Tilting the Balance

“Yeah, okay. Come on this way.” Szabo stood up so Mutt could spot him. “Not gonna be any Lizards around for a while, though, Sarge-is it okay if I wander over there in an hour or so, and you’ll make sure there’s some dark meat left for me?”

“I think maybe we can do that,” Daniels said. “You put somebody here on your weapon before you go wandering, though, you hear me? In case we do have trouble, we’re gonna need all the firepower we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Sarge,” Szabo said. “Even roast chicken ain’t worth gettin’ my ass shot off for.” He spoke with great conviction. From any other dogface in the squad, Daniels would have found that convincing. With Szabo, you never could tell.

He took the chickens back to the auditorium. Whoever had been there last, Americans or Lizards, had chopped up a lot of the folding wooden seats that faced the stage: more than they’d used for their fires. Taking advantage of the free lumber, Mutt built his blaze on the concrete floor where others had made theirs before him.

He pulled out his trusty Zippo. He wondered how long it would stay trusty. He had a package of flints in his shirt pocket, but the Zippo was burning kerosene these days, not lighter fluid, and he didn’t know when he’d come across any more kerosene, either. For now, it still gave him a flame on the first try.

He quickly found out why the previous occupants of the auditorium had been so eager to use the seats for fuel: the varnish that made them shiny also made them catch fire with the greatest of ease. He went back out into the rain to throw away the chicken guts and to get some sticks on which to skewer the pieces of chicken he was going to cook.

His belly growled when the savory smell of roasting meat came through the smoke from the fire. His grandfathers would have done their cooking in the War Between the States the same way he was now, except they’d have used lucifer matches instead of the Zippo to get the fire going.

“Chow!” he yelled when he had a fair number of pieces finished. Men straggled in by ones and twos, ate quickly, and went back out into the rain. When Lucille Potter came in for hers, Mutt asked jokingly, “You wash your hands before supper?”

“You’d best believe I did-and with soap, too.” Being a nurse, Lucille was in dead earnest about cleanliness. “Did you wash yours before you cleaned these birds and cut them up?”

“Well, you might say so,” Mutt answered; his hands had certainly been wet, anyhow. “Didn’t use soap, though.”

Had Lucille Potter’s stare been any fishier, she’d have grown fins. Before she could say anything, Szabo strolled into the auditorium. “You save me a drumstick, Sarge?”

“Here’s a whole leg, kid,” Mutt said. The BAR man blissfully started gnawing away. Daniels took half a breast off the fire, waved it in the air to cool it down, and also began to eat. He had to pause a couple of times to spit out burnt bits of feather; he’d done a lousy job of plucking the chickens.

Then he paused again, this time with the hunk of white meat nowhere near his mouth. Through the splashing rain came deep-throated engine rumblings and the mucky grinding noise of caterpillar tracks working hard to propel their burden over bad ground. The chicken Mutt had already swallowed turned to a small lump of lead in his stomach.

“Tanks.” The word came out as hardly more than a whisper, as if he didn’t want to believe it himself. Then he bellowed it with all the fear and force he had in him: “Tanks!”

Dracula Szabo dropped the mostly bare drumstick and thigh and sprinted back toward his BAR. What good it would do against Lizard armor, Mutt couldn’t imagine. He also didn’t think the rain would give him another chance to take out a Lizard tank with a bottle of ether-even assuming Lucille had any more, which wasn’t obvious.

He threw down his own piece of meat, grabbed his submachine gun, and peered out ever so cautiously through the gaping hole in the auditorium wall. The tanks were out there somewhere not far away, but he couldn’t see them. They weren’t firing; maybe they didn’t know his squad was in the park.

“That’s great,” he muttered. “Gettin’ trapped behind enemy lines is just what I had in mind.”

“Enemy lines?” All his attention on the noises coming from the dripping gloom outside, Mutt hadn’t noticed Lucille Potter coming up behind him. She went on, “Those are our tanks, Mutt. They’re coming down from the north-either the Lizards haven’t taken out the bridges over the Vermilion or else we’ve repaired them-and they make a lot more racket than the machines the Lizards use.”

Mutt listened again, this time without panic blinding his ears. After a two-beat pause he used around Lucille to replace a useful seven-letter word, be said, “You’re right. Lord, I was ready to start shooting at my own side.”

“Some of the men are still liable to do that,” Lucille said. “Yeah.” Mutt stepped outside, shouted into the rain: “Hold your fire! American tanks comin’ south. Hold fire!”