Page 41 of The Words Beneath the Noise

TOM

Sound tore through the night like a blade through silk.

Low at first, a warning growl that climbed through the frequencies until it became a wail that scraped against every nerve I possessed. Air raid siren. Just a test, some part of my brain knew that, the rational part that understood we were inland, miles from any real threat, in a place the Germans would have to work hard to find.

But my body didn't care about rational.

My body heard that sound and was immediately somewhere else.

Normandy. June. The beach still red with morning's dead, bodies rolling in the surf like broken dolls discarded by a careless child. Mud thick as porridge sucking at my boots, trying to drag me down into the earth where the rest of them had gone. Sky on fire. Always on fire. Orange and black and the particular grey of smoke that came from burning flesh.

Artillery screaming overhead in arcs you couldn't see until they landed. Until the earth erupted and took pieces of men with it. Legs. Arms. Heads. Once, a hand still clutching a photograph of a girl back home, fingers curled around her smile like he'd been holding it when the shell found him.

Danny beside me in the crater. Blood running down his face from where shrapnel had kissed his temple, carving a furrow through his eyebrow that would scar if he lived long enough to scar. His eyes too wide, whites showing like a spooked horse, and his mouth moving but I couldn't hear the words over the roar of the world ending.

“Stay down stay down stay down.”

His voice in my ear, or mine in his, impossible to tell anymore. We'd been the same person by then, Danny and me. Same fear. Same desperate animal need to survive another minute, another hour, another day.

The whistle of incoming. That particular pitch that meant close, too close, get down get down get?—

My back hit the wall of the building I'd been walking past.

I didn't remember moving. Didn't remember the decision to seek cover. Just the animal instinct that said get small, get hidden, make yourself a harder target. My body had learned lessons my mind couldn't unlearn, reactions burned so deep into muscle and bone that they bypassed thought entirely.

My rifle. Where was my rifle?

Hands patted my sides, frantic, searching for the familiar weight that wasn't there. Had never been there. Hadn't been there for weeks. I wasn't on the front. Wasn't in danger. Wasstanding outside a bloody administrative building in the English countryside while some bastard tested the sirens to make sure they still worked.

But Danny was still screaming.

Danny was always screaming, in the place where I kept him. Screaming as the second shell landed closer than the first. Screaming as the crater wall collapsed and buried his legs in mud and debris. Screaming my name, over and over, while I clawed at the earth with bare hands that bled and broke and couldn't move fast enough.

“Tom. Tom. TOM.”

And then the third shell, and then silence, and then the weight of him in my arms as I finally got him free, and the way his head lolled wrong on his neck, and the blood, so much blood, everywhere, on my hands and my uniform and my face where I'd pressed it against his chest trying to hear a heartbeat that wasn't there anymore.

My legs gave out.

I slid down the wall, brick scraping my back through my uniform, and ended up crouched in the shadow of the building with my arms wrapped around my knees and my forehead pressed against my thighs. Making myself small. Making myself invisible. The way I'd learned to do in foxholes and craters and the shattered shells of buildings where snipers waited for any movement.

The siren kept wailing.

The sirens in Normandy had meant planes. Had meant the sky filling with dark shapes that dropped their payloads and banked away, leaving fire in their wake. Had meant running for cover that didn't exist, praying to survive long enough to die some other way.

Had meant watching men burn.

Jenkins. Crawling across no-man's-land with his uniform on fire, screaming in a register that didn't sound human anymore. I'd shot him. Clean through the head, the way you'd put down a horse with a broken leg. Mercy, they called it. Mercy, as if there was anything merciful about watching your friend's skull cave in because the alternative was letting him burn alive.

He'd been twenty-two. Had a girl in Manchester who sent him letters written on pink paper that smelled like roses. He'd read them out loud sometimes, in the quiet moments between bombardments, and his whole face would change, go soft and young and hopeful.

I wondered if she ever found out what happened. If someone told her he died a hero's death, quick and painless. If she cried over his grave without knowing I was the one who'd put him in it.

My hands were shaking so badly I couldn't make them stop.

I pressed my palms flat against the frozen ground, feeling the bite of frost through my gloves, using the pain to anchor myself. Cold earth. Real and solid. Not mud. Not blood-soaked soil. Not the grave I'd dug for Danny with my bare hands because there wasn't time for proper burial, just a shallow scrape in the Frenchcountryside and a promise that I'd come back for him when the war was over.

A promise I'd probably never keep.