“Henry”

Chapter 1: Blood, Mud, Memory

The Escape

January 1777 – Somewhere Near Brooklyn, New York
My knees were torn open from the brambles. Couldn’t feel my feet anymore—just thorns and blood and frozen mud sucking at my legs. Every branch sliced like a knife. Every root reached like a noose. The woods pressed in like a closing fist, and still I crawled.
The dogs were close. Not close enough to see me, but close enough to smell me. I could hear them—snarling, yelping when the brush snapped back. Somewhere in the distance, their handlers shouted, cursing at the dark, at the cold, at me. At the very idea of prey getting away.
I kept crawling.
My breath rasped in and out like bellows clogged with ash. Every inhale scraped raw. Every exhale felt like fire. I paused behind a fallen log, the taste of bark bitter on my tongue. My lungs felt full of smoke, like I was still breathing the tar stink of the ship. I could still feel the heat of the iron shackles on my wrists, ghost pain wrapping around me like chains.
I didn’t dare stop. If they caught me, I’d be back in the belly of that beast. Back in the dark. Back with the coughing and the fever-slick skin of boys who died whispering for their mothers. Or worse.
Somewhere behind me, an officer barked something in that clipped London tongue—”Raise the torches!”—like we were sport. Like this was a fox hunt and I was meant to bleed in circles for their delight. Their amusement. Their boredom.
They’d lost me in the ravine. For now. But I didn’t trust luck, not anymore. I didn’t trust anything except the dark, and the way forward.
A branch cracked too close. I froze, face in the dirt, heart pounding like a drum in a hollow barrel. Mud slid under my ribs as I pressed down, willing myself to vanish. The torchlight flickered over the ridge above—orange veins in the black, dancing like fire spirits.
One guard slid halfway down the embankment. His boot skidded near my head. Just feet above me. I could see the leather stretching over his heel, the wet glint of his bayonet.
Don’t breathe. Don’t twitch. Be stone.
The dog snarled—low and sharp—and I thought that was it. Game over. My hand curled around a rock the size of a fist. I was going to kill something, or die swinging. I could already feel the cold steel tearing into me.
But then—
“Bloody thing’s caught a scent of its own arse again,” the soldier muttered, yanking the dog’s leash hard.
They moved on. Just like that. I stayed frozen for another minute, not believing it until their footsteps finally faded. My whole body shook—not from cold, but from the sudden absence of death. The rock slipped from my fingers, silent in the moss.
I didn’t cry. Couldn’t. My throat was too dry and my soul too rattled. I waited until the woods swallowed their voices, then rolled to my side and bit down on my coat sleeve just to keep from screaming. Pain flared up my leg where a thorn had buried deep. I didn’t pull it out. Not yet.
A few more minutes. Then I moved again—lower, slower, a shadow dragging its bones through the brush.
The trees opened for a moment, revealing the faint sliver of a moon. I turned my face toward it, letting the silver light soak into my skin like a blessing. My breath caught. It was the first sky I’d seen in weeks that wasn’t framed by iron bars.
Freedom wasn’t ahead. Not really. No safe house. No waiting friend. Just a few more miles of not being dead yet. But maybe, just maybe, there’d be a fire one day. Bread. A name spoken without fear. For now, that hope was a thread. Thin, but unbroken. That was enough.
I don’t remember how long I kept going. Hours maybe. Time stretched and twisted in the dark. There were no landmarks, no sounds except my heartbeat and the cursed baying that faded and returned like a tide. My muscles trembled with each crawl, but I didn’t stop.
My ribs stuck out like broken boards. My fingers bled. I was sixteen.
They say you see your whole life flash before your eyes when you’re about to die. That’s not true. You see one thing. The thing that made you run in the first place.
And what I saw was my father’s hand on my shoulder the day we signed up. His palm heavy with pride and something more — a quiet fear that I didn’t understand at the time.
That memory stayed with me in the mud. And it was what I clung to now.
Because it meant I still had something left to lose. Or something left to fight for.
And that meant I wasn’t done yet. I kept crawling. Into the dark. Into whatever came next.

The Ship

January 1777 – Near Brooklyn, New York
The prison ship spit me out like something it couldn’t stomach.
Morning light hit my face for the first time in weeks—maybe longer—and it felt like being scalded. My eyes didn’t know what to do with the sky. The brightness stabbed clean through me. I turned my head, not just against the glare, but against the shame of being seen like this.
We were ghosts. Hollowed out. Starved. Gray as ash.
Rats had run that ship. Bigger than cats. One of them chewed straight through the heel of my boot while I slept, left my foot raw and bloody. I watched another man wake up screaming because a rat had crawled into his coat and wouldn’t come out. The stench—God, the stench. Sweat, sickness, piss, rot. It lived in your lungs, your clothes, even your skin. There was no escaping it. Even now, standing on solid ground, I could taste it in the back of my throat.
They called it a transfer.
Fifteen of us shuffled off the deck in a line that barely looked human. Bones under skin. Eyes sunken. Some swayed like tall grass before a storm. Some didn’t look up at all. One kid—no older than me when I first enlisted—clutched something in his fist so tight his fingers had gone white. A button, maybe. Or a memory. Something that hadn’t died yet.
They unshackled us. Not a kindness. Just a change in chains. On the road, it was easier to lose a man. No need for iron when exhaustion would do the work. There was a rhythm to it. One step. Another. Breath. Pain. Repeat. No one spoke. What would you say?
We began walking. The guards joked, dragging their bayonets through the frostbitten dirt. They didn’t expect trouble from the walking dead. They kicked at our heels, laughed when someone stumbled. One of them hummed a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. It made my stomach turn.
One man collapsed ahead of me, just folded like a coat with no one left to wear it. While they cursed and pulled him up, I moved.
Not a plan. Just a breath. A twitch. A step.
Off the road. Into the brush. A musket cracked behind me.
Missed.
I ran.
Branches clawed at my face. Roots caught at my feet. The wind burned colder in the trees, but it was real. Not that damp rot from the ship. Real. Sharp. Clean. It hurt. I welcomed it.
Behind me, the shout came too late.
A mile. Two. I don’t know.
Behind me: the howl.
Dogs.
The guards weren’t chasing to catch. They were chasing to kill. I knew it. They knew it. This wasn’t justice. This was performance. One man breaks free, and they have to break him in return—so the others don’t dream.
I didn’t stop.
Didn’t look back.
I wasn’t Henry anymore.
I was breath. Blood. Bone.
I was motion.
The dogs howled again. Closer. Echoing off the frozen ground like bells at the end of the world.
I angled downhill, praying for water. Any water. A stream. A ditch. If I could lose the scent, I might make it. I might get to see Easton again. Might sit by the hearth in my father’s shop. Might find out if Keller made it. Might get a second chance at becoming something more than a corpse with a number.
The trees thinned. The air cut sharp through my shirt. My legs burned. My hands were bleeding. I tore skin from my palms on a jagged limb and didn’t care. Somewhere beneath the pain, I realized I hadn’t eaten in four days. My stomach twisted like a rope.
But I kept going.
Because mercy doesn’t save you.
Only motion.
Only will.
Only the fire that hadn’t yet gone out in me.
And I wasn’t ready to let it.
I leapt a fallen log, stumbled into a clearing, and nearly fell flat. But I caught myself. Barely. I didn’t stop moving. I angled to the left, down toward a hollow where fog was thickest. It might mean water. It might mean nothing. But it meant cover. It meant a chance.
The barking grew frantic now. I could hear boots behind it, commands barked, curses flung like musket balls. They were closing. Fast.
I slipped. Hit the ground. Rolled. Got back up.
My chest was fire. My lungs were knives. My mouth tasted of iron.
But I ran.
Because if I stopped—
I died.
Because if I stopped—
They won.
And I wasn’t ready for either.
Not yet.

The Hand on My Shoulder

July 9, 1776 – Easton, Pennsylvania
It was July 9th, 1776. Easton boiled in the heat, and the whole town was alive with rumor and rising voices. The Declaration had been read aloud just days ago—some claimed the world had shifted. Others said it was suicide. Words like liberty, treason, and providence floated over the stalls of the market and clung to the rafters of the meeting house. Preachers warned of judgment. Soldiers promised glory. Farmers muttered about supply lines and burned fields. The air itself felt tight with waiting.
But not my father.
He didn’t speak into the frenzy. He stood at the edge of the crowd like a stone in a river, unmoved. When the shouting grew loud enough to turn heads, he gave one last listen, then turned to me and said only: “Come, Heinrich.”
I followed him through the glare of high sun, into the dust and noise of town. My boots scuffed the same path we always walked, but everything felt different. Each step felt heavier, like the ground knew what I hadn’t yet named. I walked half a pace behind him, not because I was told to, but because it felt right. That was how you followed a man like Johann Bush.
We passed the blacksmith’s yard, where sparks snapped like insects in the sun. The hammer strikes echoed in rhythm, slow and certain, like the heart of a place too stubborn to break. The smith didn’t pause. Didn’t look up. He just swung.
We passed the DeWitt house. Mrs. DeWitt stood on the porch wringing a rag in her hands, staring down the hill where her eldest had gone off the week before. She gave us a nod, but didn’t smile. She knew. Everyone knew what it meant when a father walked beside his son in silence.
The square was swollen with motion. Cart wheels creaked under weight. A preacher prayed over two boys barely shaving. Horses shifted under their reins. Crates of salt pork and powder were loaded into wagons headed south. I smelled sweat and tobacco, leather and gun oil.
Somewhere behind a stack of barrels, a boy wept, trying not to be heard.
We passed it all, my father and I, without a word.
When we reached the steps of the mustering tent, he paused. Turned. Looked down at me—not towering, just steady, like the trees in the woods behind our house.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “This is not for glory. This is for duty.”
I swallowed. The dust in the air caught in my throat.
“I want to,” I said.
He studied me—not like a boy, but like a man he was still trying to see clearly. Then he nodded once. No fanfare. Just the truth. He reached out and placed his hand on my shoulder. Calloused. Solid. Still stained faintly from the sap of the tree he’d felled the day before. It rested there with a weight that didn’t press, but steadied. That was when I knew he was proud—and afraid. And I was both too.
We stepped forward. The enlistment line was short but slow. A man in a blue coat read names with a gravel voice, pausing now and again to look each volunteer in the eye. Some hesitated. One turned around. The officer didn’t chase him.
When it was our turn, my father signed with a hand that didn’t shake. Then he handed me the quill.
I gripped it tighter than I needed to, trying to keep it from trembling. The ink splotched at first, but I kept going. Wrote my name beside his. Too small. Too crooked. But mine.
We were handed armbands—rough cloth, dyed blue. A list of supplies: Flint. Water. Bread. Thread and needle. A small pouch of powder. And this from the officer: “And bring your faith, lad. More of us die from doubt than lead.”
My father didn’t reply, but he didn’t look away either.
We walked home in the hush of early evening. The world was quieter than it had been that morning. The streets had emptied, the sun dropping low, casting everything in long shadows. We reached our fence just as the first bats came out.
My mother was outside pulling laundry from the line. She didn’t stop.
“Heinrich,” she said, not turning, “are you going with him?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She folded the sheet in her arms and pressed it to her chest. Her fingers moved like she was folding something sacred. Then she looked at me.
“Your boots’ll need mending before you go. Bring them in.”
I nodded, throat too tight to speak.
She came forward. Smoothed my hair. Her hands smelled of soap and lavender, but there was something else—ash, maybe. Or time. She touched my face, thumb resting beneath my eye, then turned slightly to glance toward my father, her voice quiet but firm.
“I’ll keep you and your, father’s name in our prayers,” she said. “You’ll be gone longer than he says, he always was.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure if she meant it for me or herself.
She kissed my forehead. Then turned away, her jaw clenched against something too deep for words.
We left before sunrise. The dew hadn’t yet lifted. The drums thudded like distant thunder. My pack rubbed against my shoulder wrong. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I remember walking past the garden one last time. The rows were clean, the stalks high.
I have never left home, Easton, and may never return.

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