To Breathe or Not to Breathe (Night at the Museum fanfiction)

In Which the Wicked Witch of the West Helps me Escape

Oh crap.

I skidded to a halt, trying desperately to offset my momentum enough to turn around and run back the way I came. But a hand grabbed my arm with a firm, steely grip, and cut off any possibility of escape. I stumbled to the floor instead, pulling against it and falling to pieces inside. No no no no no. What was I thinking?

The screaming that had forced me out of the room was still sounding through the hall, even louder now and more painful in my ears. My eyes took in a brief flash of the hallway, unable to process the surge of movement and sound surrounding me, blinding me. A quiet dripping invaded my ears, somehow cutting through the rest of the chaos with its gentle cadence. In my mind I saw blood pooling out across the hall, slowly staining and capturing each inch of floor, dripping from a breathing body.

I blinked, and reality flooded back. The dripping came from a wax woman's figure, whose linen clothes had caught aflame and were sustaining her slow demise. She was melting softly across the floor, but her screams and the engulfing flames were a stark contrast to the smoothness of the melting. The wicked witch of the west flashed into my mind, but in this case Dorothy was a Nazi soldier and the witch was an innocent, tortured wax woman. All around her huddled other captive wax Jews, staring in horror at the impossibility staring them in the face. It was a truly hollowing sight.

A man with a flare gun, probably the one used to ignite the woman, spoke harshly in German, waving the weapon and dropping his regular gun.

The man who had grabbed me, who seemed to be the leader, nodded. Then he looked down at me like I was a worm squirming on the ground after the rain. "Noch einer. Nimm sie."

He let go of my wrist, and my captivity was transferred to the hold of the man who had spoken first, who grabbed me quicker than I could even realize I'd been free for one fleeting moment. The man forced me to stand again, and I didn't resist. If I did, maybe they'd shoot me. Or light me on fire. Either way, I couldn't afford to resist. They'd made it abundantly clear through their treatment of the woman that they were all too willing to hurt people.

Instead I just sat there, torn between panic and irony. Who was I to think I could rush out and save the day? All I had done was make everything worse. Now Hitler's soldiers had added a living, breathing person — me — to their assortment of captives to torture. They'd probably use me as a hostage to keep Ahk and the others away, so they could do whatever they wanted with the Jews. It would work, too! I had ruined everything.

As that realization struck me, I knew I had to do something. I owed it to my friends. I couldn't allow myself to be put into a position where I stopped them from stopping the Nazis from destroying everything in sight.

"Heil!" cried the leader, staring at something down the hall.

The rest of the group of soldiers straightened, following his gaze and saluting, yelling in unison.
"Heil Hitler!"

The words struck me like a thousand tons. They were something I'd heard in movies, of course, like The Sound of Music. But I'd never heard them... for real. It was terrifying. As I lifted my eyes to follow theirs, my gaze stuck on a man leading another group of soldiers down the hall towards us — a man I'd seen in pictures in history class in highschool, a man who was, like the soldier's loyal shouts, so much more terrifying in person.

Adolf Hitler.

He looked so real, though I knew he was actually made of wax, just like the rest of these people. How far did the wax go when they were alive, though? I had just watched a woman melt. But also, their guns seemed to work. It was such a strange mix of half-real, half-not. Would reason work on a wax figure? Did he have enough of a brain left to do anything other than mimic the patterns of the mind of his historical counterpart? I didn't know. But for the sake of my friends, I had to try.