Free Stormfuhrer by E. R. Everett Page A

hands together while staring at the fake wood grain on his laminate desk.  He began to stand up again and sat back down, shaking his head.
    “ Oh my God.  Oh . . . my  . . . God,” repeated Herr Spiegel’s human counterpart.
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
     
     
    Dana watched as the smoke seethed through the hastily-built chimney’s chinks.  She saw fire behind a semi-rusty grate with “ achten ” chalked across it and was soothed by memories of her grandmother’s cabin in the cold, windy woods of Maine.  She could somehow smell the wood fire behind the black metal door.  She couldn’t move anything but her left hand and arm.  The right arm seemed broken and useless.  She brought up the dirty left hand and held it before her eyes.  It was real enough, but not quite, in some respects.  The spaces between the bony fingers were dark along with the fingers themselves, all stained with dirt, but the hand was not in pain, nor was any other part of her emaciated body.  The metal door of the furnace, rounded at the top, was pulled open by the spindly fingers of a hand protruding from a dirty, striped uniform.  The Sonderkommandos tried to work quickly but often stumbled from lack of sleep.  Their stumbling was often rewarded with sharp yells from a few SS soldiers watching from a distance, but not from kicks or rifle butts.  They were too important.  They were even kept separate from other inmates, housed in rooms rimming the crematorium, warned to speak to no one.
    The flat iron gurney upon which she lay was fixed to move in only two directions, its wheels seated atop two rails.  Her naked feet became warm and then very warm as her body was rolled toward the small, opened door, feet first.  Her feet were catching fire, already sizzling and blistered, joining with the bits of charred bones already in the oven, superheated in the orange and yellow shimmer.
    Dana reached for her tightening throat, finding that she could now move her arms freely, and as she did so a different awareness penetrated her mind, cooling her skin, and the angle of her body gradually inclined until her upper body was vertically positioned.  Dana found herself once again seated in the dark box, at a student’s desk, before a now black monitor that slowly closed to its hidden, horizontal position.  Her feet still tingled as if just removed from the flame.  She removed the headset that covered nearly her entire head and became aware of a square of light around her sandaled feet.  Shaken, she heard the end-of-class bell and soon passed through the little makeshift cloth door and beyond, grabbing her backpack, dragging her feet down the hall, almost tripping down a flight of stairs, then to the left, past a row of blue lockers, and into the classroom where she would sit through a period of Calculus Fundamentals, nauseated and very weak.
    She knew that she would be assigned another avatar, one in a similar situation, if Hayes was correct about how things worked.  Her death was so terrifying, however, that she didn't want another avatar.  A guard had died.  Her avatar had been punished for something neither she nor the avatar had done, sent into the crematorium oven . . . still conscious.  Right now she just wanted to sleep.
    Dana's Calculus Fundamentals teacher, Mrs. Villarreal, sat beside the overhead projector and called on students at random to grade the homework of their peers, a daily procedure.  Having switched papers with Julia, the quiet girl with long black hair sitting next to her, she dug for a red grading pencil from her small, orange purse and wrote her name on the back of the single sheet of paper that had been torn from a spiral notebook and handed to her.  Julia's homework was only half-finished, so she kept her regular pencil out in case she could squeeze a few right answers in without Mrs. Villarreal noticing.  Dana's and Julia's handwriting weren't that different.
    Dana couldn't focus on the