“Good luck, Fish,” Baby said, his eyes glazed and voice tight. “Don’t do anything stupid. Now go get in that hole and if I see you look back, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Kennet made a run for it. The foxhole was no pit. It was a shallow slit that he could not fit himself into. No matter how he turned and shifted, some part of him was always left out. A foot. His ass. Or his head. The machine guns continued to spray death across the snow and still no sign of Kennet’s platoon coming over the hill.

For the second time in two days, Kennet found himself alone on the battlefield. If he’d been a fish out of water in the woods yesterday, right now he was a sitting duck.

Looking toward the crest, willing his comrades to come to him, he could make out Malinda’s bloody head on the snow. Beyond it lay Silver’s lifeless body and the shallow trench left by Baby as he crawled away.

He looked downhill. Frozen corpses. Abandoned tanks and guns. A large, stone house in the distance, Germans running all around it.

There was the enemy.

Where were his friends?

Kennet wet his lips and whistled the first line of “Colonel Bogey.”

Nobody peeked out at him. Nobody was coming.

At that moment, he was sure the company had withdrawn, retreated, and left him to die here and become another lifeless body.

“I didn’t think I’d die alone,” he whispered. “Goddammit, Hook, I didn’t even say goodbye. How’d you let me get away?”

A thread of panic wove over and under his ribs.

I am alone out here. This is where it ends.

The next unit to march over this hill would find him shot dead, frozen in the snow. Or maybe they wouldn’t. More snow would fall and cover him and not until springtime would his bones be visible. And nobody would know whose bones they were.

“Easy, gullgosse,” he said, pulling in deep breaths, trying to shake off the cords binding up his ribcage and making him stupid. Baby had specifically instructed him not to be stupid.

“I am a fisherman and a pirate,” he heard himself say. “I was conceived in a casino in Aix-les-Bains. The gold in my veins is inherited from my father, who got it from a Hun’s tooth. My namesake uncle is king of the river.”

A few of his terrified bits and pieces pulled together. He found he fit better into the narrow slit in the ground when he calmed down. And talking to himself helped him stay calm.