Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(104)
Powerful hands grab her shoulders and haul her to her feet. Blood sheets down over her eyes, and she wipes it away with her arm. She cannot stand fully erect, not yet, leaving her to look and feel even smaller than usual.
She tries to look at the man in the boots but her eyes will not focus and all she can make out is that there are three soldiers in butternut-colored uniforms, and the spurred man wearing dusty black.
The man in black speaks. Is it German? No, the words are accented but familiar. English, but pronounced like a war movie villain. She struggles to make sense of it, to get her brain to work properly, to understand—
A hard slap across the face knocks her against the table. She is almost facedown in the captain’s ruined belly.
“Where have they gone?” the spurred man demands.
“Gone?” she mumbled, uncomprehending.
“Your unit. Your men. Where have they gone? Where is their rendezvous?”
She blinks and wipes away more blood and turns with slow, arthritic dignity to face her interrogator. Her vision focuses on silver collar patches, each marked by the SS lightning bolts.
She does not then recognize the significance of those emblems, nor can she decipher the insignia of rank on his uniform, but she knows him to be an officer by the stiffness in the poses of the soldiers.
“I will strike you again, if—”
“They ran off,” she says.
“Where are they going? What is their destination? Are they joining another unit?”
She shakes her head and cries out sharply at the pain that swarms her. “I’m just a medic. Just trying to sew this man up.”
“You stayed behind to care for him?”
“Leave her alone, she’s just a Nigra,” the captain says from the table.
The German officer jerks his head, and before Frangie can protest, one of the soldiers steps close, presses the barrel of his rifle against the captain’s head, and fires once.
Bone and brain explode from the opposite side of the captain’s head. A piece of skull shatters the hanging bottle of plasma.
“Damn it!” Frangie cries. “You didn’t have to do that! You didn’t have to do that, he was dead anyway!”
“Then no harm has been done,” the officer says, and grins, revealing uneven but bright-white teeth.
He snaps orders to the soldiers, who immediately begin to gather up what medical supplies remain.
His next order will be to shoot Frangie, unless rape is on the menu first, and from the look in at least one of the German soldiers’ eyes, it is. He is anxious, she can see it, anxious lest the officer order that she be killed before he can have his fun.
The officer says two things, neither decipherable, but it makes the soldier with the hungry eyes grin. The officer laughs indulgently, as though he’s jolly Saint Nick handing out presents, then he turns and leaves.
Before he has cleared the tent flaps, Hungry Eyes’ belt is unhitched and the other two are crowding in close.
“No, don’t,” Frangie says, knowing it won’t help, knowing in her heart that the officer has told the men to have their fun and be quick about it, and then shoot her.
The tent flap opens again, a second officer, this one in gray. His uniform is stained with blood as well as mud. He speaks in German, as harsh as the first officer, but with more irritation in his tone, more like a stern schoolteacher addressing stupid pupils.
The soldier with his pants down around his ankles remonstrates, but this just sets off a torrent of derisive abuse. Reluctantly and angrily he pulls his pants back up, creating mirth among his fellows, who follow him as he rages out of the tent.
“I am Oberstarzt Hefflewezen. Doctor-Major to you,” He leans over the dead captain. “These are your sutures?”
Frangie grunts a yes.
“The wound is septic, he would not have lived.”
“I know that.”
He sighs, not a sympathetic sound, an annoyed one. “Your officers are fools leaving a medic behind. They will come to regret it.”
I already regret it, she thinks bitterly, though despite everything she does not quite believe it.
“You are my prisoner.” There is subtle weight on that word my. “My company has several cases of typhus. I have no time for routine bandaging and suturing.”
Lest Frangie believe she has fallen in with a sympathetic medical professional, the doctor grabs her by the back of the neck, squeezing painfully hard, and shoves her toward the tent flap.
She is startled to see that the gray light of morning is in the eastern sky. German soldiers pick over the remains of the abandoned camp, looking carefully for booby traps, scrounging for food and water, hoping for alcohol.
The German unit is a long column of trucks, most of them tankers carrying either water or fuel. There are two half-tracks—lightly armored vehicles with tank tracks at the rear, conventional tires up front, an open bed that carries nine or ten German soldiers, and a machine gun mounted over the low, sloped roof of the driver’s compartment.
The column is starting to move again, engines roaring, gears grinding. Frangie sees the SS officer in an open staff car, drinking something from a thermos bottle.
Doon Acey’s body lies still unburied, laid out on the ground beside the road with three other American dead, awaiting graves registration units. A bored-looking German soldier methodically shoots each corpse in the chest and head. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, bang. Making sure the dead Americans stay dead.