Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(72)

That was our escape. It took thirty seconds and six slices of bread.

We didn’t know it then though. We were just in a frenzy of panic and fury that Ró?a could have done anything so utterly, desperately, monstrously stupid. We were out of Ravensbrück, out of the danger of being gassed, we’d got her scrawny Exhibit A legs safely into an ordinary work camp, and now she’d killed us all by trying to escape.

But they hadn’t counted us getting into the truck back in Ravensbrück. Well, maybe they’d counted Irina, but they hadn’t counted Ró?a and me, and they didn’t count us getting out. So that was lucky – they didn’t know we were there, and thanks to Ró?a’s staged food fight, no one noticed us leaving. We caught up with Ró?a easily as soon as we broke free of the bread ruckus. The road outside the gates was also full of trucks. In a couple more seconds the dogs would come after us, we’d be dragged back into the factory yard and they’d beat us all to a pulp and shoot us. We didn’t turn back. How could we turn back? They’d have beaten us to a pulp and shot us if we’d turned ourselves in.

Irina threw Ró?a under the nearest truck and dived in after her. So did I.

For another minute or two we lay there panting. Running fifty feet had just about killed us. We were still so close to the fence that we could see the riot in the parking lot.

‘Come on –’ Irina gasped, and we crawled beneath the trucks, moving slowly from one to another, until we were a little further away and we felt safe enough to rest again.

We were also lucky the ground was frozen. We didn’t get coated head to foot in mud or slush. I shrugged off my coat and gave it to Irina. She pushed it away and I threw it back at her insistently, too fearful to talk. I wasn’t being noble – I was being sneaky.

‘Put on the coat, you stupid Bat Girl,’ Ró?a snarled. ‘You look like a schmootzich. We don’t have a hope in hell out here with you in stripes. Cover up! As soon as we stand up we have to look like normal people –’

I’d caught what was usually Ró?a’s disease: inappropriate hysterical laughter. I lay on my face on a sheet of oily ice under a German munitions truck, smothering myself and shaking with mirth.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ Ró?a swore. ‘I’m surrounded by lunatics!’ She began to giggle too. Irina did not, but she quietly put my coat on and then lay next to me with her arm over my back.

‘You threw away all our bread,’ I pointed out to Ró?a. ‘Talk about lunatics!’

And we both broke into muffled hysterics again.

Irina took hold of my ear and twisted it hard. I shut up.

‘We have no papers,’ she said. ‘We speak no German. What is our story when someone stops us?’

Ró?a improvised wildly, ‘We are French –’

‘French!’

‘French servants. We have to be French – it’s our only common language. You and Rose are cooks! And I am your sister. Only I speak German. We are servants for a German officer – I do all his sewing and cleaning –’

‘I bet you do,’ Irina snickered.

We lay quietly for a few minutes, feeling falsely secure. It was cold, but no colder than standing in a roll call in the dark.

‘We better move,’ said Ró?a. ‘If they notice the Bat Girl’s gone, they’ll look for her.’

We crawled for half an hour. We crawled underneath the entire row of trucks. When there weren’t any more we had to stand up and walk, vulnerable and obvious, along a barren stretch of road outside the camp and factory complex. We could see the town in the distance, church spire and silhouettes of buildings, and there wasn’t the faintest question that we could go that way.

‘Maybe we should try to get into the woods,’ I said. A lot of the landscape around us was the same sandy tracts of pine and birch that surrounded Ravensbrück.

‘We’d just freeze to death. We should go into town and walk down the middle of the street,’ Ró?a countered. ‘Right down the middle, like we belong there. Slowly.’ She turned and gave me a witchy grin. ‘Smiling at everyone.’

‘Gee whiz, not smiling like that.’

‘You look almost human in that skirt and sweater, Rosie,’ she said critically. ‘Like an SS secretary, almost human. The kerchief is the best part.’

‘Shut up, Rabbit.’ The kerchief was ridiculous. But I was more ridiculous without it. I’d had my head shorn again very recently, as punishment for annoying the Demon Nadine with nervous humming.

‘Dark in a few hours,’ Irina said to me.

‘We can’t stop here. But – I know! There were farms on the other side of the airfield – I saw them as we were landing. This is the road they brought me in on. We’ll go back past the airfield. Maybe hide in a barn – find some turnips or potatoes –’

‘A cow!’ Ró?a improvised wildly.

‘Maybe a cow! Maybe send you into someone’s kitchen to organise a loaf of bread. Maybe –’ Now I was thinking about what I’d find in the summer kitchen of the Mennonite farm just on the other side of Justice Field – succotash and applesauce and smoked sausage and shoofly pie. Talking like this was just going to lead to fantasies about Fasnachts and bologna. ‘Anyway, we’ll be safer on the other side of the airfield. Come on, girls!’