Tide King Read Online Free Page B

bubbling up, blood oozing on the smooth, unshaven skin.
    He was a boy. Stanley wondered if he was lost. His eyelids flickered, and Stanley wondered whether he should touch them, hold his hand. He kicked away the boy’s rifle. The boy’s fingers opened like petals. Stanley touched the boy’s forehead with his left hand, his right cocked on his pistol, near his hip.
    â€œMutter,” the boy said, a whisper wet with blood. When he reached up toward Stanley, Stanley shot him. The arm fell back toward the body. Stanley shivered. He shivered in his heart and his throat and the tears from his eyes warmed his face until it grew cold and sticky and he shivered again. He thought to eat his mother’s herb, to protect himself. It could not hurt. When one no longer believed in anything, he considered, all things could possess equal power.
    â€œYou all right?” Johnson appeared from the brush, as Stanley groped in his helmet, feeling for the crumbled flowers. He put a hand on Stanley’s shoulder. His grip was gentle, as if handling crystal, unlike his usual vice of fingers that dug right into Stanley’s collarbone.
    â€œYeah.” Stanley put his helmet back on quickly without retrieving it and rolled the boy over, face down, in the snow.

    They walked in a diamond formation: Stanley walked in the back, Johnson in the front, one man, red-haired, was to their left, another, blond-haired, to their right. Stanley didn’t know their names. It seemed a waste to learn them. Wood and shrapnel fell from the sky, mixed with snow, hitting the ground in hisses. The trees burned standing still. Stanley listened to the fire eating the wood, the snap of twigs and branches as they broke free of the parent trunks and fell down to the forest. Smoke poured from the nooks and crannies of the burning bark, and men were forced to crawl. On the ground, the red-haired man, in front, would tap the top of his helmet and point in the direction of movement, and they all would crouch and fill that direction with fire, grenades. But then the blond man on the right threw a grenade that hit a tree and bounced back toward them, and they dove leftward and rolled down a small hill.
    â€œI would die for a stick of gum.” Johnson entangled himself from Stanley. The smoke cleared, briefly, and the hard marble of sun blinked through the treetops.
    â€œThis might be your lucky day.” Stanley nodded. Before them, a formation of rock appeared in the trees with a low opening, two by eight feet. A bunker. The red-haired man stood off to the side of it. He tossed in a grenade as they turned, covered their ears. Then they waited for the smoke to clear before joining him at the hole.
    Stanley was the shortest, so he got on his knees and crawled in. He imagined a speckling of dead pale boys, boys with smooth faces and darting eyes, but it was empty with black. He tapped the inner mouth of the cave to make sure it was still secure. Then he pointed his thumb up, and the others joined him.
    â€œNow this is living,” red hair said in the darkness. He lit a cigarette and stretched. “We stay here until the war ends, okay?”
    â€œAt least for a nap,” Stanley agreed, pulling his blanket out of his backpack. “We’ll take turns on watch.”
    They slept on ground that wasn’t wet and in corners that weren’t windy. They slept with their helmets off, their boots unlaced, oblivious to the shelling outside. When they woke, their stomachs were relaxed, growling. They wondered how to get back behind the line for rations, wondered where they were.
    â€œI say we stay in the hole,” the red-haired man said.
    â€œYeah, and when one of our own boys throws another grenade in here, then what?” the blond said, tightening his laces. They were broken and did not go all the way up the boot.
    â€œThat’s why we take turns on watch.” The red-haired man shook his head.
    â€œAnd when our whole