Sisters in Arms

by Kaia Alderson

  He hauled her into a deserted alleyway, too far away from the crowd of Negro soldiers for anyone to notice them. Shit.

  Time and distance faded away. Eliza was alone again in that deserted Kentucky train station. But this time, she wasn’t defenseless.

  “What are you doing here?” Her teeth gnashed together as she continued to fight his grip on her.

  “Me and my buddies heard some Colored gals were coming through here today. Haven’t seen any more of y’all over here since I got off that boat. Figured it had to be you. Thought I’d come say hi to an old friend.”

  Her shock now gone, Eliza tried to jab her elbow into his side. Unsuccessfully. “We have never been friends.”

  “That’s right. We aren’t friends,” he slurred. “You’re the bitch who embarrassed me in front of my whole company. And none of them will let me forget it.”

  The private manhandled Eliza as he put her down. He pushed her against the brick wall, the one hidden in the darkness of shadow. He let her go but pressed his hand to her chest, taking liberty to wiggle his fingertips against her breasts. With his other hand, he tugged at his pants.

  “Damn zipper. These cheap things always get stuck at the wrong time,” he mumbled to himself.

  Eliza took advantage of the private’s distraction to widen her feet into a fighting stance. “Here, let me help you with that.”

  She reached out for his lower hand, getting a firm grip around his wrist.

  “Huh?” The private looked up, his jaw slack with confusion. His sour breath reeked of cognac.

  Good, he’s drunk. She smiled at him. She reached around his waist with her free hand as if to hug him, then stretched as far as she could until she had a good hold of his waistband. “Been drinking the good stuff, eh?”

  “Gimme a sec and I’ll be feeling the good stuff too.” He laughed. His foul breath assaulted her nose again. Eliza didn’t share his amusement. It was taking everything in her not to vomit onto his face. Instead, she focused on the new skills she had acquired since they had last met.

  Eliza flexed her legs to stabilize herself, then used her core strength to flip the man sideways onto his back as hard as she could. He was out cold the moment his head hit the ground.

  “You idiot, my body is my weapon.”

  Eliza stumbled out of the alleyway back onto the street. She mouthed the word “help,” but no sound came out of her mouth. The stars must have aligned in her favor anyway, because at that moment, a Negro officer came around the corner. He rushed over to her.

  “Ma’am, are you okay? I can help. I’m a doctor.”

  Eliza attempted another step. She stumbled. The officer reached out just in time to catch her. Only then did she pass out.

  ELIZA WOKE UP in semidarkness. What looked like late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through a small four-paned rectangular window. The floor was covered in straw. And the smell . . .

  She held a hand to her nose and mouth. It smelled like she was in a barn. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked around for clues to confirm her suspicion.

  The first thing she could discern was that she had been laid across an old wooden table. She gripped its sides and leaned from side to side slightly to test its stability. The table proved to be solid. That was good at least. And she wasn’t in a barn. She spotted a cupboard against the wall. There was a fireplace behind her. No, calling it a hearth would be more accurate, for the space it occupied was wide enough to accommodate several cauldrons in addition to just a fire. Suddenly, she felt like she was in the medieval dwarves’ house from that animated Snow White motion picture she had seen with her father a few years ago.

  Her father . . . She gulped. His parting words to her before she had shipped out came back to her. I told you so. Dammit. Wherever she was, she was more determined than ever to survive this ordeal so she could shove his words right back into his face.

  “You might’ve told me so, Daddy,” she muttered to herself, “and I survived anyway.”

  She pushed herself into a full upright sitting position. Her legs dangled over the side of the table. She felt her head sway in a circular motion. That couldn’t be good. But she was too stubborn to lie back down.

  Footsteps echoed nearby. They were heavy. Soldier’s boots heavy. She tensed. She looked around frantically for anything that she might be able to use as a weapon. She spied a poker next to the hearth. Her stomach growled as another wave of dizziness overcame her. The footsteps got closer and closer.

  Damn. She was in no condition to put up a fight just yet. She would need to figure out how to bide her time until she regained her strength.

  I told you so. I told you so . . .

  “You’re up. Good. How do you feel?” The male voice came from behind Eliza, causing her to jump. The Negro officer from the street stood in the doorway. Her tension eased. Instinctively, she knew he intended her no harm. She was safe. This man was nothing like the one who had attempted to abduct her and do even worse things to her.

  I told you so.

  Her “savior” didn’t wait for her response before looking down at the clipboard cradled in his arm. She reached for her opposite shoulder.

  “I’m fine. But I am a little . . .”

  “Good, good, good. I gave you a quick look over once I brought you here. A few bruises on your arm. I imagine the unconscious man we found in the alley you came out of had something to do with that. Other than the scare I imagine you experienced, everything else checked out fine.”

  It dawned on her that she had slammed her captor on cobblestone. If he died, she was done for. Who would believe that she hadn’t intended to kill him? A chill fell upon her. The truth was that she had. “That man. Is he . . . ?”

  “He’ll have quite the headache when he comes to, but he’ll live.”

  “I didn’t kill him?” Eliza said, dazed.

  “Disappointed?”

  “No!” she blurted out. That wasn’t exactly the truth, but to have this man hint at what she had been thinking . . . Hearing it out loud left her stunned. “No, I just . . .”

  “You don’t have to explain anything. His buddies looked none too happy when they came to collect him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up with a black eye or two to go with the concussion you gave him.

  “Do you want to try to walk around?” He came over and offered Eliza his hand. “I won’t let you fall.”

  It wasn’t his words that made Eliza pause. It was the way that he had said them. And how they had drowned out the sound of her father’s taunting in her head. The silence was a relief after all these months.

  “Wait, who are you?”

  “Dr. Noah Roberts. I’m the medical officer assigned to your unit.”

  Eliza ignored his hand. A Negro doctor? He was a doctor and an officer too? It was rare to encounter male officers of her own race since she had entered the military. She tried to recall the last time she had been around another one. Too long.

  It was going to be a madhouse in their officers’ quarters once word got out about him.

  Well, she wasn’t going to be one of the ones falling over herself to get his attention. After her scare with that drunk private today, flirting was the last thing on her mind.

  Eliza, feeling a little bit more clearheaded, pushed herself off the table without Dr. Roberts’s assistance. With one hand still on the table, she took a few tentative steps. Then she bent her knees a few times to test her balance. No stumbling. That was an improvement.

  “I think I’m going to be fine, Dr. Roberts. Now, can you tell me where I am?”

  He grinned at her, making him even more handsome than before. She’d be damned if her knees didn’t wobble a little. “Welcome to Caserne Tallandier.”

  Eliza had not heard of Caserne Tallandier during her previous travels through the region. As Noah led her to a primitive-looking building, he explained that the post had been constructed in the previous century to house Napoléon’s troops.

  “I must warn yo
u that the buildings hold heat about as well as a sieve holds water.”

  “I think we can handle that.” Eliza smiled. “We’ve been living in a drafty British school since February.”

  “You don’t understand. These buildings were built before central heating was invented. And they’ve never been updated.”

  Noah led her into a room that must have been a barn in a previous life. The women from her battalion were lined up to receive what looked like burlap sacks from fair-skinned men with POW marked on their sleeves.

  “What is going on here?”

  “They’re being issued mattress covers.” Noah nodded toward a corner that had bales of hay stacked sky-high. Women were stuffing their mattress covers with fistfuls of hay. “And that is where you’ll be filling them.”

  “With hay?”

  Noah nodded. “Welcome to France, Captain Jones.”

  There were more than a few grumbles by the time Eliza made it over to the hay pile. Eliza would have added to them herself were she not an officer. But thinking back to her stall-mucking punishment during her early days at Fort Des Moines, she smiled to herself and gave thanks that the bales of straw smelled way better than that manure had.

  She was not still smiling, however, when it came time to sleep on her hay-filled mattress. Sleep did not come easy that evening as blades of straw poked through the cover.

  “Hey, can you be still down there?” Grace called down from the upper bunk. “All your moving around is keeping me up.”

  “It’s not my fault that this bunk bed frame is as old as France.” Charity and Noel had briefed the officers after everyone had settled in. German POWs had constructed new bunk beds for the enlisted women’s barracks. They had run out of time on the ones intended for the officers’ quarters.

  “Ow!” Another blade stuck through her bedsheet and her nightgown and into her back. She would have given up already and made a pallet on the floor if not for the cold draft. Noah’s warning about the lack of heat had been an understatement. “Seriously, Grace. How are you not tossing and turning on these things?”

  “I laid out my duffel bag in between the mattress and the sheet.”

  “Good idea.” Eliza pushed herself out of bed. Just as she had emptied out the remaining contents from her own duffel bag, the lights flickered out. “Great.”

  “It looks like you’ll just have to suck it up for the night, rich girl. Look on the bright side. It’ll help you build some character.”

  “Not funny.”

  So far, this trip was a far cry from the visions of elegance and grandeur that had filled the imaginations of the Six Triple Eight.

  Chapter 28

  Rouen, France

  July 1945

  THE ONE IMPROVEMENT that Caserne Tallandier had over the King Edward School was that the workspace was big enough so that all the women assigned to the mail operations could work their eight-hour shifts at the same time during the day.

  Grace was making her rounds when she spied another large canvas bin of corrected mail ready to go out to the field. She started pushing it down the hallway to the loading docks. Or attempting to anyway. The bin’s contents were heavier than she anticipated.

  As a company officer, Grace didn’t have to pitch in with matching letters and parcels to individual soldiers anymore. The work was being completed at a pace now that allowed her to assume more of a supervisory role. But she liked to help with some of the more mundane tasks when possible.

  “Let me help you with that,” said an accented male voice, causing Grace to jump. Hans, a German prisoner of war who had been brought in to assist with the heavier manual labor duties, came from behind her. He easily maneuvered the bin over the doorjamb.

  “Thank you. But I could have handled it.” The words came out hesitantly. Grace was still getting used to working alongside men who would have shot her on sight only a few weeks ago. With honey-blond hair and startling blue eyes, it also didn’t help that Hans was helpful and attractive. Day by day, it was becoming harder for Grace to reconcile that this man was supposed to be her “enemy.”

  There had been approximately three hundred German POWs who had constructed the women’s bunk beds in the barracks and performed the rest of the work needed to ready the place for their arrival. A good number of them remained after the Six Triple Eight’s arrival in Rouen to serve as the maintenance crew and to do any of the menial tasks that they needed on a daily basis.

  “What kind of gentleman would I be if I let you ruin your beautiful hands with this thing? How would you play your music?” Hans smiled at her. Grace looked away.

  Why does he have to be so damned charming? Hans always seemed eager to help her or share a pleasant word. And when he had mentioned that he had been an aspiring musician before the war, Grace had shared stories of her own musical adventures. It turned out that he was as much of a closeted jazz fan as she was.

  “I wish you would stop bringing that up. I told you I don’t play anymore.”

  “I don’t understand why you keep saying that. Your eyes light up whenever you talk about music.”

  “Which is why I don’t want to talk about it.” Grace sighed. She added almost as an afterthought, “I never should have told you.”

  Hans stopped. He gently tugged her arm until she was forced to look at him.

  “You can tell me anything. You shouldn’t feel ashamed to love the things that make you happy.” His eyes searched hers. It was almost like he was pleading with her to give in to something that had nothing to do with music. She pulled away. Hans was cute. But he wasn’t that cute.

  “I did love music. Very much. But that was before . . .” Her voice drifted off. Despite this unexpected bond that they shared, Grace wasn’t ready to talk about Tony with Hans. That would border on betrayal to her brother’s memory. It had been Japanese soldiers who were responsible for his death. But the Germans and Japanese had been allied with each other in the war.

  No, in that regard, she couldn’t afford to see Hans as anything but the enemy.

  “Bâtard!” Sylvia, one of the Frenchwomen that the battalion employed, spat on Hans’s shoe. Grace was shocked at the venom in her voice.

  “Sylvia!”

  The young woman barely said a word on most days. Grace could see she must have been a stunning beauty at one time. Now her face was etched with premature lines and her ear-length hair grew in patches. The war had not been kind to her.

  “You should not be so friendly with this German trash, Capitaine.”

  Hans held up a hand. “It is all right. I should get this post to the trucks before they leave.”

  They watched him walk away, pushing the heavy bin along. Grace didn’t miss how tightly he held his jaw before he left. Sylvia spat again, this time on the spot where Hans had stood.

  “Sylvia, I’ve never seen you be so unkind.”

  “I have no reason to be kind to them. You don’t know how bad it was here before you came. Those men are monsters.” Sylvia pointed at Hans’s retreating back. “He is a monster.”

  Grace looked back in the direction that Hans had gone. She had heard rumors about what the Germans had done: forcing the Jewish population to wear yellow stars on their clothes, the starvation rations while the German officers feasted like kings, and then stealing people in the middle of the night. Grace had a hard time reconciling those accusations with the prisoner she knew, a man who had an artist’s soul.

  “People do bad things in the heat of battle . . .”

  “What battle?” Sylvia shrieked. “France had already surrendered when he came. When he seduced me with his charm and promises of food and sweets. He shot my sister when she accused him of stealing my virtue. He shot her then laughed at her after he made her beg for help. And still he let her bleed to death. She was sixteen. Tell me, what battle was raging when that happened?”

  “I . . .”

  Grace had also heard rumors from American troops who were returning to the coast from places like Germany and
Poland. The stories they told about what had happened to the people who had been taken prisoner made her shudder in horror. She hadn’t believed them then. Those guys were always lying about something in hopes of impressing a gullible WAC.

  What if they had been telling the truth?

  Grace suddenly felt cold despite the heat of the July sun. She took the younger woman’s hand and squeezed it.

  “I apologize. I shouldn’t have commented on things I know nothing about.”

  Still holding on to Sylvia’s hand, she led them back to the mail-sorting workroom.

  NORMALLY, GRACE SPENT her free time alone on her bunk scribbling on some sheet music. The sights and sounds of the unfamiliar surroundings had a new melody floating around in her head. This weekend, however, she was the ranking officer on duty. That meant she had to make herself available to the enlisted women in the post’s recreational facilities. Sylvia’s story was still heavy on Grace’s mind as she walked over to the rec room. The image of Hans laughing over a girl’s corpse had chased the music from her mind. She was glad for the excuse to be around people.

  The rec room was housed in a long building near the front gates that led into town. Normally, officers shied away from the spots where the enlisted women liked to hang out. Grace and the others knew it was hard for them to enjoy themselves with their superiors lurking in the corner. Luckily, the rec room was mostly empty. It looked like Grace would be presiding over a quiet Friday night on post.

  This was Grace’s first time going in there. What she found was surprisingly nice. One half of the building had been transformed into a makeshift beauty parlor. Thankfully, they had been able to transport all of their hairstyling supplies and equipment over from England. The other half of the building had been transformed into a lounge with a few chairs and tables. There was even a Ping-Pong table at the center of the room. Grace wasn’t sure if she wanted to know how Eliza and her team had managed to procure that.