A haze of smoke hovered over them. The flames from the men’s prison were shooting into the sky, an eerie midnight sunset, and the sound of desperate wails carried across the wind, mingling with the shriek of the siren. Audrey couldn’t stay here. Clutching Wen’s hand, she stepped forward, distancing herself from those dreadful sounds. Wen followed without hesitation.
They reached the front of the crowd and walked through the gate, into the night. Audrey’s body tensed, but no shot rang through the air, no bullet ripped a hole in her chest. Other women were trailing them now, some sticking together in pairs whilst others set out on their own. None of them looked back. A sense of terror mixed with elation at their sudden, unexpected freedom descended on Audrey.
“Go, Audrey, go!” Wen urged.
“Which way?” she shouted over the siren, struggling to catch her bearings in the chaos. The men’s prison and the airfield—the target of the Allied bombs—were to the east. To the west, the woods.
“Left, to the woods,” Wen said. “West. The Dutch border is close. We need to get out of Germany.”
Others had the same idea, and a group of them broke into a jog around the side of the prison fence. They pulled up short when they saw the guards from the men’s prison milling around at the back. The Nazis fingered their rifles, some looking serious and some laughing, imitating the screams of the inmates as they burned to death inside.
They spotted the women, and several were suddenly alert, pointing their guns at them.
I was right, Audrey thought, with a sickening swoop of fear. This is for sport. A spring hunt.
One shot cracked and they all screamed. A woman fell not far from Wen and Audrey, shot through the neck. Her head was nearly severed from her body, blood shining in the light from the burning prison and its searchlights. Audrey looked away, waiting for her own death to come.
“What are you doing?” one of the guards said to the sniper. “Don’t waste your bullets.”
More laughter.
“Have at it, ladies!” another called, gesturing to the empty field to the west: the only way into the protection of the woods, the only way toward the Allies.
The minefield. The fail-safe for the prison.
“Wagers on how long it takes to get ’em all?” a guard shouted to his comrades.
“We have to go,” Wen said, panting beside her. “We have to.”
Audrey saw herself reflected in Wen’s eyes along with the orange glow of the sky. What were the chances they would make it? How thoroughly was the field booby-trapped? Another Allied plane screamed overhead, a shell quaking the ground once more as the airfield took another hit. Audrey closed her eyes at the sound, breath heaving. She opened them again as a woman to her right shouted.
One of the inmates had either lost her mind or found her courage, and sprinted forward. They all watched for a full minute as she fled across the field toward the woods. She made it halfway before she hit a mine. The blast shocked Audrey to her core. She was already so weak, running only on blistering adrenaline. And the sight of the woman’s body blown sideways, no longer in one piece, made her knees falter.
Another shot went off behind them. One of the Nazi guards fired at the ground near one pair of inmates, deliberately missing them by two feet.
“Get a move on, you cunts!” he called. His fellows guffawed cruelly.
“Audrey, we have to go,” Wen said again, breathing hard.
They could either take their chances or stay here until the guards got bored and used them for target practice anyway. They had no choice.
“Stay behind me,” Audrey told her.
She broke into a sprint, barely feeling her feet touch the ground as she ran, and she imagined for a moment that perhaps she was flying, impervious to the web of mines lurking in the dark soil beneath the grass. She kept her eyes on the tree line ahead of her. Her goal. Her refuge.
She would not look down at her grave.
The siren from the airfield faded. Audrey barely registered the sound of Wen’s heaving breath and the blasts behind her as their unfortunate fellows met their ends. Lost limbs. All Audrey heard was the rush of her own blood in her ears as she flew across the field faster than she had ever run in her life, never diverting from her straight path.
The trees were growing closer.
A flood of instinctive willpower pushed her on.
Then she was surrounded by trees and darkness, the canopy of evergreens shutting out the unnatural orange night sky. She fell to her hands and knees, gasping for air, sweat dripping from her forehead, eyes burning from the cold wind. She caught her breath, then spun round and faced the edge of the wood again. The density of the trees only barely dampened the screams from the women who didn’t die cleanly.
Audrey pushed herself up and stumbled back to the edge of the forest. The field was littered with bodies, and pieces of bodies. She could see them all in the light from the fire and, for a fleeting moment, was sure she must be dead too. One girl had stopped in the centre of the field. It was Hannah, the tiny White Rose resister. She shivered with terror, afraid to move any farther. Another woman was moaning for Jesus somewhere on Audrey’s left, too far into the field for her to try to haul the unfortunate woman to safety. But from the looks of it, her death was imminent.
And there was Wen. At the very edge of the field. She must have hit the mine right at the end, because her body was blasted forward to settle beneath one of the first trees.
Audrey rushed to her and fell to her knees. Tears sprang to her eyes as she saw the catastrophic damage to Wen’s leg. Blood was pouring from somewhere in her abdomen too.
“Oh, Wen,” she gasped, cradling her friend in her lap. Wen’s body was shaking from shock and blood loss. She was so far gone, she wasn’t even screaming from the pain. “I’m so sorry, Wen,” Audrey cried, brushing Wen’s hair back from her forehead. A tear coursed down Wen’s pale face. “We tried. We tried.”
Wen managed the ghost of a smile. “I—told—you,” she said, her words stuttering with the force of her chills. “This kitty used up—all her lives. Got lucky. Right the—end.” She lifted a trembling arm and pointed at the edge of the minefield.
She was so close to making it. Inches.
The other dying woman stopped moaning. The air raid siren went silent. The assault must be over. A cold wind brushed the tips of its fingers over Audrey and Wen, entwined together on the frigid ground.
“You were so brave, Wen,” Audrey said through her tears. “So brave.”
Wen locked eyes with her, amber into grey. “So—you.”
Her shakes were getting worse, her breathing shallow, and Audrey couldn’t bear to see her suffer any longer. She braced Wen’s weight with one arm and slid her own shoe off with the other hand. She wiggled her fingers beneath the sole and found the cyanide pill.
“Here,” she said. “Take this. It’ll help the pain.”
Wen opened her mouth without question, like a child to a trusted parent, and Audrey placed the pill between her remaining back teeth.
