Shadows Passing, J. C. Laird [top 100 novels .TXT] 📗

Dusk was upon them. The two children raced along the cobblestone path through the park toward their destination of safety, their small sacks heavy with apples. The wind chilled them beneath their flapping coats and whipped the bright orange and yellow leaves around their legs and over their fleeing feet. The city’s great clock began striking the hour in an ominous warning of the impending darkness, an incentive for their tiring legs to keep moving,

Their young chests heaved with exertion as they dashed across the deserted road, turned the corner and spied the converted school house at the end of the street, high on a hill. Jimmy glanced back at his sister who had fallen behind. “Hurry up, Mary. It’s almost dark, it’ll start soon.”

Mary had stopped, moving the sack of apples to her opposite shoulder. She glanced around at the disappearing twilight, still panting from their mad dash. “Maybe nothing will happen tonight, Jimmy.”

As the last echoing strike from the city’s clock was still fading in the chill air, a faint humming could be heard from the east, an ominous drone that slowly began to grow. Warning sirens began to wail into the early night, foreshadowing the death that was rapidly approaching. “Hurry, Mary, run! We have to get to the school house!”

By the time the youngsters burst through the front door of the school, a pulsating thunder had enveloped the large, two-story building and the more than two hundred tired and hungry people cowering there. Gasping, the siblings dashed into a classroom on the right, dropped their cache of apples on the floor, bent over with their hands on their knees and attempted to catch their breath. Only an oil lamp illuminated the room as the twenty or so occupants finished darkening the windows. The biggest window had been painted black, the smaller ones fitted with black curtains. With the curtains shut and any illumination sealed in, one of the adults turned on the lights.

A man approached the two recovering children. “If your parents were here, they’d skin you alive for being out so late!” His expression immediately turned to one of regret. Jimmy and Mary’s parents had been killed the prior week and their Uncle Benny—somewhere in the school house—had been trying to care for them as best he could. The rueful man ruffled the youngster’s hair gently and stared at the pair of apple-filled burlap bags. “I see you young scavengers have made a good haul on the apples. We’ll have to parcel them out, food has been running scarce in this sector. Where did you find them?”

Jimmy, his face dirty and tear-streaked, spoke up, “There’s an abandoned nursery with a small fruit orchard north of the park; a lot of the apples are still in pretty good shape, we—”

They froze as a deafening bolt of sound hit their sanctuary, shaking it to its foundation. Breaking glass could faintly be heard from somewhere distant. Then, echoes of Hell descended upon the building’s inhabitants. Screaming shrieks of sound, great booming reverberations, the crump, crump, crump

of explosions, and the roaring, shattering echoes of death overhead combined in an almost incomprehensible, mind numbing cacophony.

People screamed and scurried for cover, hid under desks, chairs or cowered in corners as the glass from the windows blew in and a section of the ceiling collapsed. Plaster and debris from the second floor plummeted down into their crumbling refuge. Electricity failed and the lights went out as the building took another direct hit. The overwhelming din increased in intensity, building to an almost impossible crescendo. Jimmy and Mary huddled under a table stacked with clothing, their hands clamped tightly over numbed ears as more of the ceiling collapsed.

After an eternity of deafening chaos, the horrendous sounds began to abate. An eerie rose-colored glow suffused their demolished room, the air thick with plaster dust. Amidst the moans and cries of the injured, brother and sister crawled to a nearby window, side by side. A warm, smoke clogged breeze was wafting through the glassless opening. Holding hands, the two gaped wide-eyed at the devastation before them.

The majestic St. Paul’s Cathedral to the north was surrounded by fire and cloaked in a burial shroud of smoke. The entire horizon of the great city was aglow with scores of blazing fires. Buildings nearby were burning, some close enough that they could hear the crackling of the flames. The sky immediately above the fires was an angry red, the cloud of smoke enveloping the city a pink veil of cotton candy. Their world seemed illuminated by this hellish glow. The dark ribbon of the mighty river to the west was highlighted by the burning buildings along its shores. Flashes of light and flame on the ground identified new explosions.

The pulsating, grinding drone began to grow once more. Jimmy and Mary covered their ears, but couldn’t pull themselves away from the spectacle before them. They stared at the returning black smudges high in the air, lethal pinpoints of light exploding around the deadly shadows. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the ethereal phantoms began to retreat eastward before the onslaught of the city’s defenders in the air and from the ground.

With trembling hands, brother and sister plucked an apple from several that had rolled nearby and unconsciously began to eat. They paused for a moment, grim expressions slowly blossoming into smiles of hope as they stared out at the domed St. Paul’s Cathedral in the distance. The autumn winds had finally begun to dispel the smoke that concealed it. Miraculously, the great Cathedral had emerged unscathed from the bombs and fires, a continuing symbol of survival for their city and nation.

The scratchy radio broadcasts kept calling this the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain, the shadows that brought the death and destruction the German Luftwaffe. But Uncle Benny said they would never break the will of the people...

The children decided to have another apple.

Text: John C. Laird
Images: Cover image by Alexandra Laird (http://gracefulwings.deviantart.com) with stock by Rafael Carrazco (http://rafaxx.deviantart.com/) and Melissa Offutt (http://melyssah6-stock.deviantart.com/)
Editing: Valerie Fee, Alexandra Laird
Publication Date: 10-23-2012

All Rights Reserved