Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read Online Free PDF Page B

Charlie watched from the trees while the lead half-track clanked to a stop in front of the house where they had been hidden. The turret swivelled, the gun moving back and forward across the whitewashed stones, the red tiled roof, the garden on the side where the woman and her father had been putting in a spring planting, even tying up an aluminum pie tin on a pole to scare away the birds.
    The three of them, in blue-black body armour, went through the front door, and five hundred yards away in the cover of the pines, you could hear the sound of wood being smashed, glass splintering and a scream, muffled through the walls, but so distinct, so piercing, so lonely. You had your face in the dirt and your hands over your ears.
    When Charlie looked up, a fourth one in body armour was out of the half-track carrying the jerry-can to the door.
    The village boys in the dug-out could have started shooting, but it would have drawn fire, and they were no match for the half-tracks. So they just sat there, as stunned as Charlie and Jacek. She was out in the road by then, running towards the commander, shouting.
    Charlie was pacing the hotel room now, and the towel had slipped off his waist. He was naked but for the bandages on his hand, not caring about being ridiculous, he was back there, really back there, with the story inside him needing to be pulled out, like some infected splinter. She watched from the bed.
    One member of the squad with a jerry-can was sloshing down the door-frames and windows, the garden fence, the plants, the grassy path to the door. She was screaming at the commander, fists raised, when the gasoline arced over her and the lighter touched her hem. She went up with her house, an orange-black spinnaker of flame catching the wind. Jacek began to turn over, whispering as he stared down the viewfinder, mouthing Polish prayers.
    She was running along the road towards them, while the commander watched her go, and stayed the mercy of an executioner’s bullet. Then he climbed into the half-track, reversing hard and turning around to finish the operation.
    That was when the torpor of fear ended and you broke cover and stepped into the road. As she ran, her arms were like wings of flame, and she blundered into you in an embrace of fire – and you were both down, in the dusty road, rolling over and over.
    They had ten minutes maybe, before the patrol came back. The village boys might cover them, might not. You remembered pulling her off and sitting up, looking at your hands and then at her, legs and lower body intact, but shoulders and upper arms charred and that terrible place across the top of her back. Jacek had his water bottle out and poured it across her shoulders and she cried out.
    Only Jacek had instincts you could trust. Benny was shaking, and talking to himself, and Jacek told him to get her up if she could walk, which she could, and get her into the trees. She did not look back at the burning house. Her father was in there, but it was too late.
    He remembered Jacek taking Benny by the shoulders and shaking him and saying: we are taking her. When Benny said they couldn’t, Jacek told him to shut up. And then they poured water down her throat and down her back, and she said nothing, and seemed to feel nothing, and fell, and Benny and Jacek picked her up and carried her most of the way, and she astonished them by walking ahead of them, like a possessed spirit, the final mile to the edge of the plateau where, reaching safety, she buckled again. Behind came Charlie stumbling and falling, reaching out to the trees and crying out when his singed hands rasped against the bark. And all along the road, they had one thought: it will be all right if we can get her to the other side. And then it was: it will be all right if we can get her into the chopper. And then it was: it will be all right if we …
    He was now standing in the middle of the hotel room, looking at his hands. Weak light came through the windows