Grenade

by Alan Gratz

  He blinked in confusion. Hideki wasn’t where he had gone to sleep. The blown-up tank, the muddy field, the pouring rain—they were all gone. He lay instead on a cot under a green army tent. A green American army tent.

  Hideki had been captured by the enemy.

  Hideki was a prisoner of the Americans! He turned to roll off his cot, to run away, but a man stood over him, silhouetted by the dawn. Hideki lifted a hand to shade his eyes.

  It was Rei. Rei, the boy he’d killed, was standing over him, a gaping hole in his side. Hideki’s heart caught in his throat, and he sat up with a yelp.

  Suddenly, the ghost of Rei was gone, and an American doctor stepped into the space where Rei had once stood. Or had he? Hideki blinked and put a hand to his sore head—but instead of touching dried blood he found a gauze bandage there, wrapped tight.

  “You’re all right,” the American doctor said. It took Hideki a confused moment to realize the medic was speaking Japanese. The doctor handed Hideki two small white pills and a metal cup of water. “Here. Swallow these. They will make you feel better,” the doctor told him.

  Hideki put a hand to the place on his neck where the kijimunaa had bitten him. A small cloth bandage covered the spot.

  “I had to give you a shot to help you sleep,” the doctor explained. “You had a nasty gash on your head, and we had to sew it up for you. It’s still going to hurt for a while though, and these pills will help.”

  Hideki was afraid of the pills. But why would the Americans go to all the trouble of fixing him if they were just going to poison him now? He put the two pills in his mouth. They tasted like chalk, and he quickly swallowed them down with the water.

  “Good boy,” the doctor said. “It looks like shrapnel from a grenade caught you. What happened?”

  Hideki felt the blood drain from his face. He couldn’t tell the doctor what really happened—that he’d been injured by his own grenade killing an American soldier. Killing Rei.

  “I—I don’t remember,” Hideki lied.

  “That may be a result of the concussion,” he told Hideki. “You may have problems with your memory, or problems with your eyes and ears, like hearing and seeing things that aren’t there.”

  Hearing and seeing things that aren’t there. Was that what was happening to Hideki? Was he hearing and seeing Rei because he’d taken a knock to the head, or because Rei’s ghost was haunting him?

  “Get some rest,” the doctor told him, “and maybe your memory will come back to you. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can find you some shoes that fit you.”

  When the doctor was gone, Hideki snatched a bottle of the little white pills from a tray and stuffed the bottle in his pocket. Then he got up from the cot and slipped out of the medical tent. All around the camp, American doctors and soldiers walked on boards laid down in the mud, and trucks unloaded more Okinawans, both injured and uninjured. None of them seemed to be prisoners.

  First the food in Rei’s pack hadn’t been poisoned, and now the Americans had treated his wounds. He’d seen them be monsters, but he’d seen them be kind too. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to surrender to them after all. But if the Americans ever found out what he’d done to Rei, they might not be so nice.

  Besides, he had his sister to find.

  American star shells exploded in the sky above Hideki. Designed not to kill but to illuminate, the shells burst into bright glowing stars that hung from tiny parachutes. It took the star shells about a minute to hit the ground, and in that time everything below them was lit up with a ghostly green light.

  For Hideki, it was like the Americans were lighting his way south, toward his sister. But it was also the way toward the dangerous front lines, where the Americans and Japanese were still fighting.

  After a quick detour to pick up Rei’s pack, Hideki had joined hundreds of Okinawan refugees walking in the same direction. He hoped the Americans would let him pass through safely with the refugees, and then he could press on farther south to find Kimiko.

  The Americans used illumination shells to watch for Japanese infiltrators at night. What the light showed Hideki and the other refugees were all the dead bodies around them. Some were Japanese, but most were Okinawan. They littered the muddy fields to each side and lay like stones in the road. But Hideki had learned to not really see them and keep moving. Seeing them—really seeing them—was too much to bear.

  Hideki felt the skin on the back of his neck crawl, like the person behind him was breathing on him, and he spun. But the nearest person was four steps away. Hideki shivered and turned to walk again. Was it the ghost of Rei? The ghost of his father? It was hard to know. It could have been the ghost of any of the thousands of other people who had died on Okinawa since the fighting began. The reek of death was everywhere.

  Another star shell exploded in the sky, and Hideki looked down at his cold, sodden feet. He was just thinking that maybe he should have waited until the American doctor brought back shoes for him when he noticed the shoes underneath the bashōfu kimono of the woman walking next to him. They weren’t wooden sandals or tabi socks. They were leather boots. The woman wasn’t a woman at all—“she” was a Japanese soldier wearing a kimono over his uniform!

  A quick scan of the feet all around him found more army boots hidden among the kimonos. Japanese soldiers had snuck in among their ranks throughout the night, hoping to slip through enemy lines with the refugees.

  Hideki’s heart skipped a beat. He was in trouble. They all were. When American soldiers discovered there were Japanese soldiers hiding among them, the Americans would kill them all. But if he said anything now, raised the alarm, the Japanese soldiers would just as likely kill them all as spies.

  Hideki slipped off the road, away from the refugees. He had walked straight with them for far too long. Evil was about to catch up to these people on both sides.

  Zigging and zagging, Hideki used the eerily illuminated Shuri Castle as a landmark and made his way further south on his own. He thought again about the cave with Yoshio and Private Maeda and the old woman. Were the Okinawans safe? Did Private Maeda still think the old woman was a spy? And what about Yoshio? How had he gone from being Hideki’s worst enemy to Hideki’s best friend? Not that he had come to Hideki’s defense when Private Maeda went crazy. But what could Yoshio have done, really? What could any of the Okinawans do against the Americans and the Japanese?

  Hideki slid to the bottom of a steep ravine, where a body lay half-buried in the mud. Another star shell exploded overhead, and in the light Hideki saw that the fallen soldier was an American. That was unusual. The Americans usually claimed their casualties as soon as they could, taking them away to treat them or bury them. It was the Japanese who couldn’t come out of their defensive bunkers to claim their dead.

  Hideki knelt by the body and went through the man’s pack. There was food! And a photograph. A pretty woman wearing a dress and sitting on a beach. The smeared imprint of her red lips decorated the bottom corner of the photo.

  There were more American bodies nearby, and Hideki hurriedly stuffed his own pack with as much food as he could find from theirs. He kept all the pictures he found too, adding them to Rei’s collection. Their collection now.

  A single shot rang out—pakow—and a bullet fwipped into the mud near Hideki. A sniper! Hideki dove behind one of the bodies. The sniper didn’t shoot again, but he knew where Hideki was. Hideki cursed himself for his stupidity. There was a reason this ravine was still full of American corpses. It was too dangerous to come and get them! He must have wandered right into the no-man’s-land between the Americans on one side, and the Japanese on the other.

  That meant that the slope behind him was occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. If he could get to one of the caves inside it, he’d be safe. But if he stood, the American sniper would have a clear shot again.

  Hideki watched the star shell overhead growing dimmer and dimmer. He waited, his throat dry with anticipation, until the shell suddenly winked out and everythi
ng was pitch-black again. Hideki leaped to his feet and ran up the hill, his bare feet slipping in the mud beneath him. For every meter he gained he felt like he lost a half meter sliding back down.

  Pakow. Pakow. Pakow. Bullets fwipped into the hillside around him. The American sniper couldn’t see him, but he knew Hideki would be running in the darkness. Hideki climbed faster, his arms and legs scrambling to push him higher. Higher. Pakow. Pakow-pakow. More rifles joined the first. The American sentries were taking pot shots at him, hoping to hit him in the dark.

  P-poom. A battleship offshore fired another star shell. It whistled high into the air, leaving a glowing green-white trail. Any second now it would explode, the burning phosphorus lighting up the whole hillside. The American snipers would see him plain as day.

  Hideki’s hand hit something wooden. A man-made ledge.

  Fwasssh. The star shell burst overhead, and Hideki saw a small open window cut into the hillside, just big enough for him to crawl through.

  And the Americans saw him.

  Hideki tossed his backpack into the hole as bullets shredded the wooden frame, then pulled himself through the window headfirst. He hit the rock floor inside with a thump and scrambled back against the wall as bullets pinged through the opening. He licked his dry lips and panted hard, but at least he was still breathing. He’d made it!

  But where were the Japanese? The bunker was empty. If the Americans had been charging this hill for days and couldn’t even come close enough to collect their dead, where were the Japanese soldiers with their rifles and machine guns and mortars?

  The American snipers stopped shooting. Hideki slid away from the hole in the wall, staying out of their line of sight. He crawled through a narrow tunnel to a larger cavern beyond, where multiple levels had been cut out of the rock. But the whole place was completely empty.

  Where was everybody?

  Hideki got goose bumps walking through the empty bunker. This place should have been teeming with Japanese soldiers. And it looked like it had been until very recently. The floors were littered with abandoned ammunition boxes, scraps of bloody bandages, and empty ration cans. But there were no people.

  Hideki wound his way through the tunnels to the opposite side of the hill, facing away from the American lines. There, another hole cut in the mountain framed the scene on the other side, showing him where everyone had gone.

  The Imperial Japanese Army was in full retreat. The roads south beyond the front lines were clogged with Japanese soldiers, all hurrying toward their next line of defense under the cover of dark and rain. When the Americans attacked the hill again tomorrow, they would meet no resistance. They would storm the bunker and find no one left inside.

  Except for Hideki.

  Unless he left right now.

  Hideki hiked Rei’s backpack up on his shoulders, climbed through the hole, and ran.

  Hideki made a rectangle with his fingers and squinted, framing an imaginary photograph.

  All around him, thousands of Okinawan refugees and Japanese soldiers trudged south in the pouring rain. The Japanese soldiers didn’t even stop to go to the bathroom. They urinated as they jogged along the muddy highway, none of them willing to pause for even thirty seconds. They had to get to the next line of defensive caves before the Americans caught up.

  Hidden among them, Hideki was just one of tens of thousands of people clogging the roads. The highway would take them through Shikina to Ichinichibashi, and that’s as far as Hideki needed to go. Ichinichibashi was where his sister would be.

  Hideki had never been this far south before, but wherever he was, it didn’t look like Okinawa anymore. American bombs had knocked down trees and taken the tops off hills, stomping the landscape flat like an angry god. Entire villages were shattered, the wooden houses and barns reduced to toothpicks. There was no color to anything anymore—the people, the ground, the sky, they were all a dull, filthy gray-brown, like all the paints on an artist’s palette had been swirled together in a muddy mess. This wasn’t Okinawa. Not the Okinawa that Hideki knew and loved.

  Hideki had always used his fingers to frame what he was seeing in front of him, the way the photographer had taught him. But now he did something different. Now he used the frame to imagine the way Okinawa had been, before the Americans had invaded, before the Japanese army had brought in cannons and built bunkers.

  He saw brilliant white coral sand roads lined with waving green palm trees. Thatched wooden barns, square houses with red terra-cotta roofs. Women in blue bashōfu kimonos with babies strapped to their backs, going to the market. Old men in brown bashōfu and round straw hats, leading water buffalo to the sugarcane fields. Everywhere he looked, the bright memory of before overlaid the gray, miserable after, like his fingers were making a window into the past, a past that was so recent, so real to him, that he could almost reach out and touch it.

  Something moved in the corner of Hideki’s eye, and he glanced sideways. But nothing was there.

  “I know, I know,” he told the ghost of Rei. “I’m sorry. I’m trying. Kimiko will be able to help us. We just have to find her first.”

  But how will I ever find her in all this? Hideki wondered.

  An American fighter plane came roaring right up behind the long line of people, like it was following the highway. It flew so low that Hideki could make out the face of the pilot. Everyone ducked and screamed, but the plane didn’t shoot at them. It roared up into the sky and circled high above them for a few seconds before disappearing into the clouds.

  The Japanese soldiers among them shoved Hideki and the other Okinawans out of the way as they ran off in all directions, and Hideki suddenly understood. The plane was a spotter for the battleships offshore. It had probably already radioed in where the crowds were.

  “Incoming! Get down!” Hideki yelled. He dove off the road into a water-filled ditch as the first shell exploded right in the middle of the highway.

  The blast was deafening. Hideki held his breath and put his head under the water. The muffled booms shook him and rocked the ground, and he squeezed his eyes shut and drew his arms and legs in tight. Mud and rock and shrapnel pelted him. His world was hellfire and destruction for longer minutes than he could count, punctuated only by quick gasps of air.

  At last the bombing stopped. Hideki waited under the water until his lungs burned so much he had to breathe, and he lifted himself up on his hands and knees.

  The road was gone, and so was everyone who had been on it.

  Those who had been outside the target area—those who had been spared—got to their feet and hurried on through the carnage, leaving the wounded behind.

  And Hideki, his eyes dry and his heart hard, did the same.

  It was safer to travel by night, when the American planes weren’t flying and the battleships weren’t shooting, but Hideki was exhausted. He had to find some place to sleep. He broke away from the refugees and soldiers plodding south and soon came to a family tomb. Hideki almost cried with relief. He staggered inside, hoping the ancestors resting there would forgive him for invading their home for one night.

  But the ancestors weren’t the ones he needed to worry about. The family who owned the tomb were already hiding there. There were eight of them, a mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and four small children, all huddled in the back.

  “I’m sorry,” Hideki told them. “I just need to get in out of the rain. I need to sit down.”

  He didn’t wait for them to say yes. Hideki’s weary legs gave out, and he flopped to the floor of the tomb. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open. He let his pack slip off his back for the first time that day and he slumped over, absolutely exhausted.

  The family crept over to meet him and introduce themselves. Their last name was Miyagi. They each told him their first names too, but Hideki was too tired to remember any of them. They had been living in this tomb since the battle began, they told him. Not one of them had been outside in two months. They still had water, but their food h
ad run out five days ago. The littlest of the children looked shrunken, like his body was eating itself from the inside out, and they all had hollow eyes and sunken cheeks.

  They look like ghosts, Hideki thought to himself. Like their long-dead ancestors resurrected.

  Hideki thought of his father, perhaps never to be buried in the Kaneshiro family tomb, and he sagged.

  “Why didn’t you evacuate?” Hideki finally asked them. “Why did you stay?”

  “We thought the Imperial Japanese Army would protect us,” Father Miyagi said.

  “This is our home,” Grandfather Miyagi added. “This is where our ancestors live.”

  Hideki closed his eyes and nodded. It was the same answer he would have gotten from any of the refugees streaming south. This is our home. The Japanese will protect us. One of those things was true. The other was far from it.

  “Are the Americans really coming this way?” Mother Miyagi asked Hideki.

  Hideki was too tired to lie to them. “Yes,” he said.

  The children gasped and clutched at each other.

  “Is it true what they say? That the Americans are monsters?” Father Miyagi asked.

  Again, Hideki wanted to tell them the truth. But what was the truth?

  “Yes,” he told them. “And no. When they’re fighting, the Americans are killing machines. When they’re not, they’re like us.” Hideki pulled the wet tangle of bandages from his head. “One of their doctors fixed me when I was hurt,” he told the Miyagis. “And they’ll give you food if you ask for it.”

  Hideki pulled his pack around and fished out what was left of the ration boxes. They were coated with a waxy substance that helped keep them dry from the rain. The crackers were fairly disintegrated, but there was some chewy gray stuff, a few practically indestructible candy bars, and the meals in the tins. Hideki cracked one of the cans open, and Grandfather Miyagi cried out longingly at the delicious smell. Hideki took a bite to show them it was all right and offered it to the family.