Swing Band (War Shadows: Book 3)

Chapter One

Janek Sadowski spent that morning in 1939 the same way he spent every morning: writing music.

He sat on the train that morning with his pencil and his notebook, drumming his fingers manically. He always did that when he was trying to write any parts other than the piano sheet. Writing for his native instrument had always come easily to him, had since he was a child. He always struggled with writing the clarinet/saxophone, vocals, bass, and drum parts, and Nina, Lev, and Anton always had to revise the parts he wrote for them. Sometimes, they even had to gut whatever he wrote and practically write their parts from scratch, but he didn't mind: that was just part of the fun of playing in a jazz quartet that played their own songs.

The song Janek was working on that day was a song he called Can't Lie. He had most of it done, and was on his way to the studio to meet with Anton. He needed help with the drum part, as always, and Anton had some time in his busy schedule as a studio manager to help him with the drum part. That meant riding the train across town with the tail end of the commuters.

"You look nervous, there."

Janek looked up. Sitting across from him was an elderly woman, working on some knitting. The two of them were the only ones not reading a newspaper, that morning. The headlines were all around him: GERMANY INVADES POLAND. GERMANY IS ADVANCING DEEP INTO POLAND. NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN RESIGNS AFTER INVASION OF POLAND. STILL NO SIGNS OF ALLIED AID. He hadn't been able to read a newspaper without his anxiety getting the better of him since Hitler first began his invasion.

He frowned. "Huh?"

"You keep drumming your fingers," the woman explained.

"Oh! I'm not nervous," he said. "It just helps me think."

The woman nodded in understanding. "My boys used to do the same thing. Drove me bonkers when they were younger."

Janek nodded, then looked down at the sheet music, again. How many bars did he have left? Right: he just had the last twelve bars of music-

And then, just like that, the entire world exploded.

He wasn't entirely certain of what happened in the moments that lead up to it. All he knew was that one second, he was looking down at his sheet music, trying to figure out if he wanted some snare mixed in with the bass drum and the tenor drums, and the next, he was on his stomach, surrounded by broken windows and gnarled metal.

For a few seconds, he simply laid there, blinking, in shock. His ears were ringing, and he couldn't hear anything beyond that. The train was suddenly filled with suffocating heat. His entire body felt like a giant blister, one that had been scraped on concrete over and over, again.

Janek managed to push himself to his feet. He was starting to hear people crying. Most of the other people on the train looked like they were unconscious or... gone. Including the old woman he'd been talking to just seconds earlier. He knew just by looking at her that she wasn't going to get up. The train car ahead of the one he was in was on fire, the heat radiating from that car into their car. The entire train was on its side, like a toy knocked over by an angry toddler.

Realization began to dawn on him. He didn't know how he knew it, but he knew it: the Nazis had made it to Krakow.

And in that moment, he only had one thing on his mind: Nina.

He managed to crawl his way out of the car, through the windows that had become the ceiling.

Janek was met with pure chaos the second he got out of the car. There were other civilians like him running through the streets, trying to get to safety. There were Polish soldiers among them, guns at the ready for any Nazis. They were screaming at the civilians to get away, get to the nearest bomb shelter and clear the streets. In the distance, he could hear the sounds of gunfire and artillery shells. And if he wasn't mistaken, it was getting closer.