Playing with Fire by Thomas Wood

Author:Thomas Wood [Wood, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781916413863
Publisher: BoleynBennett Publishing
Published: 2020-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

21

I felt my back desperately squeezing into the wall of the church, praying earnestly that it would suddenly open up and envelop me. I wanted to be as far away from the scene as I possibly could.

There seemed like there was nothing that I could do to comfort myself, nor the man who lay dying right in front of me.

As I watched the colour slowly drain from his face, his limbs flapping around as they debated whether to try and crawl to safety or stop the flow of blood, I hoped that he had lived a good life. I hoped that he had achieved everything that he had wanted to, said everything that was needed, because he was surely about to die.

There was a defiance in his eyes, as he looked at me, that screamed how he thought he could still make it through. I screwed my face up, wincing, as the man began trying to speak, blood-specked spittle spraying out onto his own face as he did so.

He was begging for his life, but not in the way that one might expect. There was an aggression to it, almost triumphant, that he wanted revenge on the man that had done this to him.

As he continued to flap and roll around, staining the grass around him a deep, romantic red, I felt the body beside me suddenly try to make a lunge towards him. Instinctively, my arm flew out, thumping into the determined midriff.

I felt the power behind the body, which forced me round to pin him back into the wall, exposing myself for a brief half-second.

“No, Mike. We can’t.”

His eyes weren’t full of tears as I had expected, but instead remorseful of the fact that we had been here more than once. Together, we had seen men shot down over the blue skies of Kent and we had instigated the murder of several Germans.

The tightening knot in my stomach told me that I felt much the same way as him. We had been around so much death and suffering, that to stop one from the fate that we had sealed for others, would be a mighty weight from our shoulders.

But to do so would put us both at risk.

“But we have to do something,” he breathed.

“I agree,” I replied, his eyes looking up from the half-dead verger with surprise. “We do need to do something.”

“I don’t think we’re on the same page here, are we?” There was a sad smile to his question, as if he knew that I wanted to leave the verger exactly where he was. There were bigger things than the verger’s life in play now, that was all.

“On any other day, Mike, I would have helped him.”

“Of course, you would, old fruit.”

His guard was down, a far cry from the man who had needlessly battered a German soldier to death outside a railway station.

But there was no time to consider any of that now, we had to get a move on.

“Get to Suzanne and the German.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.