Upsetting the Balance

The Lizards, worse luck, weren’t asleep at the switch. When somebody shot at them, they shot back. Mutt didn’t know if they really had all the ammo in the world, but they sure as hell acted that way. He threw himself flat; he’d return fire after the storm calmed down. A thump told him Muldoon had gone down on his belly, too. Muldoon knew how things worked.

A couple of houses away, somebody started screaming for his mother in a high, broken voice. Mutt bit his lip. One of the rookies had just found misfortune, or rather, it had found him. He hoped the kid wasn’t wounded too badly. Any kind of gunshot wound hurt enough and was bloody enough to scare the piss out of you, even if it didn’t set you pushing up daisies.

He looked out through a hole in the wall and saw a couple of Lizards skittering forward under cover of all the lead they were laying down. He fired in their direction. They dove for cover. He nodded to himself. Some ways, he had more in common with the Lizards these days than he did with raw recruits on his own side.

A buzzing in the air made him scoot back from that hole. Anything in the air nowadays most likely belonged to the Lizards. When machine guns began to yammer, he congratulated himself on his own good sense and hoped none of the new fish would get killed.

But the machine-gun bullets, by the sound of them, were slamming into the Lizard position, not his own. He grinned wickedly-the scaly bastards didn’t often screw up like that. The aircraft, whatever it was, passed right overhead. A bomb landed on the Lizards, close enough to batter his ears and make the ground shake under him.

Even the most cautious man will take a chance every once in a while. Daniels wriggled forward, ever so warily peeked out through the hole in the wall. He burst out laughing, a loud, raucous noise altogether at variance with the racket of combat.

“What the hell?” Muldoon grunted.

“You know what just strafed the Lizards, Muldoon?” Daniels held up a solemn hand to show he was telling the truth: “A so-help-me-God Piper Cub with a couple machine guns, one slung under each wing. Got away, too. Flew in maybe ten feet off the rooftops here, or what’s left of ’em, shot up the Lizards, dropped that light bomb, and got the hell out of there.”

“A Piper Cub, Lieutenant?” Muldoon didn’t sound as if he believed his ears. “Jesus God, we really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

“I dunno about that,” Mutt answered. “I heard somewheres the Russians been giving the Lizards fits with these little no-account biplanes, fly so low and slow they’re damn near impossible to stop until they’re right on top of you-they can do stuff a regular fighter plane can’t.”

“Maybe,” Muldoon said dubiously. “I tell you one thing, though, sir: you wouldn’t get me up on one of those little crates, not for all the tea in China. Hell, the Lizards can pick out which eye they’re gonna shoot you through. No, thanks. Not for me, no way, nohow.”

“Not for me, either,” Daniels admitted. “I ain’t never been on an airplane, an’ it’s too late for me to start now. But this here ain’t exactly a safe line o’ work we done picked ourselves, neither.”

“Boy, don’t I wish you was wrong.” Muldoon slithered up beside Mutt. “But them Lizards, half the time they ain’t aiming at me in particular. They’re just throwin’ bullets around, and if I happen to stop one, I do. But if you’re up there in an airplane and they’re shooting at you, that’spersonal, you know what I mean?”

“I guess maybe I do,” Mutt said, “but a dogface who stops one of those bullets with his head, he’s just as dead as the Red Baron who got shot down all personal-like.”

Muldoon didn’t answer. He was looking out through the hole in the wall. Mutt got up on one knee and peered through the window. The strafing run from the Piper Cub had taken the wind right out of the sails of the Lizards’ pounding of his position. That made him think he could maybe do a little pounding of his own.

“Stay here and give us some coverin’ fire,” he told Muldoon. “I’m gonna see if we can head south for a change, ‘stead o’ north.”

At Muldoon’s acknowledging nod, Daniels crawled through the trench to the ruins of the house next door. The men who had dug it had broken both gas and water mains, but, since neither had worked for months, that didn’t matter. A soldier he didn’t recognize gave him a hand up out of the trench.

He pointed southward. “They’re hurting there. Let’s go take us back some houses before they remember which end is up.”

The young soldiers cheered with an intensity that made him proud and frightened at the same time. They’d do whatever they thought it took, the same way a young outfielder would chase a fly ball right into a fence. Sometimes the fence would be wood, and give a little. Sometimes it would be concrete. Then they’d cart the kid off on a stretcher.