Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(83)

Spent shrapnel rains down into the foxhole, burning hot, singeing clothing and exposed flesh. Frangie screams now, screams unheard, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

There’s an enormous metallic clang that’s almost musical and the twisted, smoking barrel of a howitzer lands across the top of the foxhole, cutting off any escape, hissing hot.

A burning smell flows down into the foxhole, a toxic, chemical smell. Frangie is suddenly afraid that she’s on fire, slaps at her uniform, checking, Where’s that smell coming from, am I burning?

It’s never going to stop.

Round after round. It’s never going to stop until she’s dead. She’s going to die. Right now she’s going to die.

And then, slowly, she realizes it has stopped. It’s stopped. Silence. She can’t hear anything but a loud ringing sound that’s no sound at all. She feels her own heart but surely no heart can beat that fast and go on beating?

Her body trembles. Every cell of every muscle shakes, shakes like she’s freezing, like she’s going to die, Oh, Jesus, take me, take me to heaven.

“Are you hurt?” She can’t hear Doon, just see his mouth moving, a sort of unreal hole just inches from her face. He leans in, brings his head into contact with hers, and now she can hear through the skull, through the bones of their bodies. “Are you hurt?”

Hurt? She’s destroyed. But she shakes her head no.

The side of the foxhole has collapsed in one quadrant, opening up a space through which they might just crawl past the barrel of the destroyed artillery piece. Doon loses all self-control now and begins clawing at the dirt, tearing his fingernails as he yells, “Hey! Hey! We’re down here!”

Frangie joins him, shouldering in beside him, tearing at clods of loose dirt that fall and cover their boots. Doon decides enough is enough and pushes his way up, kicking at the dirt, frantic, reaching up to grab the red-hot metal of the barrel, yelling soundlessly in pain, to be replaced by Frangie, who digs and scrambles, and panic feeds panic now, fear swallows fear and grows more desperate.

All at once Frangie’s head is up and out in the air, the blessed air, the air filled with fire-lit nightmare images of twisted cannon and running soldiers and smoke. She crawls up the rest of the way and lies for a while, flat on her belly in the dirt. Then she turns and offers a hand to Doon, who takes it weakly.

She pulls, and he loses his grip.

She grabs his wrist with both her hands and pulls, but there’s something wrong. He can’t hold on. He’s crying now, she can see the tears, and she can feel the weakness in his grip. Sobbing, big wracking sobs.

“Help me, someone! Help!”

But no one can hear; it’s a landscape with no sound but the droning tone in her ears.

She releases her grip on Doon and stands up, amazed she still can. It’s wreckage and destruction everywhere. Trucks and cannon lie like some failed attempt at sculpture, twisted, blown into pieces, jagged edged, smoking. The water truck drips the last of its water. Men and women wander lost and confused, looking for nothing, looking for something, around in circles. The young lieutenant stares down at a twisted hunk of steel and cries.

“I’ll get help,” Frangie tells Doon. She grabs the lieutenant and jerks her head toward the foxhole. “Help me.”

The lieutenant doesn’t understand, but he’s willing to be led. Together the two of them kneel by Doon’s foxhole. They reach down, each taking an arm, and pull Doon up.

His intestines remain behind.

He sits on the edge of the hole looking at the horrifying mess that slips down his lap. With limp hands he tries to reel his intestines back up, but they’re slippery and he’s crying, tears rolling down his cheeks. Frangie tries to help, tries to pull the pulsating wormlike tube up, but she’s crying and making sounds that are not words.

Doon looks at her. He says something, words she can’t hear. Then he dies.

Someone is shaking Frangie’s shoulder roughly, yelling at her, a sound she cannot parse, cannot understand. But the face looking at her is anguished. She nods.

She leaves Doon and the weeping lieutenant behind and in a trance follows the soldier who guides her by the hand to a second soldier. He’s lying against an unharmed howitzer. His foot is gone.

“Traumatic amputation.” That’s the term for it. Something has been blown off. Something is missing.

His ankle is a mess of red worms, arteries and veins and shreds of meat and a circle of white bone oozing marrow, but half of it has been cauterized, seared shut by the heat of the shrapnel. It saved him a lot of blood, that’s a good thing. She tightens a tourniquet around the stump. Instinct. Training.

Humanity.

She slaps a bandage on, inadequate, laughable if laughter is ever possible again. She stabs a morphine syrette into his thigh.

There’s more. A dead woman. Frangie cannot raise the dead, not this PFC, and not Doon Acey.

A man with shrapnel in his chest and belly roars in pain, the first real sound she’s heard since the bombardment. More morphine. The man has to go to the field aid station; there’s nothing she can do with a belly wound. She sends him off on a cloud of morphine.

There’s a broken arm, a scalp laceration, a few small burns. And there’s a body without its head. The head is never found. A male soldier with a superficial wound—hot shrapnel grazing a thigh—demands to be sent home.