Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“Nah.” Beebee laughs. “You’re not cold. But you will be.”

How Beebee is steering is a mystery to Martha. He has not turned on his lights. It is pitch-black but for some faint starlight. And now snow begins to fall in fat flakes. From time to time a tendril of a bush will slap her shoulder as they race along. Her face is numb. Her ears ache. Her nose is streaming and burning.

In the not-very-distant distance Martha hears artillery, an ominous rumble. Beebee pulls the jeep off whatever faint trail they’ve been bouncing along and plunges into the untracked woods. But not for long. He careens to a stop and kills the engine.

A shape appears, illuminated only by the glow of a cigarette.

“That you, Beebee?” a woman’s voice asks.

“Yep. And I brought a replacement for you, Castain.”

“Fug the replacement, did you bring coffee?”

“I got what I could. It’s in the back.”

The woman says, “Hey, Chester! Help us move this gear.”

Martha is given a box of C rations to carry, and four of them, Corporal Castain, PFC Beebee, Private Chester, and Martha, tramp into the woods bearing gifts.

They come to a fallen tree, and Martha is told to drop her box.

“All right, come with me, whoever you are,” Castain says.

“Martha Swann.”

“No one cares,” Castain says. She leads the way, and Martha hurries to keep up. “You’ll spend the night in Mazur’s hole. He dug it well.”

“Mazur?”

“Pity about him, he was hell with a bazooka.”

“Is he . . .”

“Nah. But he won’t be running any footraces any time soon.” Castain chuckles.

She follows Castain through near-pitch darkness made even more opaque by snow falling thick and hard. Her boots crunch on frost, feet plunging three inches, six inches, sudden drops into holes that trip her up. She spits snow out of her mouth and wipes it from her eyes. Tears stream from her eyes, not tears of sadness but cold, tears sliding down to freeze on her cheeks.

Martha is from Chicago. She has spent hours out in Chicago winters riding her sled down the hill or entering into snowball fights with other kids in the neighborhood. This is as cold as a Chicago January, certainly no more than a dozen degrees Fahrenheit, but the difference here is that there is no fireplace-warmed parlor, and no hot cocoa by that fire while the family’s maid, Wilma, lays a plaid blanket on her lap and clucks, “You’ll catch your death!”

There is no escape from this cold. No respite. She is in the forest, a place infinitely stranger to her than the streets of the city.

She looks up and suddenly realizes, to her utter horror, that she has lost Castain.

She spins, breath coming in throat-rasping, freezing gasps of steam. Trees. Nothing but the shadows of trees against snow. She knows she must not call out—Castain has urged silence. But she is lost! Lost in the middle of a forest with nothing at all to guide her. The panic grows swiftly and—

BOOM!

Bright yellow flames sear her eyeballs and stun her ears.

BOOM!

This explosion is above her, over her head! She drops to the ground, babbling incoherently, random disconnected words a

s . . .

BOOM! BOOM!

Something falls on her, and in unreasoning terror she rolls over to beat at it before realizing it is just a thumb-thick branch.