The Night Children Read Online Free PDF

way back into his eyes.
    “Don’t let them get to you, kiddo, okay?”
    He let him go, left his arms hanging there in case Eddie slumped to the ground again. But the boy stayed standing. Donnie checked Mike, then Henry, both pale but alert. Then he walked to Joan.
    “You see anything else?” he asked. She shook her head, then nodded it, tears as bright as diamonds etching down her cheeks.
    “The ground. In the snow, there was blood. A pattern.”
    “A pattern?” he said, and he realized he was snapping at her, leaning in too close. “What kind of pattern. A swastika? What?”
    “I don’t remember,” she said. “Something with circles.”
    Donnie swore, marching back into the clearing, refusing to look up at the crinkled, old-men faces of his friends. Fresh snow had fallen here as it had everywhere else, and he kicked it away until he found the crimson ice below, sweeping his way from side to side, back to front, until he stood in the center of a spiderweb of frozen blood that ran from corpse to corpse to corpse in perfect symmetry.
    Three circles, one beneath each body, arranged in a triangle and connected by lines.
    And in the middle, right beneath his feet, four words that even Donnie’s halting German could translate: Sie sind alle gerettet.
    They are all saved.

0313
    “Mike, secure a perimeter, make sure nobody else is here. Henry, get on the radio and see if you can find the nearest squad.” Donnie paced back and forth just outside the clearing, helmet off, running a hand through his hair. “Eddie.” The boy stood like a puppet in the rack, strings slack. “Eddie! I need you to check for prints, for broken trees, anything that might tell us what happened to the rest of the squad.”
    “We’re not going after them,” he replied, a statement rather than a question. His face looked so drawn that it too seemed as though it had been worked loose.
    “No, we’re out of here just as soon as we have coordinates. Whatever happened to the rest of Cuddy’s men … We can’t help them, not on our own, not now.”
    He felt sick for saying it, and he knew the others could see the cowardice in his eyes. But he could see it in them, too, even in Mike, who looked away without a single word of protest. Nobody would argue, not this time. If the rest of Cuddy’s squad was still alive, and that was doubtful, then they’d be far from here by now, probably heading for a POW camp or a firing line or something. Do they still have their faces? he wondered, and saw them marching through the forest, a line of men with moons for heads. He almost giggled, he almost broke.
    “But if we have an idea of which direction they went in,” he said. “Then we’ve got something to report.”
    Eddie nodded, pushing his helmet up.
    “Go with Mike,” Donnie told him. “Stay close, just keep your eyes open, find out where they went.”
    “Sir,” Eddie said. He walked to Mike, so small and so close that he could have been a kid hanging on to his father’s coattail.
    “Keep your eyes open,” Donnie repeated. “Just call if you see anything.”
    They crunched off into the snow, keeping well wide of the clearing and its conference of the dead as they vanished behind the pines. Henry had the radio out and was speaking softly into the handset. Donnie wiped a hand over his face, the skin there so cold it was burning.
    “I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Joan said quietly from his side. “Mutilations, yes, but never skinned and posed like … like china dolls. I don’t understand it.”
    “They’re trying to scare us,” Donnie said.
    “Out here? Miles away from the front? Who is going to see it, Donnie, aside from the birds?”
    “They must have known we’d come looking,” he floundered.
    “And all this just for you, a handful of boys? It must have taken hours. It’s … It’s like something a child would do, making toys and dressing them. And the words, gerettet. Saved? How on earth are they saved?”
    Donnie’s head was ringing, that same pressure, as if something up there