Trip barked a low laugh. His terrible grin was picked out by the flashes of shells and starlight. He didn’t even flinch at the delayed concussion from a bomb. “For all you know, we could be a forward advance team. Snipers. Pick them Jerries off, one by one. Pap pap pop!”
Tea flinched at the plosive words.
“Trip, the dog, for God’s sake!” Andersons eyes were wide, like he was about to lose it laughing.
“Let me go to him,” Tea plead.
Anderson gave her a quick one-handed pat down.
The most intimate a man has ever been with me, she thought. It meant nothing. She felt nothing, just his rough, shaking hand.
“Oh fer Chrissakes,” Trip growled as Tea pushed into the maze of collapsed walls. Her thighs burned from crouching too long, and her water song thrummed high and cold with all the blood around her. So much blood.
“Robbie? Where are you?”
“Tea? What the …” Robbie’s voiced wavered, whispery, like the water in it was draining out. Had he been away so long she’d forgotten the sound of him?
He huddled beneath a roof on a precarious lean. Izzy stood over another man in the corner, paws planted, fur vibrating with low growls. The man did nothing, just stared out from a mask of dirt, his eyes white against the dark. It took Tea a moment to realise the crust was all blood.
“Tea? It really is you!” Robbie wheezed. He reached out with his left hand, his right arm held tight against his chest like he was afraid something would fall out.
“This really is your sister?” Trip scoffed. “Well, now I’ve seen everything.”
“And is that …”
“Yes, that’s my dog, Izzy.” Tea kneeled.
Trip took position behind her. Anderson had melted back into the darkness.
“How did you get here?” Robbie shivered violently though he was well dressed, his wool uniform mostly intact if incredibly dirty. His boots and gaiters were well broken in, the pants torn at the thigh, and the front of his vest weighed down by things in pockets she didn’t want to examine. She only wanted to imagine Robbie butchering sheep, not other people.
“Not a story for now,” she said. “Suffice to say it was a long journey.”
“Christ, Trip, take a step backwards.” Robbie’s voice was a high-pitched whisper, but it still held authority.
Trip did so, but his hard stance held. “Are you out of your goddamn mind? We’re fucking surrounded, probably dead, and you think your fucking sister from New-fucking-Zealand is here to save you?”
Tea flinched as the curses emulated bullets burying home in her flesh.
“We’re … I’m here to help, and that’s all that matters,” Tea murmured, searching for what had incapacitated her brother.
The lines around his mouth and eyes looked like someone had taking a paring knife to his skin and scored in the borders of the countries he had crossed in the months he’d been away. This wasn’t the brother she recognised. Though she did. He may have been the younger of the two of them before, but not anymore.
Robbie’s right arm shook, though it didn’t look damaged. His hand flickered in the low light, but the flesh was still human.
You’re the stronger one, Grandad had whispered to her not long before he lost the ability to speak. Then she had thought he was being kind, but now? What had Grandad known he didn’t think worthy of sharing?
Then she saw it. The tear in the hip of the pants went much deeper and darker, blood singing an ugly, dirty song. She was good at basic first aid – a scrape here, a cut from wire there – but she didn’t know what she was looking at.
“What is this? What’s going on here? What happened to you? Where exactly are we? Why didn’t you help him? And why aren’t you taking him to safety?”
Tea’s voice rose higher on each demand. At the last, Trip’s hand flinched as if readying to strike her, but he caught himself in time.
“How do you not know where we are? You’re here, aren’t you? And your brother? He’s a bloody fool. Thought we could take out that one last bridge so the Panzers couldn’t get across. Got too close. Stray bullet. We were corralled here.” Trip ended up letting his hand flick in a dismissive gesture. “He’s losing blood but when I went to touch him, he started shrieking like a girl. Had to stop first aid or he’d bring the Jerries right down on top of us.”
“Took out the bridge, though. Boo-oom.” Robbie laughed weakly. “Took some of them bastards with it. Worth it.”
Tea didn’t want to think about what was ‘worth it’. She leaned in so her mouth was by her brother’s ear. “Where are we?”
“Tunisia,” Robbie whispered back, as if guessing she was here by no ordinary means. “Near Gabès. Past Tebaga Gap. The push was going … well.”
Robbie put his head back against the wall and hugged his arm tighter. Tea had never heard of the place, but she had to guess it was real. This was all real, wasn’t it?
“Fascinating,” whisper-lisped another voice. “But that’s not what we mean. How long have we got?”
“Izzy? That really you? Good God, how?” Robbie’s eyes brightened for a moment.
Izzy had backed off from the man hunched in the corner, though her hackles remained raised. He stared at the three of them but made no comment about a talking dog. Tea hoped if he did, he put it down to shell shock. Whatever that was.
“Later.” Izzy kept her voice low, muzzle near Robbie’s face, as if licking him. “We have to get you out of here. All of you.”
Tea brushed at the water song surrounding her brother, flinching at the piss-yellow red-clot taste-scent. It shouted, but didn’t scream. The bullet wound might not kill him right away, but the poison slowly taking him over surely would.
“We thought we were getting around the edge of the Germans fine,” Robbie said, voice cracking. “Then a Panzer came around and cut our retreat off. The rest of the British Eighth is somewhere back thataway.” His free hand trembled towards the dark hump of dunes and blackened palms waving in the distance. “May as well be all the way back home for all the hope we have of getting out of here.”
Tea’s giggle came out tinged with hysteria.
“I can’t move, Izzy,” Robbie whisper-groaned. “I want it to stop, but it won’t. I held on as long as I could, but the bullet … oh my God, it hurts, Izzy. It hurts.”
Tea caught her friend in the snare of her glare. Why was her brother, the person she’d swum across the world for, asking Izzy for help? Had Izzy lied about not courting Robbie?