Dale Cozort's Alternate History Newsletter - Feb 2011 Read online

FICTION SECTION

  THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND (PT2)

  This is the second installment of my 2010 NaNoWrite novel. It isn’t quite a rough draft. I did a quick edit pass to tighten and get rid of the worst typos. I reduced the word count by a little under 6.5%. My usual rule of thumb is that my rough drafts need two line edit passes that reduce word count by roughly 20% before they’re tight enough. So this section has a ways to go. It’s hopefully not awful though, and I’m anxious to get preliminary feedback.

  For those of you just joining us, in the last installment I had post-D-Day World War II Great Britain do an “Island In the Sea of Time” back into the stone age, actually into the last interglacial, around 120,000 years ago. You probably think you know where the story goes from there and you’re probably wrong. Enjoy.

  The rain died down to a drizzle, and the sun poked through the overcast, etching short, sharp shadows on the ground around them. Angry clouds towered to the west, moving in quickly.

  “Another storm coming in.” Lloyd picked up a rock and chucked it in the general direction of the hyaena. “Maybe worse than the one we were just in.”

  The radio man said, "What did you do? Fubar us into darkest Africa?"

  "Unless someone moved Africa west of France, this isn't Africa," Lloyd said.

  "It sure as hell isn't England," the copilot said. He pointed ahead of them. Two hippos waddled out of the river and strolled toward them, a miniature what do you call a baby hippo? racing to keep up with the parents.

  "Maybe this is a zoo. Some kind of country estate," Lloyd said. He didn't believe that. Too big. No place on the map big enough with no town and no roads. Nobody rich enough to own that much territory in the middle of a highly populated country in twentieth century Europe.

  The hyaenas (five more of them came out of the woods) didn't seem afraid of the humans. They did react to the hippos, staring greedily, then retreating as the hippos stared in their direction. The hippos wandered toward the plane, raising their heads and sniffing the air. They seemed to decide that the plane was not edible or threatening, and wandered away.

  "So where are we and how did we get here?" the copilot asked.

  Lloyd shrugged. "You had as good a view as I did. We went over Caen and headed west to northwest. We flew half an hour. Look at the map. What's there? Southern England." He got out his map and traced their route with his finger. "Which puts us right here." He pointed to Mendelsham airbase. "And if we missed it, we should have seen Stowmarket here, and other towns here and here and here." He stabbed at the map with his finger. "And if we somehow missed all of that, when we headed back to the coast we should have seen roads here and here. And when we got to the coast we should have seen a town here, a harbor here.”

  The copilot pointed to the plane. “What do we do with the bodies? Bury them or leave them be for now?”

  “I say leave them in the plane for now,” Lloyd said. “We don’t know where we are. We won’t know where to come back for them.”

  “You just showed us where we are,” the copilot said. “You pointed to the map and everything.”

  “But there’s no airbase, no towns, no ships in the channel, no planes flying over the channel."

  As he said that, a plane droned in from over the channel. It flew lazily overhead, low enough that Lloyd could see the swastikas on its wings. Ju-52. He reached instinctively for his pistol, then pulled his hand away, conscious of the futility of that gesture. Dozens of parachutes bloomed above them.

  "What in the world?" Lloyd wasn't sure who said that, but he felt the same sentiments though much more emphatically. He pulled himself together. "Okay. I don't know where we are or what's going on, but we're US airmen. We're now in survival, escape and evasion."

  The copilot took his eyes off the paratroopers with a visible effort and they hustled to salvage what they could from the downed plane. That wasn't much--emergency rations, their pistols and those of their dead comrades, and a few extra boxes of ammunition, along with their canteens and wet weather gear.

  "We need to get inland, away from the plane," the copilot said. None of them moved toward the woods. The dark, towering forest seemed far more of a threat than the Germans drifting gently down the sky, none of them directly overhead. Lloyd spotted a ship—a merchantman of some kind--on the horizon in the channel, barely visible through the light rain.

  Wind caught the paratroopers and drove them to the east, scattering their neat formation. "I hope they get a couple of lightning bolts," Lloyd said. "Nobody sane drops paratroops in this kind of weather."

  "Nobody said our buddy Adolph was sane,"

  The paratroopers were close enough that Lloyd could see them spilling air from their chutes, steering away from the ocean. They floated low enough that the forests obscured the rest of their landing. Lloyd figured that most of them made it down on land though.

  Lloyd tried to make sense of their situation. If that was Caen, this is impossible. Was it really Caen? He thought back, trying to remember anything that didn’t fit with the town they had flown over being Caen. He couldn’t think of anything as he reluctantly followed the copilot into the forest in the opposite direction from the paratroopers.