BOOM!
A hand grabs the collar of her coat and yanks her to her feet. “Move!” Castain shoves her in the back, propelling her forward as—
BOOM!
Castain yanks her back, twists her to the right, and says, “Get in!”
There is a hole at Martha’s feet, and she slides down into it with Castain bundled in that same slide and—
BOOM!
In the hole now and Martha realizes she has wet her underwear. Her teeth chatter. She thrusts her hands under her armpits and bows her head trying to get her freezing, running nose into the scarf at her neck.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The flash of explosions shows her Castain’s face for the first time, and Martha the careful observer sees a certain prettiness barely evident beneath dirt and a scarf wrapped around much of her head.
They huddle in the hole as Martha realizes that water is seeping into her boots. How can water even be liquid at this temperature?
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The sides of the hole bounce against her, bruising her, as the 88s thunder and pound. Dirt and wood shards clatter down on Martha’s helmet, and she realizes she is crying, not just runny eyes, crying, wracking sobs that join the shaking of chills.
“I want to go home!” Martha cries out, a child’s cry.
And suddenly, as if on cue, the artillery stops.
Martha’s first instinct as the lull extends is to climb out, to escape this vile pit of fear and wet. But Castain holds her down.
“Uh-uh. Give it a minute.”
Sure enough, after a several-minute pause, a half-dozen more 88s come screaming in. One blows a tree clear out of the ground and it falls tearing through the branches of other trees, scattering snow everywhere.
Castain lifts her head and peeks out. “Goddammit, I guess the fugging tree couldn’t fall the other way. Could’ve been good cover. All right, kid. I gotta go. Oh, yeah: the call sign is ‘Hair.’ The response is ‘Brush.’”
Castain levers herself up and out of the hole.
“I don’t . . . You can’t . . . I don’t even know where the Germans are!”
“Oh, they’re over that way,” Castain says, waving negligently. “Most likely they’ll be along shortly.”
“But what am I supposed to do?”
“Shoot the fuggers, what do you think?”
Alone.
Martha Swann is completely alone.
She has no watch, no way to keep track of time. Minutes might be hours, but more likely, she realizes, time is passing with extreme subjective slowness. Snow falls into the foxhole, and with freezing feet she tamps it down into the slush, hoping it will freeze solid and she can stand on it. She can no longer feel her toes, her nose, her ears or fingers.
The forest at night makes strange sounds, dripping, rubbing, soft clattering. Each sound might be a German.
How many times has she read some novel where the author talks about a character’s heart being in their throat? It no longer seems like such a cliché. She can barely swallow.
A sound. A furtive, cautious, creeping sound.
“Hair!” she calls out in a tremulous tone.