FictionPress.com - let the words flow
| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
|
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
December 17, 1941
Nice, Southern France
The machine guns masked the screaming of the people from ten miles away but in her head Marie could hear them, their horrific screams matching the rattling of the guns carried by the Italian troops, she could see the people of her city falling as many rapid bullets hit their retreating backs, sending a spray of blood out onto the cobblestone streets...
Twenty-year-old Marie looked at her younger siblings. The youngest, Antoinette, was sucking her thumb on one hand and with the other she clutched a small, dirty doll to her chest. Her other siblings, who were twins and were fifteen, Elisabeth-Louise and Jean, sat on the floor, listening with grey faces under the dirt and grime to the machine guns.
Marie turned back to the window five stories above the main street and saw men in green uniforms and helmets marching towards the building they were in. A middle-aged man ran out into the street to try and stop them, but one of the Italian soldiers spun his rifle around and hit him in the nose with the butt of the gun. The man dropped like a stone and didn’t move again.
“We have to go,” she said urgently. “Come on!”
The twins got up and moved towards the door while Marie picked Antoinette up, who was only four years old, and joined them.
“I love you, Jean,” Marie said. “I love you Lizzie, I love you Toni. Let’s go.”
They dashed down the hallway and started down the staircase at the end. Marie looked down over the railing and saw a flash of green and a glint of metal.
“This way!” she whispered. They ran back up the stairs and were about halfway down when Italian troops swarmed in from both sides.
Marie spotted a door right next to them that opened onto yet another staircase, only that one went up to the roof, not down. They had no choice but to go up. They darted behind the door and jogged up the stairs for another two stories before they got to the roof.
Fighter planes howled across the grey sky that threatened snow. Marie saw a fire escape ladder and they ran towards it. Jean started climbing down first, then Elisabeth-Louise and then Marie with Antoinette on her hip.
They reached an iron landing on the floor down and climbed down the ladder to the next one, all the way down to the street. The four siblings ran down the street, dodging the rubble of buildings that had been blown up by Italian tank rockets and down into an alleyway between two destroyed buildings.
They walked down the alleyway to the road before Marie carefully looked around the wall to see if the way was clear. There were no soldiers coming their way but troops were marching away from them further down the road.
They sprinted across the road and into a half destroyed building. Most of the roof had collapsed but all four walls were still standing. They sat down in a corner of the building and huddled together.
They were a poor looking bunch. They weren’t Jewish but their parents had been taken to a concentration camp two days ago when their house had been taken over. Marie and her brother and sisters had only just managed to escape. Their clothes and faces were dirty from climbing over the rubble, always on the run from the Italians, but most importantly, the Nazis who had taken over France.
It was icy cold in Nice, despite being in the warmest part of France. It would snow soon, and then they would freeze to death. Hopefully, if they did die, they would be with their parents again.
The rumbling of a tank came towards them, but Marie was sure they would be safe. Only they weren’t. For at the moment that the tank’s engine was the loudest, a huge explosion shook the street at a tank missile hit the five-story building next to them with a huge shower of debris and flame. Then the building collapsed. It collapsed onto the buildings on either side of it and on the street. Unfortunately, in one of the buildings next to it, the Devereaux children were hiding in a corner.
“Oh dear,” he said to himself.
He was in a covered military truck with his company and was guarding the tank from Allied attacks. When Nice was taken over by the Axis, his team would go back to Turin, in Italian, Torino.
When the dust from the explosion cleared, Lucio ordered his men to search for survivors in the wreckage and to end their lives out of mercy if they couldn’t be helped.
After fifteen minutes of searching a gun sounded, and then another. After that there were no more. Lucio was searching for the person who had screamed in the already destroyed building. He was looking in one corner when one of his soldiers called out to him.
“There’s four of them here sir!”
Lucio ran over and what he saw saddened him deeply. Twins, a boy and a girl, leaned back against the wall in each other’s arms; a beautiful young woman with a long, bloody cut across her temple, clutching a little girl not much older than three or four, who had a doll in her hand and her thumb in her mouth. All were dirty and grey-faced, all eyes were closed.
He leaned down and put two fingers on the arteries of their throats in turn, finally coming to the young woman. The pulse was weak, but it was still there. He gently pried the little girl from her arms and put her in her siblings’ arms. He prayed softly that they would be together in Heaven.
Lucio cleared more debris away from the woman and then picked her up. “We have a survivor!” he called out to his men and walked with her to the truck.