Page 64 of The Unknown Birds

People.

Bodies.

A whole slippery pile of them.

Tawny brown hair, sanguine and matted. For a moment she feared it was Tom, but the uniforms were all wrong, not blood-stained khaki but cold, steel grey. These were not Ashley’s friends but the enemy, mown down upon their own fire step before they could even seize the day.

Ash couldn’t get her legs to work. She was sliding on flesh and bones, not wanting to touch them, unable to avoid it. She scrambled to right herself despite bodies everywhere she turned trying to pull her beneath the pile and crush the breath from her lungs.

Wheezing and desperate to inflate those lungs, she couldn’t get her chest to listen, and she grew light-headed with the trying.

Then a firm, gentle hand caught and held her up, pulling her free from the grasping carnage so she could finally find her legs.

“Steady on,” Rook said, drawing her focus away from the dead as he demonstrated how to take a slow, deep breath. “Steady on,” he repeated, rubbing her back as she forced her skin to know only him and to forget the feel of bodies underneath.

A line from a Dickens story floated through her mind about the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another to be brave and true. In that moment, she realized Dickens had been an oracle writing of Rook, of her, of this war, somehow, years ahead of his time.

“All right?” Rook asked before she ripped off her gas mask and embraced him with abandon, not giving a fig who else might witness her relief. He squeezed her back, until something nudged her leg, and all good feeling evaporated as she released him to fight off the enemy soldier rising from his grave.

But it was only Max nuzzling her shin. She dropped to her knees and buried her face in the collie’s soft warm fur, kissing her head and scratching behind her ears.

“Tom?” she gasped, looking up into the faces of Stewart and Sergeant Major Chapman standing alongside Rook. “Did he make it over?”

Stew shook his head grimly and shrugged. “Just us, I reckon.”

“Too far bloody east, I’ll warrant,” Chapman grumbled, holding his watch up to the sky, trying to locate the sun through smoky haze—a trick to quickly ascertain the right direction. “Need to move if we’re going to find B Company by sundown.”

Rook and Stew shouldered their packs, and together the five, including Max, began to creep their way along the winding trench. Almost instantly, a wall of enemy fire forced them to their bellies, and they scuttled for the nearest dugout they could find.

“Other way then?” Ash suggested. “Find a comm trench?”

Rook grabbed her shoulder, stopping her from leaving the dugout. “No joy. Our own damn mortars are aimed on us.”

She glanced from Rook to Stew who nodded soberly. “Not even a little bit passable.”

“We’ll have to wait it out,” Chapman said.

A shiver ran down Ashley’s spine. “For how long?”

“Until it bloody stops,” he growled, though she hadn’t really expected him to answer.

As the hours crept by, the British mortars seemed to inch their way closer, each blast rocking their concrete bunker, threatening to bring down great chunks of plaster on their heads. Ash was having flashbacks to the cave-in which had trapped Rook, and from the grim set of his mouth as he flinched at the dust raining down upon them, he was right back in that funk hole with her too.

German fire picked up as well, each side knowing their little group was pinned, each side supposing they were the enemy.

“We’ll have to send a message or we won’t last the bloody night,” Sergeant Major Chapman finally said. “Don’t reckon it can wait until dark.”

“I’ll go,” Ash offered, swallowing down a sliver of fear.

“No, send me,” Stew argued.

“I’m shorter, Long-Leg Logan.”

“I’m faster,” he countered.

“The hell you are.”

“Be that as it may, your height is a disadvantage,” Chapman decreed, scrawling out a note for Ash to carry.