She spoke. Her words were a pidgin mishmash. German and heavily accented English mixed together.
“
Bitte
. Pliss. I muss—need he’p.”
She pointed to an outhouse nearby. To Jeff, the structure looked like something out of—
Middle ages. Probably when it was built, too. Yuck! Thank God for plumbing.
Insistently, the woman gave his shoulder a little shake. “Pliss. Need he’p. Pliss!”
Puzzled, Jeff slung his shotgun over his shoulder and nodded. The woman led him toward the outhouse, striding quickly. Behind him, Jeff’s friends followed. The cluster of older women and children huddled to one side rose and began running toward the outhouse.
What the hell is going on?
The woman ahead of him reached the outhouse first. She seized the door and practically wrenched it loose, almost snapping the leather hinges. For a moment, Jeff was dazzled by the strong, shapely figure outlined under the tattered and shapeless dress. Even the woman’s dirty bare feet seemed lovely to him.
A moment later, the woman—frantically, now, no
almost
about it—had entered the outhouse and was lifting the wooden seat up. Wrestling with it, pitching it out the door. Jeff scuttled aside hastily, barely avoiding the horrid missile.
What the hell is she doing? Is she crazy or something?
Then, when he heard the first wail, he knew. He was so stunned, he couldn’t move. Dimly, to one side, he saw Larry turn away and double up, vomiting. Behind him, he heard Eddie hiss with shock and horror. Jimmy came up alongside him, muttering. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this.”
The woman bent over, extending her arms. A moment later, her back arched with effort. Effort. Effort.
Jeff saw her face turning toward him. Saw the look of silent pleading.
Pliss. Need he’p.
Jimmy was still muttering. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” Jeff was paralyzed.
The face.
Pliss. Need he’p.
The breath blew out of Jeff’s chest. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it. Jerkily, he scrabbled the shotgun off his shoulder and thrust it at Jimmy. “Hold this!”
An instant later, he was stepping forward. Then, seeing the straining frenzy in the face ahead of him, began running. He was at her side in seconds.
Looking over her arm, he saw the face of a young girl staring up at him from a black pit. The girl’s expression combined terror and—
Christ, they must be suffocating in there.
Almost violently, Jeff thrust his arm into the hole. The woman crowded alongside him was holding the girl’s hands. He seized the girl’s wrist. Between them, heaving, they hauled the girl out in seconds. Jeff, flinching from the smell, almost threw her out the door. But he managed to transform the motion into a simple toss. The girl landed on her knees, gasping for breath. Then, almost immediately, she began vomiting alongside Larry. Her tattered dress was crawling with spiders.
Eddie and Jimmy were staring at him. Jimmy was still muttering. “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this.”
Angrily, Jeff pointed at the girl. “Help her,
goddamit!
At least get the spiders off of her!”
He didn’t wait to see if they obeyed. He turned back into the outhouse and took his place alongside the woman. Another girl, another heave—
out.
This one didn’t vomit, judging from the sounds coming from behind him. Just gasped and gasped, before breaking into sobs.
Another—
out.
He and the woman had the procedure down, now. Each take a wrist. Heave.
Get them out of here!
Another—
Jeff almost lost it, then.
A baby?
Fortunately, the woman could handle the baby on her own. Jeff was locked into paralysis, fighting down his nausea.
Seeing another white face in the darkness—
the last, thank God!
—he managed to control himself. He didn’t wait for the woman to return. Just bent over, seized, heaved. He drove off hideousness with humor.
Coach’d be proud of me.
He did not toss the last girl out of the outhouse. Something in him rebelled, demanding that a measure of dignity be returned to a world swirling down into utter foulness. Holding the girl under the armpits, ignoring the spiders on her shoulders and the one crawling down his arm, he carried her out and set her gently on her feet.
The gesture was pointless, perhaps. The girl collapsed immediately and began retching. But Jeff still felt the better for it. He held out his arms, examining. One spider, no more. A quick flick of the fingers did for that.
Jimmy and Eddie were crowding around him. Then, backed away.
“Thanks a lot,” grumbled Jeff. “Can you see any more spiders?”
After circling him for a few seconds, his friends shook their heads. Jeff was almost amused by the paleness of their faces. But not much. He didn’t doubt his own face was just as pale.
He was feeling a bit giddy, now. He realized that he had been holding his breath. Trying to restore his calm, he turned his head back and forth, examining the scene around him.
The area was now packed with Americans. Two of the coal-hauling trucks had pulled up near the outhouse and disgorged the miners who had been inside manning the rifle slits. Other Americans had begun to arrive in pickups. All of them were being drawn by the commotion at the outhouse.
A young man pushed forward from the crowd. Harry Lefferts. His camouflage was bulked up in his midsection by the bandages he was still wearing from the first day’s gunfight. He held his rifle in one hand, muzzle pointing to the ground.
“I can’t believe this shit,” muttered Harry. He shook his head, turned it, fixed his eyes on a German prisoner standing a few feet away. The man had his hands raised, clasped on top of his head.
“Little girls’d rather hide in a shithouse than deal with these fuckheads.” Harry gave the German prisoner a very savage grin. “Go ahead, asshole!” he shouted, hefting his rifle. “Look at me cross-eyed, why don’t you? Spit on the ground. Anything. Just give me an excuse so’s I can blow your fucking brains out!”
The German obviously didn’t understand the words. But, just as obviously, he understood the essence of them. He kept his hands firmly clasped on top of his head, and kept his eyes carefully away from Harry.
Smart move,
thought Jeff. He looked around. All the German soldiers were now behaving as meekly as lambs. Harry’s reaction to seeing the girls being hauled out of the outhouse was fairly typical. Many of the coal miners were taking the opportunity to express their opinion of Hoffman’s mercenaries—usually right in their faces, obviously quite prepared to shoot if anyone gave them any trouble.
Trouble, needless to say, was conspicuously absent. The prisoners were thoroughly intimidated.
Mike Stearns arrived then. After hearing a quick muttered explanation from Harry, Mike walked over to the group of girls and stared at them. The girls were still on their knees, but they were not vomiting anymore. Jeff didn’t think there was anything left to vomit. Just four girls, gasping for breath. Old women surrounded them, still brushing off spiders.
Jeff was standing close enough to hear Mike’s whisper. “They can’t be more than thirteen years old.” His face was as pale as a sheet. Mike’s faint freckles were normally almost invisible. Now, they shone like stars in the sky. Red stars. Antares—and Mars. Jeff could sense the big man’s effort to control his temper.
Hearing the whisper, the young woman whom Jeff had helped stared up at Mike’s face. She seemed to flinch, for an instant. Then, rising, she stood straight before him. Hands at her side, back stiff, shoulders square.
She was shielding her family again, Jeff realized. From the blows she expected to come from Mike. He saw her turn her face aside. Still level, but presenting the cheek.
Mike understood also. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “What a nightmare world.” He started to raise his hand, as if to comfort the young woman, but dropped it. The gesture seemed feeble, helpless.
What can you do? Say?
The leader of the strangers came up just as Gretchen and her family were cleaning the last spiders off of the girls. Gretchen was so relieved to see that all of them were unharmed—filthy, yes, but unharmed—that she never noticed his arrival. Not until he was standing right next to her and whispered something did she realize that he was there.
Startled, she looked up. Then, when she saw his face, she stood erect.
She recognized the leader. He was the one who had captured the Protestant chieftain. He was even bigger, up close, than she had realized. Not as big as Ludwig, but—
This man could have broken Ludwig in half.
Gretchen didn’t doubt that for a moment. The American leader was the scariest man she had ever seen in her life. Much scarier—
much
scarier—than even Diego the Spaniard.
It was not so much the sheer size of the man—not even when that size contained nothing but bone and muscle—as he himself. He loomed above her like something out of old legends. She barely noticed the mottled clothing and the odd helmet.
(Why put a lamp on a helmet?)
She saw only the face, and the anger in it, and knew the ancient warriors of Teuton myths.
Gretchen assumed that the leader was angry at her and her family. The Protestant soldiers also, of course. But mostly she. Because of her, some of his newly captured women were so foul no man would touch them. Not even soldiers.
She felt herself cringing, and fought it down. Cringing before men only fed the flames. She turned her head, bracing herself for the beating. She knew from experience that a blow on the cheek was the easiest to handle.
But the man simply turned away. He muttered something to the young man who had helped her. The young man nodded and turned toward Gretchen. She realized that the leader had instructed him to watch over her.
She glanced around. The victors’ camp followers were arriving. She was astonished to see a Moorish physician in their midst. Only powerful people could afford Moorish or Jewish doctors. Then she saw two or three women moving through the camp, and was astonished again. Each of them was wearing a white armband with a red cross emblazoned on it. A religious order, apparently. Gretchen almost laughed. The piety of the insignia went very poorly, she thought, with those brazen bare calves. One of the women had a dress so short it showed her knees!
Then, another thought drove out all humor. She turned, looking for help from the same man who had provided it twice already. The man who had helped save her, and her sister, might help her save her brother. If Hans could be saved at all.
“
Mein bruder. Hans.
” The woman pointed toward the battlefield. Jeff, looking, saw that the distant field was now covered with people, moving slowly through—
He swallowed. There were so many bodies there. So
many.
“Pliss,” she repeated. “
Mein—
my—brutter. Hans.”
Eddie Cantrell spoke hesitantly. “I think she’s looking for her brother, Jeff.”
Jeff looked back at the woman. She was not much shorter than he was, he thought. At least, her eyes seemed very level. Light brown eyes.
“Pliss.”
“Sure, ma’am,” he replied. “I’ll be glad to help you look for your brother.”
He ignored the chuckles, as he and the woman walked away. With great dignity, he thought. He even managed to ignore Larry’s parting remark.
“See?
That’s
an opening line, stupe. Flowers’ll work, too.” Then, half-shouting: “Beats the last stand at the Alamo, you crazy jerk!”
Chapter 19
As soon as Mike left Jeff and the young German women, he headed for Nichols. The doctor was moving through the crowd of frightened camp followers, quickly inspecting the women and children to see which might need immediate medical attention.
“James!” called out Mike. The doctor turned. Mike reached him in a few quick strides.
“I think you should look at those people first,” he said, indicating the cluster of people by the outhouse. He gave Nichols a quick explanation.
The doctor winced. “In
there
? Jesus Christ almighty. What kind of a world—”
Nichols broke off. “They should be all right, if they haven’t been bitten by the wrong kind of spiders. Lucky they didn’t suffocate, though. And you’re right, Mike—we need to get them to the sanitation center right away. I’ll see that they get first priority.”
“I already told Jeff and his friends to look after them,” Mike explained. “So you can have them escort the girls—the whole family—to the school.” Mike glanced back over his shoulder. Seeing the way Jeff was staring at the tall young blonde, Mike’s spirits lifted. The sight of a young man so obviously dazzled by a young woman was quite refreshing. Innocence and sanity blooming in a field of lust and murder.
Nichols was observing the same tableau. He grinned. “From the looks of things, I’d have to pry him loose with a crowbar.”
He began walking toward them. “I’ll take care of it, Mike.” James pointed into the distance, back toward the original American lines. His grin widened. “Rebecca’s here, by the way. Speaking of prying people loose with a crowbar.”
“Rebecca!” Mike spun around, staring in that direction. “What in the hell is she doing
here
?”
For a moment, he began to charge off. Then, guiltily remembering his responsibilities, he forced himself to turn back.
For the next ten minutes, while he organized the disposition of the surrendered Protestant soldiers, Mike’s mind was only half on his task. Half, at best. He was fretting over Rebecca.
What is that crazy woman doing on a battlefield?!
Fortunately for him, Harry Lefferts and Tom Simpson cheerfully took on themselves the nitty-gritty work. Between Harry’s savage grin (
go ahead, Kraut—make my day
) and Tom’s sheer size and extravagant musculature (
yeah, go ahead—I need an arm bone to pick my teeth
), Hoffman’s mercenaries were quickly rounded up and organized into a column. Hands carefully placed atop their heads, eyes front, meek as could be.
Then Frank showed up, along with Lennox—Frank in his pickup and Lennox on his horse.
Lennox spoke first. “We’ve got t’Catholics neatly tied oop,” he announced complacently. “Mackay’s seeing to t’last o’ t’strays. ’E’ll be coomin’ in a minute.” Mustachioes bristled. “T’en we’ll march this lot into Badenburg an’ put’m under guard. Don’ expect no trooble.”
Frank had his arm perched on the open window of the truck. He was studying Mike with half-quizzical/half-amused eyes.
“Oh, why don’t you cut the act?” he chortled. He hooked his thumb toward Grantville. “Just go see the lady, Mike. Lennox and I can handle the rest of this business.”
Mike glowered. “What’s she doing here?” he demanded. “She could have gotten hurt! She’s got no business—”
“Are you
that
stupid?” snapped Frank. “She’s worried sick about you, what do you think?
You’re
the one went marching into battle, not her.” Frank snorted. “She isn’t alone, either. Half the women in town showed up, looking for their fathers and sons and husbands and boyfriends. Did you think they were going to stay home, waiting for a telegram—with a battle being fought practically on their doorstep?”
“Oh.” Mike stared into the distance, looking for the log parapet. The parapet itself was not visible, but the small knoll where Ferrara had positioned his rockets made the location obvious. To his surprise, he saw that the knoll was now covered with people. American women and children, he realized, anxiously trying to spot their menfolk in the field below.
He winced, remembering the carnage on that field. None of the bodies were American, but the sight was nothing he wanted to inflict on children. He’d had a hard enough time with it himself.
“I guess I’d better get over there,” he muttered. “Reassure everybody.”
Frank grinned. “Yeah, guess so.” He got out of the vehicle. “Here—take my truck. I can’t bear to think of you tripping and falling all the way back. Fast as you’ll be running and paying no attention to where you’re going.”
Mike was already at the wheel. “
Do
try not to wreck the thing, willya? It’s only two years old—” Off with a roar, fishtailing in the dirt. Frank sighed. “So much for the paint job. Not to mention the shock absorbers.”
