Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Night of Fire: Part One

London, 1940

The streets of London were quiet, but they wouldn't stay that way for long.

It was December, and though it was only early evening, the sun had been down for hours, and the air was frigid. Isabeau enjoyed the cold while she could. Soon enough, the city would be an inferno.

Everything was dark. Every window was blocked off by blackout curtains and the streetlamps were turned off. Any vehicles on the street had to keep their headlights dim so the enemy air raids couldn't see them. It was for public safety, the country had been told, but Isabeau had her doubts about the measures. The blackouts had caused an increase in road fatalities, merchant seamen sometimes fell from the docks and drowned, and people took advantage of the darkness to commit burglaries, rapes, and murders.

They called it the Blitz.

Night after night after night, enemy planes soared overhead, dropping bombs at random, turning the beautiful, ancient city into a raging hellscape. Every morning, the sun would rise to illuminate the damage, the shattered streets and obliterated houses, the twisted wreckage of cars and buses, the bodies buried beneath vast heaps of rubble. It was endless and exhausting and devastating, and intended to crush the fighting spirit of London, to terrorise its people.

But despite the death and destruction, the fear and the trauma and the grim reality that no one knew when this would end, London persevered.

The mornings were cold and bleak, casting grey light on the devastation of the nightly attacks, and the air was thick with the stench of smoke and fire, but the people of London refused to give up. They caught the bus to work. They opened shops. Blackout curtains were pulled aside. The debris from the smashed buildings was cleared away, even though it would all begin again when the sun went down.

Isabeau loved this city.

She'd felt pride like this before, twenty-four years ago when she'd worked as a munitionette in the Barnbow Munitions Factory – pride in the people who would not let fear win, who fought back in whatever way they could, despite the risk to their lives, despite the horror happening all around them.

Across the street, a door opened, and a young woman emerged, carrying a swaddled baby and a torch to light her way through the streets.

Isabeau didn't need a torch.

She watched the woman cross the road, presumably heading to her own house, and then she heard it.

The awful wail of the air-raid siren sliced through the air, and the young woman froze, clutching her baby to her chest as she looked up at the sky.

There it was – the humming noise, the now grimly familiar noise of the Luftwaffe.

The bombs were coming.

"Get inside," Isabeau called, waving her arms to get the woman's attention.

But the woman didn't seem to hear her. She was rooted to the spot, her mouth open, her eyes fixed on the sky, one hand cupping the back of her baby's head.

The air filled with the sound of whistling – the sound of bombs falling.

Isabeau had been about to run forward, to drag the woman to safety, but when she heard the whistling, she stopped dead. The whistling was horrible, but the real danger came when that noise stopped, because it meant that bombs were close overhead. It meant that you stayed still and waited to see where they were going to land, and you hoped with everything that you weren't standing in their way. If you were, then you were dead.

Maybe the woman ahead of her didn't know that.

Maybe she was so scared that she'd forgotten.

Maybe she was reacting on pure instinct.