Free Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt

said Owen.
    ‘They are nothing.’
    Janek moved forward and the man hastily retreated further into the shadows, stumbling over the broken bits of furniture in the dark. Then, as Janek went to snatch one of the papers from him, the
man abruptly darted, dodging Janek’s hand and slamming Owen hard against the wall as he ran past them and out.
    ‘Bloody hell!’
    ‘
Prase nacistický!
’ Janek started after him, but the man was already gone, papers fluttering in his wake.
    ‘Don’t,’ said Owen, calling him back. ‘Leave him.’
    He pushed himself away from the wall and caught his breath, then picked up the dropped pistol and one of the discarded papers. He pushed open one of the shutters so that the light fell in. It
looked like a registration form: boxes completed in neatly printed German and attached on the top left-hand corner was a photograph of a man. He was holding up a card that bore the numbers 5792.
Owen scanned the form. There were recognizable English words scattered among the German: place names and family names, an address in Dorset. He stared at the face in the photograph – a man
with oiled hair and a cleft in his chin. He was wearing an RAF jacket.
    He leant against a porch rail and looked out at a vegetable patch kicked to smithereens, at the swallows looping over the field beyond, and the distant firs bristling in the
breeze. On the post beside him was that same symbol that had appeared in the concrete store – the two ‘V’s forming wings and a head enclosed in a square. He wondered how it had
got there and when he ran his fingertip lightly over the scratches, it felt like it had been freshly cut, the wood still hard and dry.
    He turned his attention back to the garden. For a while he watched wind chimes made from cut tins gently spinning on an apple branch, God’s last glints of light running down them like
melted silver. He tried to cling to the memories that had come to him in the camp. If he could keep playing them in his head, turning them over and over, maybe they would crystallize and then they
would be safe.
    He wrote down everything he remembered: Joe Hallam, Guy Fletcher, ‘Bugsy’, Moe, and Teddy Williams – faces that had come back to him and that he could see now in his mind.
    HUT 105
    RUSSIANS – GERMAN BORDER
    BRITISH RAF
     
    He paused and circled it, then added a question mark. He had been quite convinced that Max would be there, that they had been together, but now he couldn’t place him there.
    He closed his eyes and tried to think, but whatever else he’d remembered of the day had already slipped from his mind.
    In the cellar Janek had discovered a well-stocked food store – the previous incumbents of the house had clearly left in a hurry – and as they ate from the tins,
Owen laid the scraps of map out in front of the fire, trying to piece together a route. Granted the boy had navigated them here but the fields and woods were a hard slog. They should find a road
and hold their nerve. Keep their head down and make for a town. He was a British citizen, after all. He would hand himself in to the first official and be done with it. The boy – well, he was
free to do as he liked.
    He scanned the map, hunting out roads, then circled Cottbus several miles to the west. It was a start. He wrote it on the paper. There were railway lines too, leading from Sagan, some heading
west, others south. His finger followed them down into Czechoslovakia, pausing at every point where they crossed a river. He had been at one of these spots, he thought – a collapsed bridge.
He wondered which of these rivers he had walked along, which railway line out of all these threads was now broken and out of use.
    He remembered a man, Uncle Archie, coming one afternoon in a smart black Bugatti. He had given Owen his driving goggles to wear as they lounged about in the drawing room. The
whole summer had been a washout and so, to brighten up an otherwise damp and disappointing day, he had