Tilting the Balance

Once the planes zipped out of sight, he didn’t spot them again. He hoped that meant they were returning to base by a different route instead of getting knocked down. “No way to find out for sure,” he said.

He abruptly stopped being interested, too, because Lizard shelling picked up again. He embraced the ground like a lover, pressed his face against her cool, damp neck.

Some of the blasts that shook him where he lay were explosions of the same sort he’d known in France. Others had a sound he’d first met retreating toward Chicago: a smaller bang, followed by a pattering as of hail.

“Y’all want to look, sharp,” he called to the scattered members of his squad. “They’re throwin’ out them goddamn little mines again.” He hated those little baseball-sized blue explosives. Once a regular shell went off, at least it was gone. But the Lizards’ fancy ammo scattered potential mutilation over what seemed like half an acre and left it sitting there waiting to happen. “Instant goddamn mine field,” Mutt said resentfully.

After a while, the barrage let up. Daniels grabbed his tommy gun and took a cautious peek out of the foxhole. If the Boches had been doing that shelling, they’d follow up with an infantry attack just as sure as you were supposed to hit the cutoff man. But the Lizards didn’t always play by the book Mutt knew. Sometimes they fooled him on account of that. More often, he thought, they hurt themselves.

So here: if they wanted to drive the Americans out of Randolph, they’d never have a better chance than now, while the shelling had stunned and disorganized their human foes. But they stayed back in their own lines south of town. The only sign of action from them was a single plane high overhead, its path through the sky marked by a silvery streak of condensation.

Mutt gave the aircraft a one-finger salute. “Gonna see how bad you beat on us before you send in the ground-pounders, are you?” he growled. “Mis’able cheap bastards.” What was infantry for, after all, if not to pay the butcher’s bill?

His battered eardrums made the quiet that followed the barrage seem even more intense than it was. The short, sharp bang! that punctuated it wouldn’t have seemed worth noticing, save for the shriek right after.

“Oh, shit,” Mutt exclaimed. “Somebody went and did somethin’ dumb. Goddamn it to hell, why don’t nobody never listen to me?” He’d thought minor-league ballplayers were bad at paying attention to what a manager told them. Well, they were, but they looked like Einsteins when you set ’em next to a bunch of soldiers.

He scrambled out of the foxhole. His body was skinnier and sprier than it had been while he was wearing his Decatur Commodores uniform, but he’d have cheerfully gone back to fat and flab if anybody offered him the choice.

No one did, of course. He crawled over battered ground and through ruined buildings toward where that shriek had come from. Memory wasn’t his only guide; a low moaning kept him on course.

Kevin Donlan lay just outside a shell hole, clutching his left ankle. Below it, everything was red ruin. Mutt’s stomach did a slow lurch. “Jesus Christ, kid, what did you do?” he said, though the answer to that was all too obvious.

“Sarge?” Donlan’s voice was light and clear, as if his body hadn’t really told him yet how bad he was hurt. “Sarge, I just got out to take a leak. I didn’t want to piss in my hole, you know, and-”

Next to what he had, swimming a river of piss was nothing. No point telling him that, though, not now. “Miss Lucille!” Mutt bawled. While he waited for her, he got a wound bandage and a packet of sulfa powder out of a pouch on Donlan’s belt. He dusted the powder onto the wound. He wondered if he ought to get the remains of Donlan’s shoe off his foot before he started bandaging it, but when he tried, the kid started screaming again, so he said the hell with it and wrapped the bandage over foot, shoe, and all.

Lucille Potter scrambled up a minute later, maybe less. In dirty fatigues and a helmet, she looked like a man except that she didn’t need a shave. The helmet bore a Red Cross on a white circle; the Lizards had learned what that mark meant, and weren’t any worse than people about respecting it.

She looked at the way blood was soaking through the bandage, clicked her tongue between her teeth. “We’ve got to get a tourniquet on that wound, Sergeant.”

Mutt looked down at Donlan. The kid’s eyes had rolled up in his head. Mutt said, “You do that, Miss Lucille, he’s gonna lose the foot.”

“I know,” she said. “But if we don’t do it, he’s going to bleed to death. And he’d lose the foot anyhow; no way to save it with a wound like that.” Her sharp stare dared him to argue. He couldn’t; he’d seen enough wounds in France and Illinois to know she was right.

She cut Donlan’s torn trousers, took out a length of bandage and a stick, and set the tourniquet. “Hell of a thing,” Daniels said, to himself and her both: another young soldier on crutches for the rest of his life.