Upsetting the Balance

He nodded to himself. Chicago was a good bet, probablythe good bet. And where would they use the second bomb? That was harder to figure. Where it would do the most good, he hoped.

Mutt Daniels had known snow in Chicago before. He’d been snowed out of an opening-day series here in 1910-or was it 1911? He couldn’t recall. A hell of a long time ago, whichever it was. The Cubs hadn’t even been playing in Wrigley Field yet, he knew that; they were still over at West Side Grounds.

When it snowed in April, though, you knew things were winding down: pretty soon it would be hot and muggy enough to suit you even if you were from Mississippi. Now, though, winter looked to be settling in for a nice long stay.

“No gas heat, no steam heat, not even a decent fireplace,” Mutt grumbled. “I went through all o’ this last winter, and I don’t like it worth a damn. Too stinkin’ cold, and that there’s a fact.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Muldoon said, “so don’t make it out like I am, but the Lizards, they like it even less than we do.”

“There is that. It’s almost reason enough to get fond of snow, but not quite, if you know what I mean.” Mutt sighed. “This here overcoat ain’t real bad, neither, but I wish I didn’t have to wear it.”

“Yeah.” Muldoon’s overcoat was a lot more battered than the one Daniels was wearing, and smelled overpoweringly of mothballs; Mutt wondered if it had been in storage somewhere since the end of the Great War. The sergeant, though, was good at making the best of things. He said, “We may not have a decent fireplace like you was talkin’ about, Lieutenant, but Lord knows we got plenty of firewood.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Daniels said. Every other house in Chicago-some parts of town, every single house-was wrecked. Places where fire hadn’t done the job for you, you could burn a lot of wood staying warm.

The neighborhood in which the platoon was presently encamped was one of those areas where next to nothing was left upright. Since winter arrived, the Americans had pushed their front south a couple of miles. The Lizards weren’t grinding forward any more; they were letting humanity come to them. The price was ghastly. One thing the cold weather did do: it kept the stink of rotting flesh from becoming intolerable instead of just bad.

Fighting back and forth across the same stretch of ground also produced a landscape whose like Mutt-and Muldoon, too-had seen over in France in 1918. Not even an earthquake shattered a town the way endless artillery barrages did. In France, though, once you got out of a town, you were back in the country again. Chewed-up countryside was pretty bad, too, but it didn’t have quite the haunted feel of stretches where people used to be crowded together. And Chicago wasn’t anything but stretches where people had been packed close together.

“One thing,” Mutt said: “I don’t believe in ghosts no more.” He waited for a couple of people to wonder why out loud, then said, “If there was such a thing as ghosts, they’d be screamin’ to beat the band at what we done to Chicago and done to their graveyards in partic’lar. I ain’t seen none o’ that, so I reckon ghosts ain’t real.”

Off to the rear, American artillery opened up. Mutt listened to the shells whistling by overhead. That was a reassuring noise, nothing like the roaring screech they made when they were coming straight at you. They landed a couple of miles south of the house in whose wreckage he was squatting. The explosions sounded flat and harsh, not so big as they might have been. Mutt grimaced. He knew the why of that.

So did Muldoon. “Gas,” he said, as if tasting something sour.

“Yeah.” It was one of the big reasons the Lizards had stopped advancing in Chicago, but that didn’t mean Daniels liked it. Nobody who’d ever been on the receiving end of a gas bombardment liked the idea of gas. “All the hell we let loose on this city our own selves, us and the Lizards, I mean, maybe it’s no wonder we ain’t seen any ghosts. By now, I reckon they’re liable to be more scared of us than we are of them.” He scratched his head. “What the dickens was the Irving Berlin song from the last war? ‘Stay Down Here Where You Belong,’ that’s it-the one where the devil tells his son not to go up to earth on account of it was worse there than it was down in hell. Maybe the devil knew what he was talkin’ about.”

“Maybe he did.” Muldoon nodded. “Thing of it is, though, it’s either do what we gotta do or else have the Lizards do somethin’ worse.”

“Yeah,” Daniels said again. “An’ that reminds me-I’m gonna go up and check on the sentries, just to make sure the Lizards ain’t doin’ somethin’ worse right here.”

“Sounds good to me,” Muldoon said. “I sorta got fond of living, all that time between the wars-I’d like to keep on doin’ it a while longer now. But you wanna watch yourself, Lieutenant. The Lizards, they can see like cats in the dark.”