Free The Lives She Left Behind by James Long Page A

You can’t do much damage.’
    Luke crouched, stretched out his hand and pulled a skim of soil towards him as he had seen the man do. He looked up again and saw the girls kneel down to work. He reached out for a second scrape
and this time, as the blade touched the earth, he snatched his hand away as something travelled up through it, through his fingers and up his arm. He looked around. Dozer hadn’t noticed. He
reached out again and there it was, flowing through him, a flood of light and peace and knowledge and something startling that felt like love.
    He knelt there utterly still, letting it wash through him like the best of gifts until it drained away so abruptly that he wanted to chase it down into the ground. There was a sudden commotion.
Everyone in the other trench was standing up – the three girls at the far end and the rest of the diggers. Luke found he was touching inert earth with nothing coming from it at all. The
others were hurrying towards him.
    ‘Up, you two,’ said the man called Rupert, who was leading the way. ‘No questions. Just come with us, right now.’ He didn’t stop until they were down the hill and
out of the trees where the footpath came up from the village below.
    ‘Okay, listen up,’ he said, and the diggers gathered round. Luke saw the three girls on the far side, with four boys who were a little older. The other diggers were in their fifties
or even sixties and they were all focused intently on Rupert.
    ‘Conrad had a bright idea earlier,’ he said, nodding at the young man standing next to him. ‘He pointed out that the dog escaped all by itself, which meant there was clearly a
second hole in the ground because the owner was still looking down the first one, so we decided he would go and search for it. Five minutes ago he found it. Tell them, Conrad.’
    ‘It was in the bushes,’ Conrad said. He wore thick glasses and he was sweating. ‘Maybe a badger’s sett, I thought, but it was big. You could crawl down it, like at
forty-five degrees. I got a torch and stuck my head in but when I saw what was at the bottom, I got out again double quick.’
    He looked around at their faces. ‘There’s a wooden crate down there at the base of a tunnel. It’s a bit rotten, coming to pieces, but you can see stuff inside – round
sticks. There’s metal strapping around the crate holding it together, and there are four or five hand grenades wired on to the strapping.’
    A murmur went up. Rupert was frowning. ‘It fits with Lucy’s electric cable. We think it’s a wartime bunker of some sort,’ he said. ‘That means the grenades and the
dynamite or whatever it is in the crate could be highly unstable by now. No one goes near the site until Bomb Disposal have dealt with it. I want groups of you spaced out around the bottom of the
hill to stop any walkers wandering up there. Dozer, can you sort that? Anyone not needed should go down to the campsite and wait. It’s safe there. I’ll go and call up some help.’
He turned to Michael Martin. ‘Mike, I think we need to clear the site of anyone who’s not camping here. I’m sorry. Can you take the lad with you?’

CHAPTER 6
    ‘You’d think he was half dead,’ Lucy had said when they were back in their trench. ‘They’re making such a fuss of him. What a dork.’
    ‘Stop being horrible,’ said Ali. ‘Poor guy. I bet it hurt.’
    After that they worked silently, thinking about the story they would have to tell that night, but Jo was starting to feel a weight of history stir and wriggle from the layers below her as if all
the particles, sifted and compressed by time, had stories of their own requiring her to listen. The three of them had been first to the trench when he fell out of the sky and she had bent over him,
seeing he wasn’t breathing and looking at his staring eyes, terrified that he might indeed be dead. Then she saw him fighting for breath and, as Dozer pushed them out of the way, feared he
might have