They flew like a murder of crows in the blackened sky, their presence evident in the scrolling beam of a searchlight. In previous raids, they would have opened their bellies by now.
And yet still they came, growing larger, louder until the small hairs in Grace’s ears trembled at the noise. The ack-ack guns cracked in the thin night air; the hint of their smoke in the distance acrid. She craned her head back to stare up at the formation above her head. A searchlight passed over a plane just in time to see as its bottom split open and a large, pipe-like shape slid free into the sky.
A bomb.
Above her.
She watched, transfixed. Her mind screamed run, run, run, but her legs wouldn’t listen. The bomb whistled a note that pitched higher as it gained speed. As it came closer.
That shrill note called her to her senses and she turned from it, grabbing Mr. Stokes’s arm as she did so, pulling them back behind a wall framed with sandbags. The whistle became a shriek and her entire body went cold with fear.
The sound stopped abruptly and her heart with it.
That was the worst moment, when it fell, in the split second before it detonated. When you didn’t know where it had gone.
The explosion was an immediate burst of brilliant light and a powerful bang that made the world go eerily silent. A flash blew hot as an open oven at her back. The force of it shoved Grace and sent her sprawling forward several feet.
Her body smacked hard into the ground, knocking the wind from her lungs. She blinked, stunned, as a pitched whine rang one lofty note in her ears, tuning out any other sound.
Her cheek ached where it had struck the pavement, her chin tender where the leather strap of her hat had kept it on her head as she landed. She huffed out a breath and a cloud of dust billowed up in front of her face.
Slowly, the world came back to her, starting with the booming anti-aircraft guns, odd and distant like an underwater echo. She lay a moment more, taking in the broken bits of rubble around them, waiting for a rush of pain to announce a missing limb or a fatal wound.
Her chest throbbed where she’d landed. But nothing more.
She pushed herself to sitting with arms that almost seemed too weak to lift her. With shaking hands, she patted her jacket, pressing over the thick, gritty layer of dust for any indication of injury.
There was none.
She looked to her left and found Mr. Stokes sitting beside her in a similarly dazed fashion.
They had survived.
But others might not have.
All at once, sound rushed back at her. Not just the ack-ack guns, but the whistles of bombs and the explosions. So many explosions.
She and Mr. Stokes appeared to recover their senses simultaneously. They looked to one another and immediately jumped to their feet. The wall they’d been standing behind had a hole at its center, the sandbags ripped to shreds.
Had they not been behind it, those shreds of fabric might have instead been their bodies.
It was a realization Grace couldn’t allow herself to process at that moment. She tucked it into a neat box, locked tight in her thoughts, and set it to a dark, dark corner of her mind.
Several homes had been obliterated to rubble before them, and the glow of fire pulsed like wounded hearts within. Quickly Grace assessed the numbers on the homes and deduced that three of the ruined dwellings had inhabitants she’d seen to the shelter herself. However, the one to the left, which was still standing, belonged to Mrs. Driscoll, the middle-aged widow who had stopped coming to the shelters a fortnight ago.
Grace pointed to the home. “Mrs. Driscoll.”
She needn’t have said more. Mr. Stokes broke into a run toward the standing townhouse and continued through the gaping entryway, its door having been blown off. Grace followed and waited for him to go in and return, as he’d always instructed her to do.
Except he did not reemerge.
Grace cautiously entered behind him to find Mr. Stokes standing in the parlor, staring at something. “Mr. Stokes?”
He said nothing.
She came to his side and followed his stony gaze. It took a moment to realize that what she was looking at had once been a person. Had once been Mrs. Driscoll.
Grace’s stomach roiled, but she gripped her hand into a fist to hold herself together as she added this sight into the neat little box in her mind, along with her fears of what could happen to Mrs. Weatherford in such a circumstance.
“Mr. Stokes,” Grace said.
He didn’t look at her.
“Mr. Stokes,” she said sharply.
He turned his head to her slowly, his gaze wide and distant, in a dreamlike state. A single, silent tear spilled over his lower lash line and crawled down his cheek. He blinked, as though startled to see her standing there.