Tilting The Balance (66 page)

“I’ll try, Sarge. It – hurts.” Freddie was doing his best to be a good Scout, but it didn’t sound easy any more. After a while, the numbness that often came with a wound wore off, and then you started to realize what had happened to you. That wasn’t any fun at all.

Lucille dusted the wound with sulfa powder, then folded the skin over it as best she could. “Too big and ragged to sew up,” she murmured to Mutt. “Just lucky it didn’t smash the bones up, too. He may walk on it again one of these days.” She packed gauze into the hole and put more gauze and tape over it. Then she pointed back toward one of the windmills outside of Danforth. It had a big new Red Cross banner hanging from it “Let’s get him over there.”

“Right you are.” Mutt stooped with Lucille Potter and got Laplace upright, with one of his arms draped over each of their shoulders. They hauled him along toward the windmill. “Musta been Dutch settled around these parts,” Mutt mused. “Not many other folks use those things.”

“That’s true, but I couldn’t tell you for certain,” Lucille said. “We’re too far upstate for me to know much about the people hereabouts.”

“You know more’n I do,” Daniels said. Freddie Laplace didn’t stick his two cents’ worth in. He hung limply in the grasp of the pair who carried him, his head down on his chest. If he was out, it probably counted as a mercy.

“Oh, God, another one,” an unshaven medic with a grimy Red Cross armband said when they hauled Freddie into the makeshift aid station in the room at the bottom of the windmill. “We just got Captain Maczek in here – he took one in the chest.”

“Shit,” Lucille Potter said crisply, which was exactly what Mutt was thinking. The word made his jaw drop just the same.

The medic stared at her, too. She stared back until he lowered his eyes and took charge of Laplace, saying, “We’ll patch him up the best way we know how. Looks like you did good emergency work on him.” He knuckled his eyes, yawned enormously. “Jesus, I’m tired. Other thing we’ve got to worry about is getting out of here in case we’re overrun.

We’ve been falling back a lot lately.”

Mutt almost gave him a hot answer – anybody who bitched about the job the Army was doing could go to hell as far as he was concerned. But the medic had a real worry there, because they probably would have to retreat farther. And medic wasn’t exactly a cushy job, either, the Lizards honored the Red Cross most of the time, but not always – and even it they meant to honor it, their weapons weren’t perfect, either.

So, sighing, he tramped away from the windmill and back toward his squad. Lucille Potter followed him. She said, “With the captain down, Mutt, they’re liable to give you a platoon and turn you into a lieutenant.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “If they don’t reckon I’m too old.” He thought he could do the job; if he’d run a ballclub, he could handle a platoon. But how many guys in their fifties sudenly sprouted bars on their shoulders?

“If this were peacetime, you’re right – they would,” Lucille said. “But the way things are now, I don’t think they’ll worry about it – they can’t afford to.”

“Maybe,” Mutt said. “I’ll believe it when I see it, though. And the way things are now, like you said, I ain’t gonna worry about it one way or the other. The Lizards can shoot me just as well for bein’ a lieutenant as for bein’ a sergeant.”

“You have the proper attitude,” Lucille said approvingly.

A compliment from her made Mutt scuff his worn-out Army boot over the ground like a damn schoolkid. “One thing bein’ a manager’ll teach you, Miss Lucille,” he said, “and that’s that some things, you can’t do nothin’ about, if you know what I mean. You don’t learn that pretty darn quick, you go crazy.”

“Control what you can, know what you can’t, and don’t worry about it.” Lucille nodded. “It’s a good way to live.”

Before Mutt could answer, a burst of firing came from the front line. “That’s Lizard small arms,” be said, breaking into a trot and then into a run. “I better get back there.” He was afraid they’d need Lucille’s talents, too, but he didn’t say that, any more than he would have told a pitcher he had a no-hitter going. You didn’t want to put the jinx on.

Running through the corn made his heart pound in his throat, partly from exertion and partly for fear he’d blunder in among the Lizards and get himself shot before he even knew they were there. But the sound of the gunfire and a pretty good sense of direction brought him back to the right place. He flopped down in the sweet-smelling dirt, scraped out a bare minimum of a foxhole with his entrenching tool, and started firing short bursts from his tommy gun toward the racket from the Lizards’ automatics. Not for the first time, he wished he had a weapon like theirs. As he’d said to Lucille Potter, though, some things you couldn’t do anything about.

The Lizards were pushing hard; firing started to come from both flanks as well as straight ahead; “We gotta fall back,” Mutt yelled, hating the words. “Dracula, you ‘n’ me’ll stay here to cover the rest. When they’re clear, we back up, too.”

“Right, Sarge.” To show he had the idea, Dracula Szabo squeezed off a burst from his
BAR
.

When you advanced, if you were smart, you split into groups, one group firing while the other one moved. You had to be even smarter to carry out that fire-and-move routine while you gave ground. What you wanted to do at a time like that was run like hell. It was the worst thing you could do, but you always had a devil of a time making your body believe it.

The guys in Daniels’ squad were veterans; they knew what they had to do. As soon as they found decent positions, they hunkered down and started firing again. “Back!” Mutt shouted to Szabo. Shooting as they went, they retreated through the rest of the squad. The Lizards kept pressing. Another couple of rounds of fire and fall back brought the Americans into the town of Danforth.

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 Bodies 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?”