Front Lines (34 page)

Frangie changes every bandage. She sews up a split finger, irrigates an eye crusted shut with blood, and manages to do it despite rude thrusting fingers and groping hands.

The column is driving on relentlessly, no longer on anything resembling a road but pushing out into open desert. The overcast skies keep Allied air power from spotting them, but there are many nervous glances skyward from wounded and healthy soldiers alike.

Eventually she is given a can of tinned meat and crackers. It's what the German soldiers are eating, and grumbling as they do so. The grumbling is not comprehensible, but is nevertheless familiar to Frangie. Soldiers complain; German, American, every kind of soldier.

An open staff car carries the black-uniformed officer who ordered her patient shot and a second officer in the more familiar butternut khaki. There is clearly no love lost between these two as she learns from their body
language, each on his own side of the car, each avoiding looking at the other.

A young German who is missing his right foot rides along in the truck and offers her a half cigarette. Frangie doesn't smoke, and in any case fears if she takes it she'll be accepting some unspoken bargain. She shakes her head no.

The soldier shrugs, says something to his companion, gets a laugh in return.

The ambulance is just behind them and off to one side to avoid the vast clouds of choking dust the truck tires throw up. The ambulance driver leans out of his window and yells something that Frangie does not understand but contains one word she has learned:
schwarze
.

Black.

The cigarette soldier gives her a light shove and waves her toward the ambulance, but they're moving at a steady twenty miles an hour. Maybe she can jump off the truck, but she can't climb onto the ambulance.

Another shout, an impatient wave, and Hungry Eyes, the lowering brute who seems more or less in charge of the wounded, says something that causes cigarette soldier to shove her again, harder.

She stands up, bracing against the lurching, spine-jarring assault of the truck's suspension, climbs as far down as she can, down onto the bumper, takes a deep breath, and
jumps the last two feet. Unsurprisingly she stumbles, falls on her back, and rolls onto her side to stand up.

The ambulance comes to a halt beside her. The back door now flies open and the Doctor-Major yells, “Get in here, American.”

The inside of the ambulance reeks of sweat, vomit, human waste, and fear. The sides are lined with stretchers hinged to the walls, three on each side, but there are two men in each cot, lying head to foot, and three more sitting hunched over against the front of the rectangular space.

Frangie frantically runs through what she knows about typhus, but that turns out to be almost nothing.

The Doctor-Major says, “Lice,” as if answering her query. “We raided a village, not knowing . . . Some of the men passed their time with the women, many of whom turned out to be louse-ridden with
rickettsia typhi–
bearing lice. It's a nasty little disease that displays as a very severe headache, fever, cough, muscle pain . . . death in usually twenty percent or so of healthy men, but these are not healthy men, these are exhausted men who have gone too often without food or water or sanitation.”

The men are either stripped down to their underwear or buried in blankets, depending on the state of their fevers. Frangie sees rashes from the illness, but also protruding ribs and injuries in various stages of healing . . . or not healing.

“I have had no sleep in three days,” the Doctor-Major says. “I must sleep.”

His eyes are glassy, his whiskered face sallow.

“Have you taken your own temperature, Doctor-Major?”

He hesitates, bites his lip. “One hundred point five. And yes, my head aches and my muscles as well. I pray it is not typhus or who will care for these men? It is only me.”

He pulls a blanket from a man who, Frangie now sees, is dead. He spreads the blanket out on the filthy floor, lies down, mutters something about rationing the water, they always want water, and falls asleep.

Wasser.
That was the German word for
water
. There is a tin ten-gallon tank bolted to the wall behind one of the seated men. A tin cup hangs from a chain and rattles softly.

Schwarze
, give me water . . .

I want morphine,
kaffer
, this pain . . .

I am so cold . . .

They are the enemy, and they have come down with this disease as a consequence of attacking a village and raping the women. They are abusive, despite being sick, arrogant though prone. These are not fresh recruits, that is clear from their disease-yellowed tans, the ancient scars, and the tattoos that proudly advertise the names
of battles they fought against the British and the French before them.

First: love. That was what my faith has taught me.

Love even those that hate you.

Well, Frangie Marr is nowhere near summoning love for these men, but she can dole out water and hold the bucket for men who vomited, and she can spoon-feed potted meat and rehydrated cabbage to the men who can eat. She can do that.

Hour after hour the column lurches on. An especially sharp jolt wakes the Doctor-Major, who rises groggily to check on his patients. A new one arrives to be manhandled into the back of the ambulance, and is laid on the blanket the Doctor-Major had vacated, both Frangie and the German doctor straining weary muscles.

Frangie leaves the door swinging open, squeaking and banging as the ambulance hits ruts and gullies and climbs soft hillocks of sand with grinding gears. The fresh air is worth the noise. Night has long since come and is now threatened by just a hint of gray in the east. A half-track is behind them and to one side, headlights slitted, machine limned by silver starlight.

“How much longer?” Frangie asks.

The Doctor-Major has slept seven hours and awakened at last to find his charges all well cared for. And the mood has changed. Frangie is no longer
Schwarze,
at least for
some of the men, she has become
Schwester
: sister.

Nurse.

The Doctor-Major shakes his head. “I don't know. We are to rendezvous with a tank unit. But that is only the next step, America, it never ends, you know. It never ends, this war. You'll see.”

But two hours later, as Frangie sits scrunched in a corner catching a catnap, it does end, at least for most of the men around her.

The first explosion wakes her.

The rattle of gunfire propels her to her feet.

“What's happening?”

“War,” the Doctor-Major says sourly.

The rear door is still open. Frangie shoots a terrified glance at the Doctor-Major and at the door, now an eerie red rectangle in the light of the flares.

“No,” the Doctor-Major snaps, grabbing her by the back of the neck. “There will be more wounded, and I cannot—”

A noise, several rapid sounds like a knife being stabbed into a tin can, and red holes appear in the side of the ambulance and spray blood across Frangie's chest and arm.

It is a sheer panic reflex that sends her stumbling out through the open door to land hard on the sand.

In a shocked instant she takes it all in: a burning vehicle up ahead, shouts, a storm of rifle and machine gun fire
coming from the left, the zing of bullets flying in search of soft targets.

She begins to stand up but thinks better of it and lies flat, her belly in the dirt. Tracer rounds pierce the ambulance again and again, like flaming arrows. The men on the stretchers twitch and jerk, try to stand and fall, collapse, roll out of the back of the ambulance to crawl or lie still on the cold ground.

She sees the Doctor-Major twist, slap at a hole in his buttock made by a .30 caliber round, then drop to his knees as more rounds pierce him again and again.

Frangie rolls away, rolls and rolls like some game she would have played in the park with Obal, frantically aware of the half-track rushing toward her with a roar and a grinding of gears, a bear maddened by bee stings, desperate to escape the deadly fire that pursues it.

It careens past, the tracks missing her by inches.

She comes to rest, hugging the sand as the battle rages on ahead of her, drawing slowly away as the column continues to try and escape. She remains flat as a platoon of German soldiers race past, rushing to flank the attackers.

The ambulance rolls on for a bit, slower, slower, and finally comes to rest. A tire is burning, billowing toxic black smoke that rises to obscure the stars.

In the east the faint gray dawn is a signal of more terrible sights to come.

The grenade lands at the lip of what had been Jenou's foxhole. It lies there looking like a small steel pineapple, two seconds gone, two more,
tick-tock
.

The nearest German sees it, reaches for it, picks it up, starts to throw it back. The explosion amputates his arm at the elbow and shreds his helmet and face.

The German stands there, already dead but not yet fallen, frozen in the flare light, looking as if some gigantic tiger with claws of steel has ripped the side of his face.

Rio stands, staring. Her rifle leans against the inside of her foxhole, forgotten. She is looking at a monster. There is a terrible curiosity, a can't-look-away horror blended with denial because such things simply did not exist, her mind will not accept it, and a second German soldier farther back roars hatred and raises his machine pistol toward her, the deadly barrel spitting bullets.

And . . . empty.

She hears the metal-on-metal click of an empty chamber and the soldier throws his machine pistol aside in rage, draws a dagger from a sheath strapped to his leg, and runs at her.

He is a big man, brown eyed. She notices that because so many of the Germans have blue eyes, but no, these are brown. He is missing two teeth, which makes his snarl seem almost comical. His uniform is filthy, streaked with mud and coated with a thick layer of dust. His hands are big, thick fingers gripping the hilt, big boots slamming the sand, propelling him forward, roaring, always roaring, like a beast.

“Richlin! Down!”

The voice is far away and means nothing.

In three steps she will—

Down, down, down!

Where has that voice come from? Is it a voice at all? For a fleeting split second she thinks it's her father, and then, a sudden, urgent spasm, like a lightning strike, and she drops to her knees as Jack fires. She feels the breeze of his bullets.

The big German staggers forward, carried by momentum. He swings the knife and Rio feels something like a punch in the arm, and then is buried beneath the German's body.

She is on her back, squashed down into her shallow
foxhole, crushed by two hundred pounds of dead man exhaling his final breath into her ear.

Something snaps. Rio hears it as a snap, feels it as a twig breaking, and all at once she is pushing and punching and screaming foul curses and blasphemies, while all around her the guns blaze on. A second grenade goes off, and at last she breaks free and pushes herself up, drags her rifle from beneath the dead man, and starts firing again, screaming all the while, screaming, “Die, you fugging bastards!”

She fires until her clip pops.

Then . . . silence.

“Hold your fire, hold your fire!” Cole's voice.

A single shot followed by a louder Cole, yelling, “Goddammit, I said hold your fugging fire!”

Morning has come.

A white flag has appeared.

Rio stands with her rifle in her hand, legs still pinned by the dead man at her feet.

The man with the face ripped apart by Rio's grenade slides slowly down into Jenou's foxhole.

“Are you okay?”

Rio's hearing is half gone, her comprehension gone further still. The world around her seems to vibrate. The light is unreal.

A hand touches her arm and she flinches; the hand
does not pull away but tightens its grip. “Honey, are you okay?”

Rio stares at Jenou, blinks at her as if there is something about this person she should recognize, but she can't quite place the face.

“Who shot him?” Rio asked.

“What?”

“Who shot him? This one.” She looks down and carefully begins disentangling her feet.

“I think it was Stafford.”

A sharp sob. Rio takes several deep breaths, but the trembling is upon her again, the same as her first shots, her first kill. Tears come fast and hot, streams of mud down her cheeks. She dashes them away and shakes her head and throws off Jenou's comforting hand.

“I'm okay,” Rio says.

“Yeah, well, I'm not,” Jenou admits softly. “I can't do this, honey. I'm not made for this like you are.”

It's not meant as an insult, it is admiring and a little awestruck, but Rio flares and says, “Don't say that, Jen. Don't say that, we are . . . we're . . . I'm okay. I'm okay. You'll be okay.”

For that moment Rio has convinced herself that she is done, that she has performed her duty. She has done all that can be asked of her. She closes her eyes and she is home. She is home, she is in the barn with her mother,
and they are laughing while the cows moo in outrage, demanding to be milked.

Her father is there, too, but not laughing.
We're your family. Whatever happens, we're your family. Whatever happens, this is your place, this house, this town.

You'll need that.

Sergeant Cole yells to Luther and Pang to check the German bodies. “The dead ones, make sure they're dead, then strip them of their water and food. Any that are alive take their weapons, use their bootlaces to tie them up.”

“Aw, why can't Richlin do it?” Luther complains.

“She's the one who made them dead, most of 'em,” Cole says. “You just make sure they stay that way.”