Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Civilians. Jetsam of the war zone. The man might even be a deserter, from either side.

  The General felt suddenly faint. He made an uncertain gesture, mumbled, “Get . . . off me . . .”

  “Hold on there a minute,” said the lanky man unexcitedly. “Have to git a pole.” It was only as he turned away that the General noticed that one faded blue sleeve of the ragged shirt hung empty.

  They came back with a charred piece of timber, and worked it under the capsized jeep. When they began prying up, the General did faint. He never knew just how the one-armed man and the boy managed to lift the wreck and at the same time drag him out from under. But lie was close enough to consciousness to know, when he came to lying on the edge of the roadway, that it had been only a minute or two.

  The one-armed man was squatting on his heels beside him. He said conversationally, “Me and my nephew—he’s my brother’s boy—we heard you hollerin’. We was in the storm cellar—”

  “We’re gonna live there now,” said the boy breathlessly. “Since the house burnt down.”

  “Guess so,” admitted the man. “Ain’t no point to buildin’ again till things git quieter round here.”

  The General strove to sit up. “Take it easy,” warned the one-armed man. “Your leg’s broke.” He turned abruptly to the boy, who was staring fascinatedly at the stars on the General’s shoulder. “Run over to the house and hunt me up a couple of boards. ‘Bout yay long.” He held his hands apart. “Scoot!”

  He looked after the boy, said reflectively, “Ain’t nobody else to look after him, since his ma died. My brother don’t know that yet. He had to go fight.”

  Not a word about which side his brother was fighting on, or where his own sympathies, if any, lay. The ragged blue denim of the farmer betrayed nothing. This country here had been fought over before, and here—indeed, anywhere—you couldn’t be sure who was who, outside the uniform.

  The General was strangely reminded of another man whose loyalty had not been ascertainable—one whose flesh and blood was blended with the churned earth of the crossroads a few miles north. . . .

  Then, with a jarring sense of reversal, as if while looking into a mirror he had all at once found himself looking out of it, he was aware that the one-armed man was regarding him as just such another, an anonymous fragment of debris spilled out of the great confusion—was not asking him for whom or against whom he fought, or why.

  But that was absurdly wrong, for the General was a man of importance, a leader in the war that still boomed and shuddered among the hills by the river.

  It was a long way, the General realized, from West Point to the red earth farmlands—a longer way than from the General to his now-victorious opponent in command of the enemy forces; farther, probably, than from the politicians on one side to the politicians on the other.

  The General said hoarsely, urgently, “I have to get back to the army. Can you . . .”

  The other merely eyed him. “Your leg’s broke,” he said patiently.

  The General frowned. Now, in a manner of speaking, he recognized his rescuers. These were the people whom the psychological warfare boys, back at Headquarters in their clean freshly pressed uniforms, called politically apathetic. They didn’t see the issues; they thought of the war as a storm to be waited out as luck or providence might permit. When it had passed they would rebuild their houses.

  In a psych warfare course the General had taken there had been recommendations for combating such apathy. But none of them came back to him now; he didn’t try very hard to recall them. With a feeling that, with a sort of dulled horror, he recognized as relief, he saw that his situation was unchanged. It was still a matter of waiting for the enemy’s patrols.

  By then, most likely, the order would have gone out, and off there beyond the river, in Texas, certain big drab trucks would be driven to positions well back of the front, and on them men (not soldiers really, but technicians in uniform, strange new men with wiring diagrams for brains) would be making final adjustments of devices over which the intelligence and skill of a united America had labored long to make them the most lethal and infallible things of their kind in all the world. Finally someone would press a button. . . . But it wasn’t his responsibility any more, he thought with a lightened heart and a crawling sickness of shame.

  He closed his eyes, weak and dizzy, shutting out the sight of the one-armed farmer silently watching him.

  Don’t be afraid

  Of the rain and the snow—

  They’d sung that song in the year before the great confusion began, at a time when men sat safe in their warm houses, with their warm wives, and the wind howled no warning—or did it?

  Turn on the lights,

  Turn on the radio. . . .

  There were few lights in the cities these days and the radios broke their silence only to squawk grim bulletins from the shifting fronts. Somehow the formula hadn’t worked. Maybe the historians would figure it out. If they survived and if enough of the other people survived to pay their salaries while they figured. If we got another chance.

  We? thought the Genera! hazily. Just who are WE?

  Then he heard the noise of the helicopter coming back.

  He opened his eyes and sat up with an effort that sent fiery splinters of pain through his leg. The one-armed man said, “Here, now,” and the boy stared, just come back out of breath holding two uneven lengths of plank.

  “Quick!” said the General. The last chance was coming, whirring swiftly with the vanes of the copter. “The flare pistol. In the front seat of the jeep. Bring it to me!”

  “You better lay still,” said the man reasonably.

  The General’s eyes raked him, saw he wouldn’t be moved in time, swiveled to the boy and fastened fiercely on him. “You! Bring me that pistol. On the double! Rim!”

  The boy dropped the boards he carried, whirled, and ran—obeying the loud voice, the parade-ground voice, which has been thus obeyed ever since the Sumerians invented close-order drill.

  The General aimed the flare pistol skyward, fighting to keep his hand steady, and jerked the trigger. A great rose of unearthly light bloomed in the darkening clouds overhead; and seconds later he heard the propeller-sound change its beat and begin circling back.

  The one-armed man stood up. He gazed thoughtfully at the noisy sky, and bent, still without haste, to pick up the bits of plank. “You won’t be needin’ these,” he surmised, and tucked them under his arm as he turned away.

  “Wait . . .” muttered the General. “I . . .” But weakness flooded over him again, and he couldn’t think of what he wanted to say. Only the boy glanced back at him briefly. They trudged away across the fields, growing indistinct and merging with the dusk as the helicopter descended.

  The General gulped scalding black coffee, made a fly-brushing motion at the medic working on his leg, and snapped at the Brigadier: “Well, let’s have it! Report!”

  “Are you sure you’re able—” The Brigadier looked stiff and uncomfortable, facing his mud-daubed superior.

  “I’m able and I’m in command here. What have you done about Plan C?”

  The Brigadier said shakily, “The units are in place and ready to fire. I’ve been holding off as long as possible; but for getting the word you’d been found, I’d have had to consider it my duty—”

  “Cancel that consideration. Order the units withdrawn to where they won’t be overrun in case of a breakthrough. But there won’t be any breakthrough; we’re going to hold this line . . . with conventional weapons.”

  He didn’t need to add that there would be dead and more dead along that river line—or that there had been courts-martial before now for generals who had gambled with the safety of their armies.

  The Brigadier stared at him; then the color came slowly back into his face, and he said, “Yes, sir,” in the tone of “Thank you, God!” And the General realized that he’d never really known the man at all.

  But to himself the General thought: S
o, for the present . . . Don’t be afraid, everybody, turn on the lights, make a brave noise in the teeth of the storm. But how long can we hold—you, and I, and the enemy over there, however many are left of us anywhere—how long can all of us hold the line?