Hanging On

by Dean Koontz

  "Well?" she asked.

  Eyes closed, lolling against a tree, Beame said, "What?"

  "Won't you tell me who the woman was?"

  Beame opened his eyes. "What woman?"

  She met his eyes forthrightly. "This afternoon, just after you invited me to dinner, a woman came up from that bunker and called to you. We said our goodbyes, and you went to talk with her."

  "Oh, that was Lily Kain." He explained how Lily happened to be in the unit.

  "She's lovely," Nathalie said.

  "She is?"

  "Don't tell me you have not noticed. I suppose she has many suitors."

  "Lily?" Beame asked. "Oh, no. She and Major Kelly have a thing going."

  "I see," she said, brightening somewhat. She drained her cup and handed it to him. "May I have more wine?"

  When he filled her cup and returned it, their fingers touched. The contact was more electric than he would have expected. Sitting beside her again, watching the fire, he realized he had forgotten how beautiful she was. Now he was once more slightly breathless.

  She did not sit back against the tree, but knelt, using her calves for a chair. She held the wine in both hands and was very still. In time, she said, "The frogs are singing."

  "I always thought they just croaked," Beame said. But when he listened, the frogs did seem to be singing. "You're right." In the faint-orange ember glow, he suddenly saw her nipples against the tight bodice of her dress... He looked quickly away, ashamed of himself for staring even as long as he had.

  She sipped her wine. He sensed that she was staring at him, but he could not look up. He was a mess of confused emotions inside; his previous serenity had strangely vanished. "Say something else in French, will you?" he asked.

  She looked around at the trees, at the half-seen needled branches overhead. She stared at the fire and listened solemnly to the singing frogs. "Je pense que cela doit ętre la plus belle place du monde."

  "That's lovely. What does it mean?"

  She smiled. "I believe that this must be the most beautiful place in the world." She saw Beame's perplexity. "Don't you think it is?"

  "It's nice," he said, unconvinced.

  "But you can't think of it without thinking of the war," she said.

  "Yeah. I guess, otherwise, I might agree." His eyes traveled to her breasts, then rose guiltily again. He realized, suddenly, that she had seen him look at her so covetously. Their eyes met, they both blushed, and they looked away from each other.

  "Tell me about America," Nathalie said, a while later.

  "Hasn't your father told you about it?" Beame asked, his voice thick and barely recognizable.

  Before Nathalie could reply, her father replied for her. "I most certainly have told her about America," he said, stalking like a brontosaurus out of the trees and into the small clearing. He threw an exaggerated shadow in the campfire light. "And I have also told her to avoid all soldiers no matter if they are German, American, or French."

  Nathalie came quickly to her feet. "Father, you must not think-"

  "I will think what I wish," Maurice said, scowling at them.

  He no longer looked like a fat, greasy old man. The strength born of years of hard labor was evident in the powerful shoulders and in the hard lines of his face. He looked capable of tearing Beame into tiny, bloody pieces.

  "We were only talking," the lieutenant said, also rising.

  "Why did you not ask my permission?"

  "To talk?" Beame asked. He glanced at Nathalie. She was staring at the ground, biting her lip. "Look, Mr. Jobert, it was just a nice little dinner-"

  Maurice advanced another step, cutting the lieutenant short with one wave of his right hand. The campfire illuminated the lower half of his face but left his eyes and forehead mostly in shadows, giving him a demonic appearance. "Just a nice little dinner? What of the wine?"

  Beame looked guiltily at the bottle which rested against a tree trunk. "The wine-"

  "I provided the wine, father," Nathalie said.

  "That makes it much worse," Maurice said. "Alone at night, drinking with a soldier-at your own instigation!"

  "He's not like other soldiers," she said, a bit of fire in her now. "He is a very nice-"

  "All soldiers are alike," Maurice insisted. "American, British, French, German, whatever. They have one thing in mind. One thing only. Now, girl, you come with me. We're returning to the village."

  Beame was helpless. He watched as Maurice led the girl out of the woods, out of sight, out of the lieutenant's life. "I didn't even touch her," he told the darkness where Maurice had been.

  The darkness did not respond.

  "I wish I had touched her," Beame said.

  The roof had been taken off the main bunker at the south end of the clearing, and preparations made for erecting one of the fake buildings over this ready-made basement. As a result, the men who had been sleeping there were dispossessed. And for the first time since the unit had been dropped at the bridge, the tents had been broken out and set up. They were lined in a haphazard way, the rows wandering, intersecting randomly-more the work of a troop of inept first-year boy scouts than that of a trained Army group.

  Major Kelly walked briskly along one of the tent aisles, followed by twenty men. He had personally chosen each of his escorts, and he had made certain that they all had four things in common: each was big and muscular; each was mean; each was rowdy; and each one had signed his credit contract.

  They stopped before a tent which looked like all the others that stretched away in the darkness, and Kelly used a flashlight to consult the chart he had prepared before sundown. "This is Armento's tent," he told the men with him. Armento had been one of the nineteen bastards who had not signed their credit contracts. Smiling grimly, Kelly leaned down, pulled back the flap, and shouted, "Up and out of there, Private Armento!"

  Armento had worked hard all day on the preparations for the construction of the village, and he was sleeping sound as a stone when Kelly called him. Shocked by this intrusion into his deserved rest, he nearly knocked the tent down when he scrambled out of it. "What? What? What?" he asked Kelly and the men behind Kelly. He rubbed his eyes. "What?"

  "Sorry," Kelly said. "Emergency. Got to requisition your tent."

  And he was sorry to have to use pressure tactics on Armento and the other holdouts who had not signed their confessions. He felt like a monster, an insensitive creep, another General Blade. But he had no choice. The Panzers were coming. Death was coming. There was nothing else to do.

  Five of the men behind the major, all bigger than Armento, knocked down the tent and rolled it up. Before Armento could ask any questions, Kelly led his husky escorts down the aisle to the next victim.

  By now, everyone was out of his tent. Most of the men were grinning, because they knew what was up. Only nineteen of them were bewildered...

  Kelly was directing the tearing down of the eighth tent, embarrassedly parrying all questions, when Lieutenant Slade arrived. Slade was furious. "You are harassing the men who stood with me, the men who wouldn't sign those insane credit contacts." Slade shook a finger in Kelly's face.

  "Not at all," Kelly said, feeling like a heel. "The hospital staff says we're short of bandage materials. If we suffer another Stuka attack, the shortage could be a matter of life and death. So we're confiscating a few of the tents to cut them into strip bandages." He felt ill, and he hated himself.

  "Canvas bandages? Ridiculous! If you're not harassing these men who stood with me," Slade said, "why are you demolishing only their tents?"

  "Are we?" Kelly feigned surprise. He consulted his chart. "Why, we just picked the names out of a hat." Into which, of course, they had only put the names of the men who had not signed their contracts.

  Lieutenant Slade followed them, ranting impotently as the tents came down. As they were folding up the eighteenth square of canvas, he planted himself in front of Kelly. "You aren't going to rip down my tent. You won't bully me into signing away my good name
!"

  "I'm not bullying anyone," Kelly said, wishing it were true. "Besides, your name wasn't drawn from the hat. We aren't confiscating your tent. You will be snug and warm and dry tonight." Kelly looked at the sky, pointed at the thick gray thunderhead clouds rushing westward. "Sure does look like rain before morning." He was conscious of all the other men looking skyward with him. "These other fellows whose names were drawn at random from a hat will have to put up with a soaking, I'm afraid. But we couldn't make it any fairer..." Any unfairer. Kelly sighed. "We have to remember there's a war going on, and that some of us must make sacrifices. At least we don't have to put everyone out in the rain, eh? You needn't worry, Lieutenant."

  Slade saw the full implications of what the major had said. He grimaced. "Very cunning, sir. But you are not going to divide and conquer us. We aren't going to put our lives and futures in the hands of a man like Maurice, no matter what you do to us."

  "I admire your strong character," Kelly said.

  Ten minutes later, the eighteen tents had been stacked in a corner of the hospital bunker. They made quite a mound.

  Lily Kain put her arm around Kelly's waist and detained him at the bunker door as he was leaving. "You really think it will work?"

  "Work?" Kelly asked. "Never. Oh, this and a few other things I have planned might get them to sign their credit contracts. But that won't mean very much in the end. We're all going to die. We just have to go through this charade now to keep the fairy tale moving. You know?"

  "Don't start with that fairy tale shit," Lily said.

  "Can't help it. Puts things in perspective. Keeps me alive."

  A can opener of lightning took the lid off the night, and thunder rumbled like an escaping vacuum. Rain bounced on the steps, spattered on their faces, ran into the hospital bunker behind them.

  Kelly smiled, happy that the men were now almost certain to sign their contracts. Then he frowned, depressed by the realization that he had been forced into becoming a somewhat ruthless manipulator of people.

  Well... anything to hang on.

  * * *

  5 / JULY 19

  Shortly after dawn, two men came to see Major Kelly in his quarters. They were both wet, shivering, pale, water-wrinkled, and defeated even though the rain had stopped falling half an hour ago. Kelly was slipping into clean, dry fatigues when they rapped on his blanket wall. "Help you fellows?" he asked, peering around a woolen corner. He smiled warmly.

  Two minutes later, only seventeen men had refused to sign the credit contracts.

  It's working! Kelly thought, when they had gone. But then he remembered that the Panzers would arrive in little more than four and a half days. Right now, he should be engaged in the serious planning which was essential to the early stages of the construction of the fake village. The bridge was up, the preliminary work done, and now he ought to be plunging into the main project. Instead, be was wasting time and energy trying to trick the holdouts into signing their damned confessions. If he was achieving his lesser goal, he was also losing the chance to attain the greater one. He might eventually get every man to sign his contract-but by then he would have wasted so much time that they could never build the village before the Germans arrived...

  Nevertheless, he was the first in line for breakfast at the mess hall, because he wanted to have a front row seat for the morning's carefully planned drama. "Looks delicious," Kelly told Sergeant Tuttle when the cook ladled hot cereal into his mess tin.

  Tuttle leaned across the steaming kettle. "I don't like doing this," he whispered.

  "We need Maurice's help," Kelly whispered back at him. "Without it, we all die. These bastards have to be made to sign."

  "I know," Tuttle said, looking back at the line of impatient men.

  "Two more came across. Kasabian and Pike. You can treat them like you normally would," Kelly said.

  "But the others-"

  "You know what to do with the others."

  Kelly got the rest of his breakfast and sat down at one of the crude tables. He toyed with his cereal, but his attention was riveted on the men in the breakfast line who had not cooperated in the matter of the credit contracts.

  Private Armento was the tenth man in line, first of the troublemakers to reach Tuttle. The cook looked over Armento's shoulder, silently pleading with Kelly. The major turned his thumbs down. Reluctantly, Tuttle "misjudged" the position of Armento's plate and poured a ladle of hot cereal all over his hands.

  Quite a lot of commotion followed.

  Then, Private Aaron Lange, another holdout who was immediately behind Armento, got the hot-cereal treatment when he held out his tin. When he and Armento finished dancing around the room and blowing on their reddened fingers, they came over to Major Kelly and signed their credit contracts.

  "I'm glad you men have finally seen where your best interests lie," Kelly told them, putting their contracts with the others that had been signed.

  All morning, one by one, the holdouts began to see the same light which Armento and Lange had seen. Private Garnett put his signature on his contract after he tripped and fell with his second full mess tin. He had also tripped and fallen with the first. Private John Flounders signed up when, after waiting in the serving line for twenty minutes, he discovered that, curiously, Sergeant Tuttle ran out of hot cereal just before Flounders was to be given his. When the morning's work assignments were read and Private Paul Akers learned he had been assigned to that detail which would shovel out the old latrine ditch and carry the stinking contents into the woods, Akers came around to Kelly's way of thinking. Private Vinney, who was also assigned to the latrine job, lasted for less than five minutes before throwing away his shovel and signing up. And three other men stayed with it until they were accidentally bumped into that vile trench by two workmen who were trying to jostle past them with a heavy length of pine planking...

  At 9:15 that same morning, Kelly went over to the hospital bunker and waved the completed forms at Lily Kain. "When they ask for their tents back, you can tell them we found a crate of bandage materials that we'd overlooked. Tell them we won't have to cut up their tents after all."

  "They signed?" she asked.

  "All but Slade."

  "But will Maurice be willing to overlook Slade?"

  "Sure," Kelly said. "If I sign a second confession and guarantee to pay Slade's two hundred bucks, why should Maurice be upset?"

  "You'd do that?" she asked.

  "Do I have any choice?"

  "I guess not." She brightened, smiled, puffed out her wonderful chest. "Well! Now that this is settled, everything should run pretty smoothly."

  "No," Kelly said. "This is only a reprieve. We have Maurice's help now, but that won't matter. Something worse will come up. We'll be delayed a few more minutes or hours. We can never get this finished in time. We're all doomed."

  In the next two hours, the race against time was begun in earnest. All over camp, projects were launched. Thanks to Angelli's ability to cross all language barriers, the Americans and the French worked fairly well together. Ditch-like foundations for the walls of the fake buildings were marked and cut. A few outhouses, were framed and erected. In the midst of all this, Danny Dew roared around the clearing on his virility symbol, scraping out the streets which Hagendorf had surveyed yesterday.

  The demolition of the HQ building was quick and dangerous. Headquarters had to come down, because it was obviously a temporary structure and military in origin. It would not have fooled the Germans for a minute. Therefore, after breakfast, the shortwave radio and the furniture were moved out of HQ, and a crew of workmen dismantled the corrugated metal roof. An hour later, the roof was gone, and the walls began to fall, slamming the earth like a series of angrily closed doors, casting up obfuscating clouds of dust. Armed with hammers and pry-bars, goaded on by Major Kelly-"Faster, faster, faster, for Christ's sake!"-Maurice's laborers swarmed over the thin partitions. They separated metal from wood, tore one plank from the next, stacked the materials where they
could later be used in the construction of the village.

  The Frenchmen, Kelly thought, were like Eskimos stripping the carcass of a huge old walrus, leaving behind them nothing of value.

  It was a pleasant thought, and he was still thinking it when Tooley came running over from the machinery shed waving his arms and shouting. "Major Kelly! Major Kelly, why did you put Hagendorf in the box, sir?"

  "Hagendorf?" Kelly knew it was a bad idea to ask for an explanation. He sensed another crisis that would waste precious minutes. But he also knew that if he ran away, Tooley would only run after him. "Hagendorf? In the box?"

  "Yes, sir. In the box, sir."

  "What box?"

  "In the machinery shed, sir. Don't you remember which box you put him in?"

  "I didn't put him in any box," Kelly said, feeling not unlike a character in a Lewis Carroll fantasy.

  Tooley wiped his broad face with one hand, pressed the hand on his shirt, and left a huge wet palm print. "We were clearing out the machinery shed so it can be knocked down. The last thing we came to was this big crate Sergeant Coombs has been meaning to convert into a tool chest for several weeks. The crate was supposed to be empty; but Hagendorf was inside. With maybe twenty bottles of wine. He's naked and drunk, and he insists you put him in the box." While he talked, Tooley unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. His thick weight-lifter's torso was shiny with sweat and alive with muscles.

  "I didn't put Hagendorf in the box," Kelly said.

  "We didn't force him out, because we didn't know why you put him there."

  "I didn't put him there."

  "We didn't want to interfere in whatever you were doing. We thought maybe you put Hagendorf in there to guard the box."

  "Hagendorf isn't guarding the box," Kelly said, wiping sweat from his own face.

  "That's what I said. I said you must have put him in the box for some other reason." Tooley spat on the dry earth.

  "I didn't put Hagendorf anywhere," Kelly said.