Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  Had he commanded the regiment, though, he knew he would have been as ruthless. One of these tanks could still make any infantry around run. It just wasn’t up for a fight against another tank.

  “We have to be quick, and we have to stay lucky,” Morozov told his men. “I went through this the last time. I was always scared of Tigers and Panthers. They could kill me easier than I could kill them. It’s the same thing now, only more so.”

  They pushed on toward Paderborn. The rain came down harder, with snow mixed in. Visibility dropped to a couple of hundred meters, even though Konstantin stuck his head out of the hatch again. He wouldn’t spot trouble till it was on top of him. Then again, the T-34/85 couldn’t hurt a more modern tank at anything but point-blank range.

  When trouble came, it didn’t come from an enemy tank. A man with a rocket launcher popped up from behind the corpse of a Volkswagen by the side of the road. The intercom didn’t work, dammit. Konstantin had to duck inside to scream to the bow gunner: “Ahead and a little to the right! Fire! Now!”

  Ilya Goledod spat death in that direction. Konstantin popped out again, just in time to watch the enemy soldier launch his rocket. But the machine-gun rounds were enough to spoil his aim. The deadly missile flew past the T-34/85 instead of burning through its frontal armor. A moment later, Juris Eigims put an HE round into the dead VW. The guy with the bazooka tumbled away. He wouldn’t cause any more trouble. But how many more like him were still around?

  —

  Weed, California, was up near 3,500 feet above sea level. That wasn’t enough to make Marian Staley notice the altitude when she breathed or anything. Winters were colder and harsher than they would have been lower down, though. As soon as summer ended, she’d found out about that. She and Linda had no clothes to suit the weather.

  Thick jackets. Wool watch caps. Wool socks. Long johns. Waterproof boots. She didn’t like spending the money, but she liked shivering even less.

  Logging slowed down in the wintertime. It didn’t stop, but the men with the axes and saws had a harder time getting to the trees they were supposed to fell and a harder time getting them away from where they’d fallen once they did go down.

  Big, snorting trucks hauled trunks secured with chains to long trailers. When the snow started falling and when rain turned to ice after hitting the ground, the trucks and trailers got chains on their tires, too.

  And sometimes that helped, and sometimes it didn’t. The men who ran Shasta Lumber wanted to do as much cutting and as much hauling as they could, so they made as much money as they could. The other lumber bosses in and around the town felt the same way. If their men had accidents, that was part of the cost of producing the most board-feet possible.

  It was to the men who ran the outfits, anyhow. To the ones who sawed away in the snow or drove the steep, twisting, icy roads…

  Marian was typing one chilly afternoon when the front door flew open. A logger in a dark green plaid Pendleton shirt and Levi’s staggered into the office. Everyone gasped or squawked when he did—he had a bloody nose and a gash over one eye.

  He seemed unaware he’d been hurt. “Tom put truck number three down a scree slope,” he gasped. “Threw me clear, so I’m okay”—he was anything but—“but he’s still back there, and he’s tore up pretty good. I made it back to the road an’ flagged down a car. Somebody call Doc Toohey to go up there and give poor Tom a hand.”

  Glancing down at the list of telephone numbers she might be expected to use fairly often, Marian saw one for Dr. Christopher Toohey among them. Before she could dial it, one of the other secretaries beat her to the punch. “Yes, come here first,” she told the doctor. “Billy Hurley’s here, and he’ll show you where the accident’s at.” She hung up and nodded to the logger. “Doc’s on the way.”

  “Swell,” he said, as if time had stopped in 1928.

  Marian pulled tissues from the box on her desk and went over to Billy Hurley. “Here,” she said, dabbing gently at the cut. “Let me clean this up if I can. You may need stitches—I don’t know. Hold some of these to your nose, too.”

  “What’re you talking about?” He sounded irritable. “I’m okay. It’s poor Tom who got crunched up.”

  “You’re not okay.” She showed him the bloody Kleenexes.

  He gaped. “Well, swap me pink and call me Bluey. No wonder I got a headache!”

  “No wonder at all,” Marian agreed. “Dolores, get me some more of these, will you please?”

  “Sure thing,” the other secretary said, and did.

  Dr. Toohey rushed in no more than a minute later; nowhere in Weed was very far from anywhere else. He had his black bag in his hand. “Let me patch up that cut first of all,” he said.

  “Never mind me, Doc. Slap a Band-Aid on it or somethin’. Tom Andersen’s the one who needs you bad,” Hurley said.

  “If he’s worse off than you, then he must,” Toohey said. They hurried out together. Two car doors slammed. An engine roared.

  Marian stared at the handful of soggy, bloody tissues she was holding. With a small, disgusted noise, she threw them in the nearest wastebasket, then went into the ladies’ room and washed off Billy Hurley’s blood. None of the high mucky-mucks down the hall had even noticed the commotion out front.

  “That was fun,” she said after she came out. “Does this kind of thing happen all the time during the winter?”

  “Not all the time, but it happens, yeah,” Dolores answered. “You did all you could for Billy there. That was great.” The other office workers nodded.

  “I was closest to him, that’s all. Anybody else would’ve done the same.” Marian looked down. “We’ve got blood on the rug.”

  “Cold water. Lots of cold water,” Dolores said. “That’s not the kind of reminder we need.”

  Billy Hurley came back to the office a couple of hours later. He wasn’t bleeding any more. His nose had stopped, and he had a bandage wrapped around his head—so much for slap a Band-Aid on it. “Doc dropped me off. He’s taking Tom down to the hospital in Redding,” he reported. “Says he’s got some busted bones he can’t deal with here.”

  “How far is it to Redding?” Marian asked.

  “Eighty miles—something like that,” Dolores said.

  “Poor Tom!” Marian wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time in a car jouncing down US 99. She’d known Weed had no hospital, but she hadn’t thought about what that meant till now. If something went badly wrong…“There’s not even an ambulance that could take him?”

  “Nope,” the logger said. “Doc’s it, pretty much.”

  “You ought to—we ought to—be able to do better. Logging’s dangerous work. People get hurt.” Marian glanced down the hall. The bosses were still busy doing whatever bosses did.

  “Stuff like that costs money, though,” Billy Hurley said. “Who’s gonna fork it over? Lord only knows how Tom’ll come up with the cash for whatever they got to do to him down in Redding.”

  The lumber companies ought to pay, Marian thought. They’re the ones whose people go off the roads in the snow or have trees fall on them or get hit in the leg by an axe that goes wrong.

  But even though she thought it, she didn’t say it. She knew what would happen if she did say it. Shasta Lumber would fire her. They might not open the door before they kicked her through it, either. They’d call her a Red and a radical. No one else in town would hire her after they canned her. She and Linda would have to move away. The way things were these days, that kind of reputation, deserved or not, was liable to follow her, too. Political arguments made everybody insanely suspicious.

  She got less done the rest of the day than she would have liked, even if nobody else complained. Weed wasn’t a bad place. It had reasonably nice people and a breathtaking view. After Camp Nowhere, it had seemed like heaven on earth. But it wasn’t.

  Had it been just her, she might have packed up and left from sheer annoyance at the lumber barons. Linda was settling in pretty well, though. She’d already ha
d her life torn up by the roots twice this year—three times if you counted finding out that her father was dead. Little kids shouldn’t have that happen to them. Sometimes they did, in spite of everything, but they shouldn’t.

  On the way home from work, she stopped at the office of the Weed Press-Herald, the town’s weekly. The editor was a tall man named Dale Dropo. “Yeah, I heard Tom got hurt,” he said. “It’s a shame, but logging’s a tough business.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s a shame,” Marian said. “It’s a shame the town doesn’t have an ambulance, much less a hospital.”

  Dale Dropo couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. He wasn’t more than a few years older than Marian, in other words. He might never have worried about the lack of such things before. Till today, she hadn’t. He scratched at one ear. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right.”

  “Would an editorial light a fire under anybody?” she asked.

  His grin was sour. “I only wish it were that easy. Weed would have a lot of things it doesn’t if people paid any attention to my editorials. But I was wondering what I’d put in the one for next Friday’s paper. Now I know. I’ll give ’em something else to ignore me about. Thanks.”

  “Any time,” Marian said. “Any time at all.”

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko was an old soldier. He was also an old soldier who acted like an old soldier: he did no more than he had to do to get by. The way he looked at it, he’d done everything he needed to do to serve the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. He had the scar and the limp to prove it. If the Soviet Union wanted more from him now, that was the rodina’s hard luck.

  His attitude did not endear him to Sergeant Prishvin. Of course, he could have been a Stakhanovite for extra duties and worn a Hero of the Soviet Union’s star on his chest, and that wouldn’t have endeared him to Anatoly Prishvin, either. Since he was a Ukrainian, dying was the only thing that would have endeared him to Prishvin.

  “You’re a lazy, worthless cunt,” the sergeant said. Ihor stood mute. He was willing to cop to lazy, but not the rest of the abuse. Prishvin went on, “They should stick you in a penal battalion. See how you’d like being lazy then.”

  Penal battalions were for getting rid of soldiers and officers who’d screwed up in a major way. If you lived, your sins were expiated. But the whole point to penal battalions was using the bodies of the men in them to smother the fires the enemy started. Men went in where things were hottest. Most of them, by the nature of things, didn’t come out again.

  Prishvin went right on glaring. “Well? What have you got to say about that?”

  “Nothing, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor answered. Anything he did say would only inflame the Russian more.

  Saying nothing didn’t help, either. “You’re too lazy to even talk to me, huh? No wonder you and that cocksucking blackass hang around together. I bet he smokes hashish to make him like he is. What’s your excuse?”

  Ihor made a small production of starting to clean his AK-47. He’d always kept his weapons in good shape. That helped you stay alive, which he approved of. He hadn’t trained on the Kalashnikov, but you hardly needed training to take care of it. The mechanism was about as simple as it could get and still work. It was so simple, it would go on working even if you didn’t bother cleaning it.

  Not quite idly, Ihor swung the muzzle toward Anatoly Prishvin. That was just to take the edge off his own feelings. He couldn’t reassemble the rifle, release the safety, and pull the trigger here and make it seem like an accident. When they went into action against the Americans, though…A corpse shot by an AK-47 looked the same as one shot by an M-1, especially after it had a few days to swell up and change colors and stink.

  He did wonder how many stupid, vicious officers and fuckheaded noncoms had died at their own men’s hands during the Great Patriotic War. The tally wouldn’t include only the fuckheads who served the Soviet Union badly. Plenty of Fritzes who gave orders were vicious and stupid, too. Ihor had developed a healthy respect for the ordinary German soldier. Here and there, Landsers would have weeded out their assholes, too.

  He supposed even Americans could see it might be better to arrange an untimely demise for a captain before the bastard got his whole company killed.

  Eventually, Prishvin went off to make the other men in the section love him even more than they already did. Aram Demirchyan ambled over to where Ihor was sitting and said, “Here. Have of these some.” He held out his canteen.

  “Thanks.” Ihor took a cautious sip. It wasn’t hashish, but it was pretty good schnapps. Aram might speak only mangled Russian and no German at all, but he had a scrounger’s gift for coming up with useful things.

  “Sergeant, he big metyeryebyets.” No matter how mangled Demirchyan’s Russian was, he had no trouble with the obscenity.

  “Think so, do you?” Ihor said dryly. The Armenian thought that was funny. After the schnapps mounted to Ihor’s head, he did, too. How could anyone not think Prishvin was exactly what Aram had called him?

  A couple of days later, they went into action outside of Paderborn. The enemy hadn’t wasted any time retaking a large stretch of northwestern Germany after the A-bomb kicked the Red Army in the teeth. Ihor crouched behind the burnt-out hulk of a T-34/85, a survivor from the last war that hadn’t made it through this one.

  He didn’t want his head to end up like the killed tank’s turret, which lay upside down ten meters away from the hull. He thought he smelled charred meat along with all the other battlefield stenches, but it might have been his imagination. He could hope so, anyhow.

  Soviet artillery slammed the American lines on the eastern outskirts of the German town. “Forward!” Sergeant Prishvin shouted. “Forward for the great Stalin!”

  “For Stalin!” the men yelled as they ran toward the Yanks’ foxholes and trenches. Even Ihor yelled, though he’d somehow lived through what the great Stalin had done to the Ukraine.

  An American heavy machine gun in a house with an east-facing window opened up. Ihor did a swan dive behind a rock and started digging in. All around him, other Red Army men flopped to the ground and slithered toward whatever cover they could find. A couple of luckless fellows got hit before they could hit the dirt. They went down, too, bonelessly, as if they’d taken one on the button from a heavyweight. A round from that baby could punch through a couple of centimeters of hardened steel. What it did to mere flesh and blood hardly bore thinking about.

  The USSR had fielded large-caliber machine guns during the last war. The Hitlerites hadn’t, so this was Ihor’s first time on the wrong end of one. He could have done without the honor.

  Red Army men popped up every now and again to take shots at the house. But the heavy machine gun could kill them out past a kilometer, and they couldn’t hit back at that range. A couple of guys in the section carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but they didn’t have a prayer of getting in close enough to use them. So Ihor thought, anyway.

  Sergeant Prishvin had a different view of things. He called “Forward!” again, adding, “We can get that fucker!”

  He wasn’t a coward. That wasn’t what was wrong with him. He ran toward the house with flame and death spitting from the shattered window. So did some of the men he led. Ihor got up and gained thirty or forty meters; the bare-branched bushes he chose for shelter didn’t conceal him as well as he would have liked, but they were ever so much better than nothing.

  One of the RPG men launched an optimistic round. It fell far short, blowing a hole in the muddy ground. Ihor fired a few times himself, though he knew he was only wasting ammo. The AK-47 wasn’t made for long-range combat. Even a sniper with a scope-sighted Mosin-Nagant would have had trouble hitting the American machine gunners from where he was.

  “Forward!” Prishvin roared. “Everybody forward! Come on, you cunts, you whores, you needle dicks! We will take out that gun! For Stalin!”

  Forward he went. Forward the other soldiers went, too, some of them firing from the h
ip as they ran to try to make the Yankees keep their heads down. Ihor bent to stick on a new magazine. One of those big, fat bullets from the machine gun cracked over his head.

  And one of them hit Aram Demirchyan and knocked him to one side as if he were a crumpled sheet of newspaper. Crimson blood soaked his dun-colored tunic. He thrashed feebly for a second or two, then lay still.

  Ihor yanked back the charging handle and chambered the first round. He fired several shots, first high, then lower.

  “The sergeant’s down!” someone yelled. “Bozhemoi! He won’t get up again, either!”

  “We better fall back!” someone else said. “We need a mortar to shift that goddamn machine gun!”

  Nobody argued with him. Retreat was almost as dangerous as advancing had been. Ihor hoped no one else knew how Sergeant Prishvin had fallen. One more chance he’d have to take.

  LUISA HOZZEL SHOOK HER HEAD. “Not for me,” she said in a mixture of German and bad Russian. “I have a man back in Germany.”

  “In Germany?” Nadezhda Chukovskaya tossed her head. She was short and stocky and tough. Laughing, she went on, “Germany is the other side of the moon. You don’t have anybody here. Everybody needs somebody.”

  Yes, but you aren’t the somebody I need. Luisa didn’t say it. Nadezhda was one of the two or three women with the most pull in her barracks. If she got mad at somebody, she could make that person sorry. Telling her off was a last resort.

  Another soft answer, then: “Not for me. I am woman for men, not woman for other women.”

  “Men!” Nadezhda laughed again, scornfully this time. “Men don’t know anything! Wait till somebody loves you who can make you feel good because she understands what makes you feel good.”

  The only polite answer Luisa found to that was a shrug. She hadn’t been lying. Women didn’t stoke her fires. They never had, and she didn’t think they ever would.