Wind at Dawn (Noble Things)- December 1917
It takes him an hour- he’s started stumbling as he walks, his feet leaden at the end of his legs. He’s done what he could to prevent frostbite; chafing his fingers and toes vigorously every time he stops, regardless of the pain of returned circulation. But it’s not perfect. And it’s cold.
The tracks are blessedly far from any towns, as far as Chris can tell. It’s still all forest and field that he can see, and there are no tell-tale spirals of smoke winding their way into the paling sky. He nearly trips on the tracks when he gets to them, the cold iron stretching endlessly into the distance. It’s open here on the rails, and it makes him nervous. There’s no help for it, though. Out here the trains will be moving too fast, speeding along to their destinations. His hopes of catching one are slim at best, and he needs better odds than that.
He walks. His best bet is to get near a town, and then to catch a train just as it leaves the station. Tracks will lead to a town, eventually. And then… well, one step at a time.
He runs into the outskirts of a town around midday, and the intrusion of civilization is nearly shocking after two days in the silence of the countryside. He can hear the sounds of engines, of horses, of people. It all seems so normal; it’s hard to process the actual danger he’s in, not just from cold or starvation, but from the rest of humanity on this side of an arbitrary line. He sneaks into a barn just outside the edge of the village proper, stealing a horse blanket and taking a long drink from the trough. The rootcellar of another house yields some hard wintry carrots and a jar of pickled beets. He feels guilty at the theft; it’s not like anyone has much to spare right now, on either side. But he’s not especially interested in starving to death either, so he squashes the impulse to go knock on the door and apologize.
The train yard is guarded, naturally, but not too heavily. He waits and watches for an hour, hoping to understand some sort of pattern for arrivals or departures, and to find out where he is. He’s hoping to still be in occupied France; it’s certainly possible, the German’s have enough of it at this point. But he has no idea how long he was passed out in the pack of the prisoner transport. For all he knows, he’s deep in the heart of the Fatherland.
The sign on the building, when he creeps around behind a shed and gets a look at it, says Albstadt Banhoff in freshly applied black paint. The hard vowels and clipped consonants tell him more surely than any map could that he has moved beyond the sibilant borders of France. He feels the fear clench in his gut, slippery fingers of ice winding their way through his adrenal gland.
Fuck. Germany.
He takes a moment, breathes slowly and carefully. It’s the middle of the day, and he’s got to get somewhere hidden. Preferably on a train.
Slinking down the tracks gets him back to the edge of town, but, he judges, still close enough to hop on a train before it picks up too much speed and he risks being thrown under the churning wheels. At this point, he decides, it doesn’t much matter which train he gets on- either it will be heading back to Allied territory, carrying the necessary trade stuff to which rules of engagement do not apply, or it will head deeper into occupied territory. Which, yes, would be bad, but would no doubt take him to a hub, where he can get on a train out.
There are negatives to this plan, of course. On a train, when they do searches, he is a bit of a sitting duck. If the guards have guns, and if he’s found, running is really not going to do a lot for him.
On the other hand, hopping the trains beats the hell out of trying to walk back to Soissons without either starving or freezing.
Trains it is.
He doesn’t have that long to wait. It’s not more than twenty minutes, he thinks, before the rails begin their characteristic singing, the tones of the vibrating metal carrying through the frigid air. He creeps close to the tracks, waiting in the bushes that line the clearing. It’s no good if the conductor sees him; he has to wait until the last possible moment before jumping forward and grabbing the side of a car.
He waits, and waits, and just when he thinks it’s too late, he leaps, fingers stretching and flexing, popping at the joints, the jar of beets thumping hard against his hip, and then he’s flying, hanging for a brief moment above the speeding metal before he regains the presence of mind to haul himself up, hooking a knee over the edge of the open car and heaving until he can pull himself forward on his belly, the damp slipperiness of his wool coat easing his way across the wooden floor of the car.
He looks around warily, but luck is apparently with him today; the car he’s picked is nearly empty, save for a few barrels in a corner. The openness of the space makes him feel a bit exposed, but at least he didn’t haul himself into a car full of soldiers.
A feeling of utter exhaustion takes him suddenly and he crawls over to the corner, shoving the barrels out of the way and into a curved line. If he squeezes in behind them, it creates a wind break, and hides him from the line of sight of anyone doing a casual check of the car. It won’t do much if they decide to climb in and search, but it’s the best he can do for the moment, so he presses into the corner and pulls the horse blanket up over his head, closing his eyes and falling deeply asleep.
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