An excerpt from the book I'm writing; "The Running Boy"

Howie pulled his leg away in panic and floundered out of his way. He couldn't even make out now which out of the crumpled pile had spoken. He turned and ran. The ground began to rise and with the breeze picking up over his shoulders he quickened into it. He began to sail across the choppy slope in a diagonal tack into the wind. Faster and faster, remembering as if for the first time the exhilaration of the Whitby moors springing beneath his feet, cold and precarious. Freedom from the line was intoxicating; the realisation of months of monotonous longing. He skipped across the rocks, trousers slapping his thighs, negotiating the clumps; the exhilarating rhythm of the memory growing with the patter of machine gun fire. Figures appeared in the cold blue of pre-dawn before him, picking their way forward, stumbling; tripping; falling. He began to pass them. Some crept slowly, low to the ground, trying to pretend to the flying barrage of death that they weren't really there at all. Others mazed across the open ground in a bid to simply outrun the violently pursuing lead shot. Men fell as Howie ran; one man in complete silence, another with a piercing scream. Howie ignored them, immersed totally in the task of the race, his rifle gripped in the middle like a big stick chanced upon in his childhood haunts...
Before long He had made up all his lost time and was charging ahead towards the front runners. His competitors in the race were becoming fewer and as he approached the leading English; they appeared to have stopped, many of them and were hiding behind whatever they could; shell holes, large divots; sods of tall grass... A man caught sight of the running boy, “Howie! Howie! “Over here!”

copyright 2009 Joel Toombs