The Night Children Read Free Page B

a day and a half ago, took seven men with him. Then they disappeared, haven’t checked in since. We were sent out to find them.”
    “Or to find out what happened to them,” added Henry.
    “Right,” said Donnie. “So …”
    He trailed off when he saw Joan’s face. It seemed to have grown thinner, almost skeletal, her lips a razor-thin line. She glanced at him—her eyes dark, no trace left of that brightness, that sparkle—then quickly back at the fire.
    “What?” Donnie asked.
    “Eight men, you say? Were they heading north?”
    “Yes, did you see them?”
    She didn’t reply, lost in the quiet rage of the flames.
    “Joan, what?”
    “Don’t go after them,” she said, and with that soft whisper the forest found its power once again, the silence crashing down around him with such force that even the fire seemed to shrink. She looked up at him again and Donnie’s skin crinkled into gooseflesh. “Turn back, there’s nothing for you to find up there. Nothing good.”
    “What do you mean?” Donnie just about managed to find the words. “Did you see them?”
    “I saw,” she started, swallowing hard. “I don’t know, I don’t know what it was. I didn’t think it was real. But trust me, something bad happened to them. Your friends are gone, you can’t help them. And if you try …”
    They all watched her with wide eyes, watched her seem to shrink into her parachute.
    “If you try, if you go after them, then something bad is going to happen to you, too.”

0055
    “I don’t trust her.”
    Mike spat the words into Donnie’s ear even though there was no way Joan could hear him. She stood by the charred remains of the fire twenty yards away drinking the last few swigs of coffee from the helmet. Eddie was chatting to her, his arms gesticulating wildly, although Donnie couldn’t make out what he was saying.
    “There’s a reason she doesn’t want us to keep going. Something she ain’t telling us. I know it.”
    “Like what, Mike?”
    “How the hell should I know? Ask me, she’s probably a spy. Hitler’s got a whole army of ’em, broads just like her who sound right and look right but who’ll gut you while you’re swooning over ’em. She already admitted she was sent here to trap us.”
    “She was joking.”
    “Yeah? Maybe, maybe not. She’s been sent to knock us off the trail. There’s something up there, something they don’t want us to find. A base, or a weapon, maybe just a load more Hun troops ready to make the push down to Bastogne. Maybe Adolf himself is up there wearin’ furs and makin’ snowmen.”
    “So why don’t the Germans just kill us?” Donnie asked.
    “Because it causes too many questions. Cuddy dies and they send us. We die and they send someone else. They die and sooner or later the whole 101st marches up here to find out what’s going on. No, they’re sly. She’s sly. She scares us off south and we go back sayin’ we didn’t find anything and leave them well alone.”
    Donnie had to admit that he had a point. If Joan was a spy, a German agent, then that’s exactly what she’d be doing. But she wasn’t. He didn’t know how, but he was sure of it.
    “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Because we’re not turning around. Hell, we couldn’t if we wanted to, there’s nothing back there but Panzers. We keep going, we find whatever it was she saw and we know for sure what happened to Cuddy.”
    “And her?” Mike said. “Somethin’ tells me she ain’t gonna come with us.”
    Donnie sighed, pulling his collar tight around his neck, the night so cold he could have been hollow, a breeze blowing inside him from his feet all the way up to his skull. Joan must have sensed him looking, because she turned and smiled, and in that smile he saw that even though she was strong, even though she could probably survive out here longer than any of them, she didn’t want to be on her own. Out here, being on your own would make someone as crazy as the forest and the moon.
    “She’s one of us,” he said, patting Mike on the shoulder. “She’ll come.”
    He left