Heroes Read Online Free

Heroes
Book: Heroes Read Online Free
Author: Robert Cormier
Pages:
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delaying the moment of going to bed, despite the cold. The clock on the wall, in the shape of a banjo, tells me it is twenty-five minutes after eleven, which means that a long night stretches ahead. I yearn for sleep, my eyes raw and burning, but I know that the dreams will begin when I close my eyes and drift off.
    In the bathroom, I apply more Vaseline to my cheeks.
    Finally, I slip into bed. Mrs. Belander has provided me with extra blankets and I pull them up to my chin. I double the pillow under my head to prevent the phlegm from running down my throat, causing me to choke and cough.
    • • •
    I can never trace the moment when I finally fall asleep, that blurred line between wakefulness and oblivion. While waiting, I silently recite the names of the guys in my platoon—Richards and Eisenbergand Chambers and, yes, Smith—and their first names or nicknames—Eddie and Erwin and Blinky and Jack. Then, more last names, Johnson and Orlandi and Reilly and O’Brien and
their
first names, Henry and Sonny and Spooks and Billy—and then start all over again, arranging them this time in alphabetical order, still waiting for sleep to come.
    I don’t want to think about them, those GIs in my platoon. I don’t want to recite their names. I want to forget what happened there in France but every night the recitation begins, like a litany, the names of the GIs like beads on a rosary. I close my eyes and see them advancing in scattered groups through the abandoned village, ruined homes and debris-cluttered streets, our rifles ready, late-afternoon shadows obscuring the windows and doorways and the alley entrances. We are all tense and nervous and scared because the last village seemed peaceful and vacant until sudden gunfire from snipers erupted from those windows and doorways and cut down the advance patrol just ahead of our platoon. Now I can hear Henry Johnson’s ragged breathing and Blinky Chambers whistling between his teeth, the village too still, too quiet. “Jesus,” Sonny Orlandi mutters. Jesus: meaning
I’m scared
, and so is everybody else, clenched fists holding firearms, quiet curses floating on the air, grunts and hisses and farts, not like the war movies at thePlymouth, nobody displaying heroics or bravado. We are probably taking the final steps of our lives in this village whose name we don’t even know and other villages are waiting ahead of us and Eddie Richards asks of nobody in particular: “What the hell are we doing here, anyway?” And he’s clutching his stomach because he has had diarrhea for three days, carrying the stink with him all that time so that everybody has been avoiding his presence. Now gunfire erupts and at the same time artillery shells—theirs or ours?—boom in the air and explode around us. We run for cover, scrambling and scurrying, hitting the dirt, trying to become part of the buildings themselves but not safe anywhere.
    I find myself in a narrow alley, groping through rising dust, and two German soldiers in white uniforms appear like grim ghosts, rifles coming up, but my automatic is too quick and the head of one of the soldiers explodes like a ripe tomato and the other cries
Mama
as my gunfire cuts him in half, both halves of him tumbling to the ground.
    I explode into wakefulness along with the booming artillery and I find myself gasping, instantly wide-eyed, not cold for once in Mrs. Belander’s tenement, the sweat warm on my flesh, but in a minute the sweat turns icy. In the alley that day I encountered the German soldiers, all right, but my bursts of gunfire killed the soldiers quickly, no explodinghead, no body cut in two, although one of them did cry
Mama
as he fell. When I looked down at them, in one of those eerie pauses that happens in an attack—a sudden silence that’s even more terrible than exploding shells—I saw how young they were, boys with apple cheeks, too young to shave. Like me.
    “Hey, Francis, come on,” yells Eddie Richards and I join him in a
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