Upsetting the Balance

They’d cart a lot of these kids off on stretchers before the fight was through. Mutt tried not to think about that. They’d carted him off on a stretcher once already. Now he was back. He hoped he’d stay in there this time.

“Come on, we can’t waste time here,” he said. He told some men to move forward with him, others to stay back and give covering fire. The ones he told to stay back squawked and pouted like spoiled children deprived of a lollipop. He held up a hand: “Don’t get in a swivet, boys. This here’ll be fire and move. Soon as we find cover up ahead, we’ll hunker down and start shootin’ so you-all can move on up ahead of us. You’ll get your share, I promise.”Your share of shattered skulls and splintered bones and belly wounds. Exploiting such eagerness filled Mutt with guilt. He’d never again feel it himself.

Yelling like fiends, his men moved forward, some shooting from the hip to add to the Americans’ firepower and make the Lizards keep their heads down. Mutt dove behind the burnt-out hulk of somebody’s old Packard. Sheet metal wouldn’t keep bullets from biting him, not the way a good pile of concrete or dirt would. But if the Lizards couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t send as many bullets toward him.

A couple of men were down, one twisting, one ominously limp and still. The Lizards weren’t sending out the wall of lead they had before, though. Daniels waved for the troops who had been covering to move forward past and through the detachment that had accompanied him. Those men, in turn, laid down covering fire for their buddies. They did a better job than Mutt had thought they had in them. Maybe he would be able to push the Lizards out of their forward positions.

One Lizard had other ideas. He’d pop up in a window like a jack-in-the-box, squeeze off a few rounds, and duck back down before anybody could nail him. He was a good shot, too. Somebody brave and stubborn and lucky like that, whether human or twisty-eyed alien critter, could derail an advance.

Mutt gauged the distance from himself to the house in which the Lizard sheltered: maybe forty yards. The window the Lizard was using wasn’t a very big one, which wasn’t surprising-being a twisty-eyed alien critter didn’t make you stupid. The Lizard let loose with another burst. Off to Mutt’s right, a human voice started screaming.

He grimaced, shook his head, and took a grenade from his belt. His arm had got him to the majors, even if that was a long time ago-and even if his lousy bat hadn’t let him stay there. Almost without conscious thought, he went into a catcher’s crouch in back of, not the plate, but the trunk of the Packard.

He yanked the pin out of the grenade, popped up (knocking off his helmet with the back of one wrist, as if it had been a catcher’s mask), and let fly. He went down behind the car before the grenade sailed through the window. It went off with abang! different from those of the rifles and submachine guns and Lizard automatic weapons all around.

A GI dashed for that window. The Lizard didn’t pop up to shoot him. The young dogface leaned in (suicidally stupid, had the Lizard been playing possum), and fired a long burst from his tommy gun. “Hell of a peg, Lieutenant!” he yelled. “Little bastard’s raw meat now.” Cheers rang amid the shooting.

Move and fire, move and fire… and then the Lizards were moving and firing, too, in retreat. Mutt ran to a corner of the house where the tough Lizard had holed up, fired at its buddies as they pulled back. For the time being, a block of ruined North Side Chicago was back in American hands.

By the hideous standards of fighting in the city, that counted for a victory. He owed the kids a mental apology. They’d done great.

Ttomalss wondered again how any Tosevite ever lived to grow up. The hatchling he was hand-rearing was more than half a year old; it had also had a year and a half of growth inside the female who bore it. It was still helpless. It still had no control over its messy bodily functions; the chamber in which it lived-in which Ttomalss perforce did most of his living, too-smelled unpleasantly of stale Tosevite waste.

Several times a day, Ttomalss wished he had left the Big Ugly hatchling with the female from whose body it had so disgustingly emerged. She’d fought like a wild thing to keep the little squalling creature. If she had had it all this time, Ttomalss was confident she would have been willing to hand it over to him decorated with whatever the Big Uglies used to signify a gift.