To Slip the Surly Bonds

by Chris Kennedy

  With no radio they had no way to warn anyone.

  Natalya checked her map for a clear area, somewhere far from where their sisters continued their attacks, far from the airdrome.

  She shouted the new heading to Eva.

  “What are you thinking?” Eva asked as she brought Malyshka to her new heading.

  “A thousand meters is good,” Natalya said. I think. I hope.

  For a couple of minutes, they remained at their current altitude and Natalya thought Eva would pull rank and insist on taking their chances. Then she rose to a thousand meters and held Malyshka steady.

  Natalya pulled the interphone off, said a prayer and fought her way out of the safety straps. She crawled over the lip of the cockpit. Even over the wind, she could make out Eva’s outraged shouting, but Malyshka flew like she was gliding on ice.

  Natalya hooked her right hand on the leading edge of the wing, her left on the trailing. She pulled herself forward between the wires and reached down, fumbling for the release.

  There.

  She yanked. It gave. The bomb fell. Malyshka wobbled but Eva steadied her. Wind tugged at Natalya as she let go of the wing’s trailing edge and dragged herself back towards the rear cockpit. She pulled herself over as Eva re-gained altitude. It wasn’t until she was seated and strapped back in that the adrenaline hit her.

  With trembling hands, she put the interphone back on.

  “…sumasshedshaya suka!” Eva was shouting.

  “I’m back in,” Natalya said. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears.

  Eva took them up. Right into an oncoming Messer. The single-engine fighter did not have time to fire as they were too close, but could not miss the biplane that had appeared right in front of them. Malyshka spun and turned back through the low clouds as the German reversed his turn in the darkness.

  We cannot outrun him.

  As if reading her navigator’s mind, Eva lifted the U-2’s nose and aimed them at the approaching German fighter. One by one, eerily slow, like the frames of a moving picture, holes appeared across the wings and marched forward, up and over the fuselage, nicking the top of the windscreen.

  Oh n….

  A bullet drove Natalya’s shoulder back into her seat: a crush of pain; an explosion her body grabbed and held onto. Red splatters appeared across her map, ruby crystals that glittered and melted into the paper. Natalya’s hand came away from her collarbone covered in blood.

  Acceleration pinned her into place as the sky spun around her. Malyshka’s engine groaned. She gave a shudder, nose dropping.

  The Messer buzzed right past them. Once, twice, three times, leaving a trail of holes in his wake.

  Usually the Messers left them alone, unwilling to risk stalling out trying to match the U-2’s slower speeds. But not this one. This one seemed to have it out for them. It would swing out a wide arc and come right back at them. Like a predator scenting the blood coming off its prey, it gave chase, relentless.

  It was going to run them to ground. Or set them afire. Natalya knew it with cold certainty. And Eva must’ve known it too. She took Malyshka into the fight, because she had no choice. She couldn’t fly them out. The Messer wasn’t going to allow it.

  Know your position. It was a navigator’s primary responsibility. But Natalya didn’t know where they were. Avoiding the Messer had taken them off course. She could tell from the unfamiliar terrain below. None of it was on the map she knew by heart. Until the sun rose, even a compass wasn’t going to help them much. And when the sun did rise, it would be all over. They would be defenseless and naked to the light. If they made it to sunrise.

  Again and again, Eva flew up. And every time, the Messer returned, circling back to find them despite the dark, like it had caught their scent and yearned to satisfy its bloodlust.

  Ever the predator, the Messer did what predators have always done. It drove its wounded, confused prey hard, giving it no time to recover, no way out.

  It was driving them out over water. Over the Volga.

  The night went quiet. Malyshka’s engine had come to a stop.

  It was a different quiet than when they idled it. With only the wind rushing around them, it was almost peaceful.

  “Water or land?” Eva asked, her voice as calm as the placid waters beneath them.

  “Do we have a choice?” Natalya asked just as weakly. The effort brought blood up into her throat. She choked it down.

  “Not really. You swim, right?”

  “I swim,” Natalya said.

  Eva brought them down on one of the lakes off the Volga, gently setting Malyshka gliding across its mirror-like surface. The tail skid bit into the ice, making a cutting noise like metal over glass. They slid for long minutes before the bite of the skid brought them to a stop.

  Natalya undid her harness, her fingers clumsy from the loss of blood. It hurt to move, to breathe, but there was still strength of will. Prey she may have become. But she—they—were not done yet. Her pilot had done her best to protect them. Now it was her turn to protect Eva, to grab at any chance of surviving the night. That’s all they needed to do. A few more hours to be taken a moment at a time. She pushed up and practically fell out of the cockpit and onto the wing.

  Twin rows of bullets rained down. Tiny explosions bloomed on either side of Malyshka. The Messer, still intent on its prey, came back around and lined up for another strafing run, this time approaching from the front.

  Natalya met Eva’s gaze just as the ice gave way beneath them. Eva was still in her harness, the look of her face as harsh as the night. She’d pulled her goggles off her face. They were covered in blood. So was the stick. The instruments. The picture of Eva’s dead daughter.

  A flare of anger drove the gasp escaping Natalya’s tightening chest. Eva’s windscreen was nothing but holes. She’d lined up Malyshka to take as many bullets as she could with the engine, with the forward fuselage, and her own cockpit.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, one blink and the next, the frigid water rushed upward, swirled around them, and sucked them down.

  A scream bubbled out of Natalya’s throat as the black water drove her up into Malyshka’s upper wing. Eva stared at her with empty eyes as ribbons of scarlet unfurled.

  Caught under the wing, Natalya pushed against it, reaching for Eva. Bubbles still rose from her sister’s nose. She was still alive. She could still be saved.

  A floe of ice caught Natalya in the back, pushed her out from between the wings. As she floated up, Malyshka sank into the dark depths. One instant she was there. The next, she’d sunk too far down to see.

  The Volga’s dark, cold fist wrapped around Natalya, tightening its grip, pulling her up against her will, sucking out her soul as it forced its essence into her lungs.

  Bullets streaked through the water around her leaving corkscrewing tails in their wake. Natalya clawed for the sky within a threadbare cloud of red ribbons that followed her up. She clawed, she kicked, lungs burning as her heart slowed.

  Pulse weakening, Natalya could no longer breathe.

  Blessed numbness took her at last, wrapping around her like Father Frost’s cloak.

  The sky floated farther away.

  Alone, she caught the dark.

  * * *

  Thirty years later.

  Spring in Tsaritsyn was Maria’s favorite season. The Volga flowed; her waters finally pristine. Russian Orthodox crosses topped the domed cathedrals glittering in the morning sun. Each day, Maria embraced the new sunrise as the beginning, not the end of the day. Tsaritsyn had been rebuilt, a glittering metropolis full of museums and schools, art and music. Full of beauty and hope. Of the noise and bustle of prosperity.

  Along the shores of the Volga, new grass covered Aviatrix Hill and school children in starched uniforms ran around, laughing, pigtails flying, black shoes glittering, school emblems flashing. The breezes drove the scents of flowering apricots, pears, and plums swirling around her.

  A Tsar led Russia once again, and the s
chool children dodged around the row of flagpoles flying the Romanov coat-of-arms as they raced to the top, their tiny but strong arms laden with flowers. Their laughter, their joy, was more than music. It was a harmony that drowned out the steady clink of the medals on Maria’s chest as she slowly made her way up the steps that had been carved into the hill.

  Every year it became harder and harder to make the climb, but she’d pledged to make her pilgrimage as long as she drew breath. She owed her girls—her women—that much.

  Maria ascended the steps not just with flowers but with tears. Those terrible tears she feared would never come flowed freely enough here, just as they had flowed freely once victory had been declared.

  Ten meters tall, The Aviatrix was rendered in stone, her face young, just like Maria remembered. They had all been so very young.

  The Aviatrix looked up at the sky, a serene smile on her face, goggles up over her cap, flaps back, caught in some eternal breeze. Unafraid, she faced the world, ready to do what was needed, with pride, with dedication. She was dressed for winter, in an aviator’s jacket and coveralls, pockets bulging. The patch on her shoulder bore the Night Witch riding her broomstick. She bore no rank, no medals, and needed neither.

  She had become a symbol, not just of victory, but of sacrifice. She had become inspiration. She had become legend.

  No matter how hard Maria tried, there was always one face she saw on the statue—Natalya’s—even though the sculptor had deliberately created the face not to resemble any particular woman in the Tsarina’s Own.

  For Maria, Natalya’s letter had been the hardest to write. She had been the regiment’s youngest flyer. She had left behind not just parents, but siblings. Maria would never forget the stoic man under his hat and moustache, the hard lines on his face as he’d stood at his youngest child’s funeral and laid her bullet-ridden body to rest. It had been a closed-casket ceremony. Bullets and the Volga had ravaged Natalya in a way that no father or mother should see.

  By the time that the war ended, Maria had written forty-eight of those letters. Eight women lost in training exercises. Ten had gone down after running out of fuel while avoiding faster German aircraft. Four had lost their bearings when heavy clouds had unexpectedly rolled in and caused them to crash into mountainsides. Twenty had burned when tracer fire had ignited their Polikarpov’s canvas shells. Six had drowned.

  Maria had wrapped a little bit of her soul into each letter, feeling emptier and emptier each time, but never empty enough to shed tears and find closure. She’d had to wait for that. After the war had ended, she’d found it for the first time here, on this hill. They had unveiled the statue and then…then the tears had come, and Maria had found what she sought—the ability to weep for Andrei, for her girls, for those that had given life and limb for Russia.

  These were no ordinary girls she had said in an interview shortly after the unveiling. Ordinary girls didn’t get to feel the breath of death on their faces every night.

  Yet after the war, it was the ordinary that they had all sought.

  Every one of them had worked hard not to make the war the most important part of their lives. They had embraced the better things for which they’d fought, the things that their sisters gave their lives for so their sacrifice would not be wasted.

  The days of war had become something they could not allow themselves to forget, for they were present in every breath they took, everything they did. Without those days, they would not, could not be who they had become.

  Like the Aviatrix rendered in stone, their post-war lives became about remembering the youth and beauty struck down in its prime, the price of victory, paid in pain and blood, with flesh and with spirit.

  It became about remembering their dead sisters because they had died childless and there were no children to remember them.

  It became about making a life and living it not just for themselves, but for those who had died.

  “Do you wish you could do it again?” another interviewer had asked not so long ago.

  Speechless, Maria had merely stared at him. He was a bit younger than her brother Andrei had been when he’d died. But there the similarity had ended. This young man would never face the choices that her brother, that her sisters-in-arms had in order to allow him to ask that question, for if he had truly understood, he would’ve known that the answer was—

  Could only be…

  No.

  * * * * *

  Monalisa Foster Bio

  Monalisa won life’s lottery when she escaped communism and became an unhyphenated American citizen. Her works tend to explore themes of freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility. Despite her degree in physics, she’s worked in several fields including engineering and medicine, but she enjoys being a trophy wife and kept woman the most. She and her husband (who is a writer-once-removed via their marriage) are living their happily ever after in Texas, along with their children, both human and canine.

  Website: www.monalisafoster.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MonalisaFosterStoryteller/

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/HouseDobromil

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  Do The Hard Thing by Kacey Ezell

  A Psyche of War Story

  Technician Fourth Class Pearl Silver raised her chin and stood up with the rest of the room. Though her belly fluttered with nerves, she forced her step and her gaze to be steady as she turned and walked toward the crowd forming in the back of the room. She could feel the eyes of some of the men as they locked on her face, and then quickly looked away.

  She didn’t need her power to know what they were thinking.

  A Negro girl? Here? Bad enough we’re supposed to fly with women in combat, but a colored woman, too?

  As usual when confronted with such a situation, Pearl summoned up the memory of her mother’s strong, proud face and her half-whispered admonitions:

  You be who you are, baby girl, and you do the hard thing. No matter what anyone thinks, no matter what anyone says. You are powerful and unique, and you can do whatever you want in this world. Nobody can lay a hand on you to stop you, so don’t you let them.

  Athena Silver had passed both her psychic power and her defiant attitudes down to her daughter, and so Pearl lifted her chin a bit higher, squared her shoulders, and prepared to wade into the swirling chaos as the aircrews of the 381st Bombardment Group found their assigned psychics.

  Not that “assigned psychics” was a thing that 8th Air Force bomber crews were used to having, but desperate times apparently called for desperate measures. The B-17s’ attrition rate was catastrophic, and some man somewhere thought that having psychics fly along could help. It hadn’t made much sense to Pearl either at first, but once she’d seen how the aptly named Flying Fortresses protected themselves and their formation partners with close flying, she could understand the logic.

  If nothing else, she and the nineteen other women in this room could keep them from colliding mid air in bad weather. Maybe. If the crews listened and worked well with their psychic…

  Which brought her back to the problem it hand. Would her assigned crew work with her? Or would her gender and skin color blind them to the power of her mind?

  “Technician Silver?”

  Pearl turned to see a slightly older man wearing the gold oak leaves of a U.S. Army Major standing right behind her. He gave her a smile as shiny as the silver pilot wings on his chest and stuck out his hand.

  “Major Dan Corder,” he said. “I’m your pilot, and I hope you’ll forgive my language, but I’m damned glad to meet you.”

  “Are you now?” Pearl asked, unable to keep her eyebrows rising up in skepticism. Then she remembered where she was, and who she was, and what uniform she was wearing, and added a belated “sir,” as she put her hand in his.

  His wide grin spread a little wider, and he shook her hand heartily, as if she’d been a man.

  “Absolutely. We’re getting killed out there, and if you can help us fly closer, that’s m
ore of my boys we bring home. Where are you from?”

  “Atlanta, sir,” Pearl said, consciously trying to keep the Southern out of her voice.

  “Huh. Well, I’m from Pittsburgh, PA. Ever been there?”

  “No sir.”

  “You should go someday if you can. Nice town. Come on and meet the guys.” He let go of her hand and beckoned for her to follow him, then led her out of the main briefing room into a smaller, office-sized room with a table and four chairs. Three of the chairs were occupied by two captains and a first lieutenant. They looked up as the major walked in.

  “Gentlemen,” Major Corder said as he waved Pearl past him and into the room. “I’d like you to meet Pearl Silver. She’s the psychic that Colonel Rizer told us about.”

  “Good to meet you, miss,” the lieutenant, who was sitting closest, said. He gave her a nod and a friendly enough smile. The other two captains offered similar hellos as well. Pearl nodded acknowledgement to each of them and then looked at Major Corder for a cue as to what to do next.

  “Have a seat, Technician,” the major said with a twist of humor threading through his words. “You’re not in trouble, so no need to stand on formality. Let me introduce everyone. Next to you is our copilot, Lieutenant Zachary White.”

  “Call me Zipper,” the lieutenant said.

  “I think I’ll stick with sir, sir,” Pearl said, unable to keep all of the tartness from her words.

  Lieutenant White laughed. “Fair enough, Technician. Fair enough.”

  Major Corder’s smile deepened even further, and Pearl found herself wondering just how the man could be so happy. He looked as if he was going to say something else, but then shook his head and went on with the introductions.

  “This guy looks like he’s twelve, but he’s really our Bombardier, Captain Steven T. Smith. And this string bean of a man is our Navigator, Captain Frank Earl. And you already know my name. We’re the most experienced crew in the 381st Bombardment Squadron.”