Skeletons at the Feast Read Online Free PDF

be difficult for the horses to pull the wagons through some drifts of thigh-deep snow, but assuming they could make the knoll, it was no more than fifty or sixty meters from there to the edge of the river.
    beneath the oats, Callum listened carefully. His right arm and leg had, once more, gone to sleep. Unfortunately, it was hard to breathe if he tried to lie on his back or his stomach. In a moment, he guessed, he would roll over and spend a few seconds gasping for air so he could allow a semblance of circulation to return to those limbs. He was a big man--powerfully built, with shoulders that flattened out like a mesa and a back that was as straight and solid as granite quarry walls--and in his opinion he was, pure and simple, too large for these quarters.
    He and Anna were hoping that once they were west of the Vistula, periodically he would be allowed to walk beside the wagons. Her father had said he thought this was extremely unlikely. Though he was dressed in her older brother's winter clothes instead of his ragged British paratrooper's uniform--Werner wasn't nearly as muscular as Callum, but he was almost as tall, and Mutti had been able to doctor some pants and a jacket--if he was seen by anyone in authority he might be hanged on the spot as a German deserter.
    Unless, of course, he opened his mouth first.
    Then he would simply be shot on the spot as an escaped POW.
    Still, he couldn't spend forever curled like a hermit crab beneath their food and the horses' feed in this wagon. And while Anna's father had surmised that he would have to remain in the cart until they reached either Mutti's cousin in Stettin or, eventually, the British and American lines somewhere far to the west, her mother was firmly convinced that he would be up and about within days. Why? Any day now, she said, certainly inside of two or three weeks, they would all be allies together: the Brits and the Yanks and the Germans. The civilized nations of the world would band together to repel the Russians. Prevent them from barbarizing all of Europe. It was, she had said, inevitable.
    Callum wasn't quite so sure. In point of fact, he thought Mutti was absolutely loopy. A sweet lady with fortitude and courage. But also, alas, bloody bonkers.
    Nevertheless, ever since he had jumped from an airplane seven months ago now--almost eight, if he was going to be precise--his entire life had been bonkers. The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad. And, of course, jumping from an airplane--and jumping in the dark while people below you were firing machine guns into the night sky--was hardly an indication that the world was especially sane to begin with.
    The drop, at least his portion, had been a disaster almost from the moment he had first hurled himself from the plane. First there had been all that gunfire from the hedgerows and the woods. He hadn't been hit, but he had heard the agonized screams of the men drifting--sometimes minus an arm or a leg or towing their entrails like kite tails--to the earth all around him. And then, instead of landing in a meadow just east of the Orne, he had landed in quicksand. At least it had struck him as quicksand in the dark. In reality it was a mere swamp, but clutching a rifle and weighed down by his harness, the risers, and the pack with his reserve chute, it might just as well have been quicksand. And, again, the cries, though this time they were punctuated by the choking hacks of men who were drowning as they pleaded for help. Yes, indeed, they were drowning in a few feet of water and a little Norman muck. He was on his side, disoriented in the bog, but he found if he arched his back and his neck he could keep his nose above the water and slime. Finally he was able to right himself and half-crawl, half-dog-paddle his way out of the marsh.
    When he was free, when he was actually emerging onto turf that was solid, the world around him was abruptly lit as if it were noon: A troop plane had exploded, hit by a shell as it