It had held three or four hundred people before the fighting started; if the locals had any brains, they’d abandoned their trim white and green houses a while ago. A lot of the houses weren’t so trim any more, not after artillery and air strikes. The sour odor of old smoke hung in the air.
Mutt pounded on a front door. When nobody answered, he kicked it open and ran inside. One of the windows gave him a good field of fire to the south, the direction from which the Lizards were coming. He crouched down behind it and got ready to give them a warm welcome.
“Mind if I join you?” Lucille Potter’s question made him jump and start to point his gun toward the doorway, but he stopped in a hurry and waved her in.
Freight-train noises overhead and a series of loud bursts a few hundred yards south of town made Mutt whoop with delight “About time our artillery got off the dime,” he said. “Feed the Lizards a taste of what they give us.”
Before long, northbound roars and whistles balanced those coming from out of the north. “They’re awfully quick with counterbattery fire,” Lucille said. “Awfully accurate, too.”
“Yeah, I know,” Daniels said. “But-heck, come to that, all their equipment is better’n ours-artillery and planes and tanks and even the rifles their dogfaces carry. Whenever they want to bad enough, they can move us out of the way. But it’s like they don’t want to all the time.”
“Unless I miss my guess, they’re stretched thin,” Lucille Potter answered. “They aren’t just fighting in Illinois or fighting against the United States; they’re trying to take over the whole world. And the world is a big place. Trying to hold it all down can’t be easy for them.”
“Lord, I hope it’s not.” Grateful for talk to help get him through the lull without worrying about what would happen when it stopped, Mutt gave her an admiring glance. “Miss Lucille, you got a good way of lookin’ at things.” He hesitated, then added, “Matter of fact, you look right good yourself.”
“Mutt…” Lucille hesitated, too. Finally, with exasperation in her voice, she said, “Is this really the right time or place to be talking about things like that?”
“Far as I can see, you don’t think there’s ever any right time or place,” Mutt said, also with some annoyance. “I ain’t no caveman, Miss Lucille, I just-”
The lull ended at that moment: some of the Lizard artillery, instead of going after its American opposite number, started coming in on Danforth. The rising whistle of shells warned Mutt they were going to hit just about on top of him. He threw himself flat even before Lucille yelled “Get down!” and also jammed her face into the floorboards.
The barrage put Daniels in mind of France in 1918. The windows of the house, those that weren’t broken already, blew in, scattering broken glass all over the room. A glittering shard dug into the floor and stuck like a spear, maybe six inches from Mutt s nose. He stared at it, cross-eyed.
The shells kept falling till the blast of each was lost in the collective din. Bricks fell from the chimney and crashed on the roof. Shell fragments punched through the walls of the house as if they were made of cardboard. In spite of his helmet, Mutt felt naked. You could take only so many heavy shellings before something in you started to crack. You didn’t want it to happen, but it did. Once you got your quota, you weren’t worth a whole lot.
As the pounding went on, Mutt began to think he wasn’t far from his own limit. Trying not to go to pieces in front of Lucille Potter helped him ride it out. He glanced away from the broken chunk of glass toward her. She was flattened out just like him, and didn’t look to be having any easier time of it than he was.
Later, he was never sure which one of them rolled toward the other. Whichever it was, they clung to each other tight as they could. In spite of what they’d been talking about when the barrage hit, there was nothing in the least sexual about the embrace-it was more on the order of drowning men grabbing at spars. Mutt had hung on to doughboys the same way when the Boches gave American trenches a going-over in the last war.
Because he was a veteran of 1918, he got to his feet in a hurry when the curtain of Lizard shells moved from the southern edge of Danforth, where he was, to the middle and northern parts of town. He knew about walking barrages, and knew soldiers often walked right behind them.
Danforth looked as if it had gone through the meat grinder and then been overcooked since the last time he’d looked out the window. Now most of the houses were in ruins, the ground cratered, and smoke and dust rising everywhere. And through the smoke, sure enough, came the skittering shapes of Lizard infantry.
He aimed and sprayed a long burst through them, fighting to hold the tommy gun’s muzzle down. The Lizards went over like tenpins. He wasn’t sure how many-if any-he’d hit and how many were just ducking for cover.
Off to one side, the BAR opened up. “Might have known Dracula was too sneaky to kill,” Mutt said to nobody in particular. If the Lizards had any brains, they’d try a rush and support advance to flush him and Szabo out in the open. He aimed to throw a monkey wrench into that scheme. From a different window, he fired at the bunch he thought would be moving. He caught a couple of them on their feet. They went down, scrambling for cover.
“In the two-reelers, this is about the time the U.S. Cavalry gallops over the horizon,” Lucille Potter said as the Lizards started shooting back.
“Right about now, Miss Lucille, I’d be glad to see ’em, and that’s a fact,” Mutt said. Dracula’s BAR was stuttering away, and he had his tommy gun (though he didn’t have as many clips as he would have liked), but only a couple of rifles had opened up with them. Rifles didn’t add a whole lot as far as firepower went, but they covered places the automatic weapons couldn’t reach and denied the Lizards the cover they’d need to flank out Mutt and Szabo.
And then, just as if it had been a two-reeler, the cavalry did come riding to the rescue. A platoon of Shermans rumbled through the streets of Danforth, a couple of them so fresh off the assembly line that only dust, not paint, covered the bright metal of their armor. Machine guns blazing and cannon firing high explosive, they bore down on the Lizard infantry.
The Lizards didn’t have armor with them, they’d been more cautious about committing tanks to action since the Americans started using bazookas. They did have antitank rockets of their own, though, and quickly turned two Shermans into blazing wrecks. Then the tanks shelled the rocketeers, and after that they had the fight pretty much their own way. Most of the Lizards died in place. A few tried to flee and were cut down. A couple came out with their hands up; they’d learned the Americans didn’t do anything dreadful to prisoners.
Mutt let out the catamount screech his grandfathers had called the Rebel yell. The house in which he and Lucille Potter sheltered was pretty well ventilated, but the yell echoed in it just the same. He turned around and hugged her. This time he meant business; he kissed her hard and his hands cupped her backside.
As she had when he’d taken out the Lizard tank with her bottle of ether, she let him kiss her but she didn’t do anything in the way of kissing back “What’s the matter with you?” he growled. “Don’t you like me?”
“I like you fine Mutt,” she answered calmly. “I think you know it, too. You’re a good man. But that doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you-or with anybody else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Over the years, Mutt had done a fair number of things he’d enjoyed at the time but wasn’t proud of afterwards. Forcing a woman who said-and obviously meant-she wasn’t interested wasn’t any of them, though. Frustrated almost past words, he said, “Well, why the… dickens not? You’re a fine-lookin’ lady, it ain’t like you don’t have any juice in you-”
“That’s so,” she said, and then looked as if she regretted agreeing.
“By Jesus,” Mutt murmured. In a lifetime knocking around the United States, he’d seen and heard about a lot of things nobody who stayed on a Mississippi farm ever dreamt of. “Don’t tell me you’re one o’ them-what do they call
’em? — lizzies, is that right?”
“It’s close enough, anyhow.” Lucille’s face shut up as tight as a poker player’s-especially one who was raising on a busted flush. Poker-faced still, she said, “Okay, Mutt, what if I am?”
She hadn’t said she was, not quite, but she didn’t deny it, either, only waited to see what he’d say next He didn’t know what the hell to say. He’d run across a few queers in his time, but to find out somebody he liked not just because he wanted to lay her but on account of who she was-and he couldn’t be fooled on something like that, not when they’d been living in each other’s pockets through months of grinding combat-was one of these creatures almost as alien as a Lizard… that was a jolt, no doubt about it.
“I dunno,” he said at last. “Reckon I’ll keep my mouth shut. Last thing I want to do is cost us a medic as good as you are.”
She startled him immensely by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek. An instant later, she looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Mutt. I don’t want to play games with you. But that’s one of the kindest things anybody ever said about me. If I’m good at what I do, why should the rest matter?”
Words like unnatural and perverted flashed across his mind. But he’d had plenty of chances to see that Lucille was good people-somebody you could trust your life to, in the most literal sense of the words.
“I dunno,” he repeated, “but it does, somehow.” Just then, the Lizards started shelling the front part of Danforth again, probably sowing their little artillery-carried mines to keep the Shermans from pushing farther south anytime soon. Mutt had never imagined he could be relieved to take cover from a bombardment, but right at that moment he was.
Liu Han hated going out to the market. People looked hard at her and muttered behind her back. Nobody had ever done anything to her-the little scaly devils were powerful protectors-but the fear was always there.
Little devils paced through the prison camp marketplace, too. They were smaller than people, but nobody got too close to them; wherever they went, they took open space with them. It was, more often than not, the only open space in the crowded market.
The baby in her belly gave her a kick. Even the loose cotton tunic she wore couldn’t disguise her pregnancy any longer. She didn’t know what to feel about Bobby Fiore: sadness that he was gone and worry about whether he was all right mingled with shame over the way the scaly devils had forced them together and a different sort of shame at conceiving by a foreign devil.
She let the market din wash over her and take her away from herself. “Cucumbers!”-a fellow pulled a couple of them from a wicker basket tied round his middle. They were long and twisty like snakes. A few feet away another man cried the virtues of his snake meat. “Cabbages!” “Fine purple horseradish!”
“Pork!” The man selling disjointed pieces of pig carcass wore shorts and an open jacket. His shiny brown belly showed through, and looked remarkably like one of the bigger cuts of meat he had on display.
Liu Han hesitated between his stall and the one next to it, which displayed not only chickens but fans made from chicken feathers glued to brightly painted horn frames. “Make up your mind, foolish woman!” somebody screeched at her. She hardly minded; that, at least, was an impersonal insult.
She went up to the man who sold chickens. Before she could say anything, he quietly told her, “Take your business somewhere else. I don’t want any money from the running dogs of the imperialist scaly devils.”
A Communist, she thought dully. Then anger flared in her. “What if I tell the scaly devils who and what you are?” she snapped.
“You’re not the dowager empress, to put me in fear with a word,” he retorted. “If you do that, I will find out about it and disappear before they can take me-or if I don’t, my family will be looked after. But you-you’ve been a quiet running dog so far. But if you begin to sing as if you were in the Peking opera, I promise you’ll be sorry for it. Now go.”
Liu Han went, a stone in her heart. Even buying pork at a good price from the fellow in the stupid jacket didn’t ease her spirit. Nor did the cries of the merchants who hawked amber or slippers with upturned toes or tortoiseshell or lace or beaded embroidery or fancy shawls or any of a hundred other different things. The little scaly devils were generous to her: why not, when they wanted to learn from her how a healthy woman gave birth? For the first time in her life, she could have most of the things she wanted. Contrary to what she’d always believed, that didn’t make her happy.
A little boy in rags flashed by. “Running dog!” he squealed at Liu Han, and vanished into the crowd before she got a good look at his face. His mocking laughter was all she could report to the scaly devils, assuming she was foolish enough to bother.
The baby kicked her again. How was he supposed to grow up when everyone down to street urchins scorned his mother so? The easy tears of pregnancy filled her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.
She started back toward the house she’d shared with Bobby Fiore. Though it was a house finer than the one she’d had back in her own village, it seemed as empty as the gleaming metal chamber in which the little scaly devils had imprisoned her on their plane that never came down. The resemblance didn’t end there, either. Like that metal chamber, it wasn’t a home in any proper sense of the word, but a cage where the little devils kept her while they studied her.
Suddenly she had had all the study she could stand. Maybe no scaly devils waited back at the house right now to take photographs of her and touch her in intimate places and ask her questions that were none of their business and talk among themselves with their hisses and pops and squeaks as if she had no more mind of her own than the kang that kept her warm at night. But so what? If they weren’t there now, they would be later today or tomorrow or the day after that.
Back in her village, the Kuomintang was strong; even thinking about being a Communist was dangerous, though Communist armies had done more than most in fighting the Japanese. Bobby Fiore hadn’t had any use for the Reds, either, but he’d willingly gone with them to take a poke at the scaly devils. She hoped he still lived, even if he was a foreign devil, he was a good man-better to get along with than her Chinese husband had been.
If the Communists had fought the Japanese, if Bobby Fiore had gone with them to raid the little devils… they were likely to be doing more against the devils than anyone else. “I owe them too much to let them do whatever they want with me forever,” Liu Han muttered.
Instead of going on to her house, she turned around and went back to the stall of the fellow who sold chickens and chicken feather fans. He was haggling with a skinny man over the price of a couple of chicken feet When the skinny man sullenly paid his price and went away, he gave Liu Han an unfriendly look. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go away.”
“You did,” she said, “and I will, if that’s what you’really want. But if you and your friends”-she did not name them out loud-“are interested in knowing more about the little scaly devils who come to my hut, you’ll ask me to stay.”
The poultry seller’s expression did not change. “You’ll have to earn our trust, show you’re telling the truth,” he said, his voice still hostile. But he did not yell for Liu Han to leave.
“I can do that,” she said. “I will.”
“Maybe we’ll talk, then,” he said, and smiled for the first time.
XVI
Moishe Russie paced back and forth in his cell. It could have been worse; he could have been in a Nazi prison. They would have had special fun with him because he was a Jew. To the Lizards, he was just another prisoner, to be kept on ice like a bream until they figured out exactly what they wanted to do with him-or to him.
He supposed he should thank God they weren’t often in a hurry. They’d interrogated him after he was caught. On the whole, he’d spoken freely. He didn’t know many names, so he couldn’t incriminate most of the people who’d helped him-and he figured they were smart enough not to stay in any one place too long,
either.
The Lizards hadn’t bothered questioning him lately. They just held him, fed him (at least as much as he’d been eating while he was free), and left him to fight boredom as best he could. They didn’t put prisoners in the cells to either side of his or across from it Even if they had, neither the Lizard guards nor their Polish and Jewish flunkies allowed much chatter.
The Lizard guards ignored him as long as he didn’t cause trouble. The Poles and Jews who served them still thought he was a child molester and a murderer. “I hope they cut your balls off one at a time before they hang you,” a Pole said. He’d given up answering back. They didn’t believe him, anyhow.
Some blankets, a bucket of water and a tin cup, another bucket for slops-such were his worldly goods. He wished he had a book. He didn’t care what it was; he would have devoured a manual on procedures for inspecting light bulbs. As things were, he stood, he sat, he paced, he yawned. He yawned a lot.
A Polish guard stopped in front of the cell. He shifted the club he carried from right hand to left so he could take a key out of his pocket. “On your feet, you,” he growled. “They got more questions for you, or maybe they’re just gonna chop you up to see how you got to be the kind of filthy thing you are.”
As Russie got up, he remembered there were worse things than boredom. Interrogation was one of them, not so much for what the Lizards did as for the never-ending terror of what they might do.
Crash! Something hit the side of the prison like a bomb. At first, as he staggered and clapped hands to ears, Moishe thought that was just what it was, that the Germans had landed one of their rockets right in the middle of Lodz.
Then another crash came, hard on the heels of the first. It flung the Pole headlong against the bars of Russie’s cell. The guard went down, stunned and bleeding from the nose. The key flew from his hand. In a spy story, Moishe thought, it would have had the consideration to land in his cell so he could grab it and escape. Instead, it bounced down the hall, impossibly far out of reach.
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