Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Aaron had come to the same conclusion himself. It sounded uglier the way the cabbie put it. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was lean back in the seat and let the other man get him to work.

  —

  Daisy Baxter found herself humming a silly love song as she cleaned the toilets after closing time at the Owl and Unicorn. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. After thinking for a moment, she couldn’t remember ever doing it before.

  She didn’t need long to figure out why she was humming it, either. Before, she’d been getting through the days one after another. What else were you supposed to do—what else could you possibly do—when, with the war as good as won, they told you your husband would never come home again?

  She’d pulled into a shell after they told her Tom was dead, pulled in and done her best to close off the opening between herself and the outside world, the world of feeling. If she didn’t feel anything much at all, she wouldn’t have to feel quite so empty.

  “I didn’t even know how empty I felt,” she said, as if someone standing behind her in the small, smelly space had claimed she did. But after a while, you didn’t just get used to something—or to nothing—you started taking it for granted without knowing you were.

  One kiss from Bruce McNulty had changed all that. It had suddenly given her a standard of comparison. Before, she’d had only the emptiness. Now, she could see that caring about somebody else, and having somebody else care about you, was better than not.

  She laughed at herself as she washed her hands with strong soap under the hottest water she could stand, and then did it again. Like Lady Macbeth, if for different reasons, she never felt she could get them clean. As she dried them, she laughed again. It all sounded like something out of a soppy, sentimental film.

  But why did soppy, sentimental films so often turn out to be hits? Surely because they showed something people wanted to find in their own lives, even if they didn’t very often.

  Daisy was walking up the stairs to the flat when the deep-throated rumble of bombers taking off from Sculthorpe made her stop and cock her head to listen. Even from two or three miles away, the noise could rattle her fillings. It surely woke some of the people in Fakenham lucky enough to have already gone to bed.

  “Luck, Bruce,” she whispered. She didn’t know he was flying one of those Superfortresses, but that was the way to bet. And if he was, what kind of devastation did the big plane carry in its bomb bay? B-29s flying out of Sculthorpe had been striking targets in Eastern Europe—for all she knew, in Russia itself—since the early days of the war. She’d listened to McNulty and other pilots talking with a few, or more than a few, pints in them.

  They talked more than they should have. Some of the stories they told chilled her blood. How could you do—that—to a city and sleep at night or look at yourself in a mirror afterwards? But then, most of these pilots had bombed Germany and Japan in the last war. They had bigger and more terrible bombs now, but how different was it in principle?

  “Different enough,” she said, there on the stairs. She’d seen what the Russian A-bomb did to the outskirts of Norwich. The army and police made sure nobody from outside got closer than the outskirts. That told her what she hadn’t seen was bound to be worse than what she had.

  One bomb. One city. That was all it took. One bomb had been plenty to rip the heart out of Paris. Norwich, smaller to begin with, was pretty much gone.

  She cleaned her teeth and got into bed. It was still too early for her to need to huddle under blankets and quilts with a hot-water bottle at her feet. Her long flannel nightgown hadn’t changed, though. She smiled to herself as she got comfortable. One of these times, with Bruce, she might lie down on this bed wearing nothing at all.

  She took that thought into sleep. Her dreams were warm, warm enough to wake her for a little while. But she soon slept again. Minding the pub would have worn out a mechanical man, let alone a flesh-and-blood woman.

  In the wee small hours, she woke once more, this time from a dream full of howling dogs. The howling didn’t fade, though, after her eyes opened in the dark bedroom. It rose and fell, rose and fell, wailing like a damned soul.

  “Oh, bloody hell! The air-raid siren!” Daisy said as she hopped out of bed and hurried for the stairs. The Russians had dropped that A-bomb on Norwich. And they’d struck Sculthorpe with ordinary high explosives—conventional bombs, people had taken to calling them, as if they were cozy and normal. Stalin’s flyers knew where the planes that tormented them came from, all right.

  Now they were hitting Sculthorpe again, or the air-raid wardens thought they were. Daisy tried not to break her neck on the pitch-black stairs. If the Russians missed, or had to dump their bombs in a hurry because fighters were on their tails, some might come down on Fakenham. You wanted to be down in the cellar in case that happened.

  As she went down there, jet engines screamed, seemingly right above the roof. Ordinary airplane motors were loud. Jets were ridiculous.

  That was the last thought Daisy had before the world ended.

  She was in the cellar, in a building with all the windows covered over by blackout curtains. The sudden glare was so savage, she wailed and clapped her hands over her eyes just the same. A few seconds later, the bricks and plaster shook and groaned, as if in an earthquake. She’d never felt an earthquake in her life, but this didn’t seem like anything else.

  The Owl and Unicorn did more than shake. Things fell down and fell apart. Tinkling mixed with the rumble said the windows and the pint mugs and the mirror behind the bar were smashing themselves to hell and gone along with everything else in the place.

  As soon as Daisy smelled the first whiff of smoke, she knew she had to get out of there right now. She’d bake if she stayed. She just prayed she wasn’t already too late.

  Up the stairs she scrambled. That was the word, all right, because chunks of the smashed pub had fallen down them. Her bare feet took a beating. She didn’t care. A roof beam blocked the way up to the ground floor. She shoved it aside with panic-given strength. It wasn’t quite a mother lifting the front end of a motorcar off a trapped child, but it came close.

  The stumbling dash across the floor tore up her feet even worse. She fell once or twice, too, when she tripped on overturned tables and chairs she couldn’t see—and on chunks of the ceiling and the first floor and the roof that had also come down. She was lucky (she supposed she was lucky) the whole thing hadn’t collapsed and trapped her down below.

  A glimmer of light showed her a way out. It wasn’t the door; it was a rent in the front wall that ran from a corner of the window frame down to the ground. Afterwards, she never knew how she squeezed through it, but she did.

  A brick fell down and smacked the sidewalk a few inches from her bleeding feet. She stumbled farther away from the shattered Owl and Unicorn. Would she ever be able to go back in there? Right this second, she didn’t give a damn.

  High into the sky towered a mushroom cloud—not just high but higher, highest. She’d seen the one above slaughtered Norwich, of course, but that had been well off to the east, a safe thirty miles away. Nothing about this one seemed safe. She guessed that the bomb had burst right over Sculthorpe. Had it gone off a little east of the air base, nothing would have been left of Fakenham.

  Not much was left of the small town as things were. By the hellish light from the cloud, she saw that at least half the buildings had fallen down. Other people were crawling out of the ruins, all of them bloody and battered—she realized she had to look bloody and battered, too. Some had useless, probably broken, arms and legs. And how much radiation had they taken?

  For the time being, none of that mattered. People were screaming for help. Not everyone had got out, and the fires grew. Daisy started digging through the rubble, doing what she could.

  CADE CURTIS WASN’T USED to wearing a captain’s bars on his shoulders. He knew damn well he hadn’t done anything brave or clever to earn them. He’d got th
em because he was an officer who’d had the dumb luck not to be under either of the A-bombs Stalin dropped on South Korea.

  They needed officers, needed them desperately. Even a captain had no real business commanding a regiment, but there you were. And here Cade was, giving it his best shot. He wondered if he was the first regimental CO still too young to vote. It might have happened, on one side or the other, during the War Between the States. He would have bet it hadn’t since.

  His men were holding, or anyway trying to hold, a ridge line about halfway between Chongju and vanished Pusan. The Red Chinese had poured through the gap the second Russian atom bomb tore in the American defenses. If this line didn’t hold, the town of Kaeryong behind it wouldn’t, either, and a bad situation would get worse. Shit would be out to lunch, if you wanted to get right down to it.

  “Where’s that air, dammit?” Cade asked a radioman hooked into the Navy network—most surviving U.S. planes in Korea flew off carriers these days.

  “Inbound this way, sir,” the sergeant with the earphones answered. “Suppose to be here in, like, five minutes.” An 81mm mortar round thudded down in front of their trench, showering them both with dirt. Cade wondered whether they had five minutes left.

  The Reds didn’t have a lot of tanks. Stalin was using the ones he did have in Europe, not passing them along to Mao and Kim Il-sung. That meant machine guns counted for as much here as they had at places like Verdun and the Somme. Nothing like a well-sited machine gun for making infantry wish it had never been born.

  Several Brownings were stuttering bullets at the Red Chinese dug in farther down the slope. They were less eager to throw in human-wave assaults than they had been during the days just after they swarmed over the Yalu. They still did it now and then, but not all the time any more.

  Then again, they used more mortars than they had then. They also had more mortars to use. Mortars were the poor man’s artillery, and Mao’s men were nothing if not poor. Sheet metal for the tube, loose tolerances…If you were a blacksmith, you could just about go into the mortar business in your back yard.

  One of the bastardly little bombs burst in a kink of the trench, fifty yards down from Cade. Somebody over there started screaming for a medic. That wasn’t good, but maybe wasn’t so bad as if he were screaming for his mother.

  Here came the Corsairs. Cade whooped when he saw the long-nosed fighter-bombers with the inverted gull wings. They were as obsolete as the rest of the prop jobs left over from World War II. Where there were no jets to claw them out of the sky, though, they could still do a fine job of turning human beings into raw—or sometimes burnt—meat.

  Some of them carried rockets under those kinked wings. They ripple-fired them at the Red Chinese. Others had napalm bombs instead. Flame leaped and splashed when those went in. Next to the atomic fire the Russians had rained on Korea, it was puny and cold, but you sure wouldn’t think so if you were luckless enough to have it come down on you.

  Cade whooped again, and pumped his fist in the air. He knew that was an un-Christian thing to do. The Red Chinese were men, just like him. But they were also men trying their goddamnedest to kill him. Maybe he should have regretted their untimely demise, but he didn’t.

  The Corsairs banked and wheeled in the air for another attack run. They all had eight .50-caliber machine guns in their wings, so they could put a lot of lead in the air when they strafed trenches. If the rockets and the napalm didn’t do for the Red Chinese, some good, old-fashioned slugs might turn the trick.

  Waggling their wings in farewell, the Corsairs roared back toward the Sea of Japan. Cade cautiously stuck his head up over the parapet to see how they’d done. The napalm still blazed. Smoke rose from the rocket hits. And quite a few Chinamen in dun-colored uniforms legged it northward. They’d had more than flesh and blood could take.

  Not all of them, though. A bullet cracked past Cade’s ear, close enough so he thought he felt the wind of its passage. He ducked down in a hurry. He was just glad that wasn’t a permanent reminder he hadn’t come here to play tourist.

  He was a captain in charge of a regiment. His company commanders were second lieutenants, except for a couple of sergeants. One of the lieutenants asked, “You want we should move forward and push out the rest of the Chinks, sir?”

  “Howie, I just want to sit tight and make sure they can’t push us out,” Cade answered. “We’ve got to hold on to Kaeryong, and they won’t be coming after us here right away, not after that pounding.”

  “Okay, sir.” Howard Sturgis’ tone said it really wasn’t. He was in his thirties. He’d been a sergeant when the fighting here started, and won a battlefield commission for gallantry. He attacked first and worried about it later.

  He did when you let him, anyhow. Cade wasn’t about to. “Hey, look, eventually the States’ll do a proper job of reinforcing us,” he said. “Till then, we’ve just got to hang on so they’ll have something to reinforce.”

  “Sir, they’re way the hell over there. The ports on the West Coast are fucked up. The Panama Canal’s fucked up. Now Pusan’s fucked up, too, and that was the best harbor we had over here.” Sturgis pointed north with heavy patience. “But all the Chinks in the world, they’re right across the goddamn Yalu.”

  “I know about that, thanks,” Cade said dryly. “I was up at the Chosin Reservoir.”

  For the first time, he got Sturgis’ undivided attention. The older man stared at him. “But they killed just about all o’ those guys,” he said.

  “I know about that, too.” Curtis pointed at his own chest. “Just about all, but not quite. So if they give us too much trouble down here, who knows what happens? Maybe Peiping goes up in smoke, or Shanghai, or some other big cities.”

  “Wouldn’t break my heart,” Sturgis said.

  “Only thing that worries me is, will anybody have anything left to rebuild with by the time this war is over?” Cade said. “In the meantime, we’re gonna sit tight, let the enemy come to us, and slaughter him when he does. I can’t think of any better way to keep our casualties down, so we’ll do it like that.”

  “Got it,” Howard Sturgis said reluctantly. “Uh, sir.”

  “Good.”

  “Sir?” Sturgis said. When Cade nodded, the veteran went on, “Sir, no shit, you made it back down from the reservoir?”

  “Yeah,” Cade said, in lieu of Screw you if you think I’m lying. He added, “I never would’ve if I didn’t get help from the Korean Christians. They live up to the name better than a bunch of folks back home, and you can sing that in church.”

  “Huh.” Sturgis sounded thoughtful: not a usual sound from him. “Guess they love Mao even better’n they love old Kim, then.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Cade agreed.

  He might have said something more, but all the American machine guns started going off at once. Airplane engines roared in at treetop height. Cade flung himself into a dugout. The Red Chinese couldn’t call in Corsairs from carriers, but they had Shturmoviks. Those carried rockets and bombs and guns, too. The machine gunners on the ground were wasting ammo. The Russian attack planes laughed at that kind of fire. Only an F-80 or F-86 could make them say uncle, and not a whole lot of those were left over here.

  Nothing came down too close to Cade, for which he thanked heaven. Of course, heaven had just decided to visit hell on some other sorry bastards instead, so how grateful should he have been, exactly? He shook his head. When you started asking yourself questions like that, where did you stop? Anywhere?

  —

  Konstantin Morozov climbed out of the bathtub. He took it slow and easy; he had about as much strength and endurance as a sand castle. He clucked sadly as he looked down at his naked body. He was a man. Ever since his beard came in, he’d been hairy like a man, with a mat on his chest, tufts at his armpits and crotch, and some pretty fair fuzz on his arms and legs.

  Women liked men that way, dammit. It let them know they weren’t lying down with another girl.

  Bu
t, as far as Konstantin could tell, he had no more sprouting from his hide than a plucked chicken. It had all fallen out. And not just on his body. He hadn’t had to shave since he came to the military hospital. He had no hair on his dome. He had no hair in his nose or ears, and no eyebrows or eyelashes, either.

  “Will it ever grow back?” he’d asked a doc when he’d been a lot sicker than he was now, when he thought the tide was rolling in on that poor sand castle.

  She’d only shrugged. “If you live, we think it will. Eventually.” How long eventually was, she hadn’t said. Maybe she didn’t know, either.

  He was still alive. He was pretty sure now he’d stay that way for a while, and he was even beginning to believe he might want to. All of his crewmen were still alive, too, though for Vladislav Kalyakin it was a close call. The driver wouldn’t stop bleeding out his asshole, so they had to go in there and do…something. Konstantin was hazy on the details, but it seemed to have helped.

  Even if it had, though, Kalyakin wouldn’t be fit to fight again for a long time, if he ever was. Morozov, Eigims, and Sarkisyan were in better shape than that. Konstantin had puked blood only once, and not a whole lot of it. Food was starting to taste good to him again.

  The Balt and Armenian were about where he was. They’d had their brush with the scythe-carrying skeleton in the black robe, but Old Man Death wasn’t quite hungry enough to gnaw on them.

  Yet. Konstantin knew too well it was always yet. He’d survived a near miss from an atom bomb? Okay, fine. As soon as he was healthy enough, the Red Army would throw him into another tank and try to expend him some other way. A mine, a bazooka rocket, a shell from an English tank he didn’t spot soon enough…Any one of those would do to kill a man, even if they didn’t murder by carload lots like the big son of a bitch full of atoms.

  He made it back to his cot without getting too exhausted. Lying on the lumpy mattress couldn’t have been much more boring. Even Konstantin had to admit it beat the hell out of lying at the bottom of a hole two meters deep with dirt shoveled in on top of him.