Upsetting the Balance

“I seen that already,” Mutt agreed. “Dunno whether it’s their eyes or the gadgets they got. Don’t reckon that matters anyway. They sure can do it, and that’s what counts.”

Most officers just used.45s. Mutt had been a noncom and a dog-face too long to trust his neck to anything less than the best weapon he could carry. If that meant he had to lug around the extra weight of a tommy gun, he was willing to put up with it.

He paused a while outside the mined house where his men were sheltering, so his eyes could adapt to the dark all around. He didn’t see like a cat, and he didn’t have any gadgets to help him do it, either. No moon in the sky and, even had there been, the cloud cover would have kept him from seeing it The only light came from the fires that turned parts of the skyline orange. Chicago was so big, it never seemed to run out of things that would burn.

The Lizards’ lines lay about half a mile to the south of the positions the Americans were holding. Between them were both sides’ sentry posts, along with American barbed wire and Lizard razor wire coiling through the ruins of what had been middle-class homes not long before. Those ruins made the no-man’s-land an even more dangerous place than it had been in France back in 1918. They gave snipers wonderful cover.

As if the blamed war isn’t bad enough, what with the gas and the tanks and the shells and the planes and the machine guns and all that other shit,Mutt thought.But no, you gotta worry about some damn sniper puttin’ a bullet through your head while your damn underpants are down around your ankles so you can take a dump. Some things didn’t change. One of his grandfathers had fought in the Army of Northern Virginia during the States War, and he’d complained about snipers, too.

Going out to the sentry positions, Mutt used a route he’d worked out that kept him behind walls most of the way: he didn’t believe in making a sniper’s job any easier. He had three or four different ways to get from the main line to the pickets in front of it, and he didn’t use any one of them more than twice running. He made sure the sentries took the same precautions. His platoon hadn’t had a man shot going up to sentry duty in weeks. A low but threatening whisper: “Who’s that?”

Daniels answered with the password: “Cap Anson. How they hangin’, Jacobs?”

“That you, Lieutenant?” The sentry let out a low-voiced chuckle. “You give us those baseball names for recognition signals, why don’t you make ’em people like DiMaggio or Foxx or Mel Ott that we’ve heard of, not some old guy who played way back when?”

Mutt remembered hearing about Cap Anson when he was a kid. Was that way back when? Well, now that you mentioned it, yes. He said, “The Lizards’ll know about today’s players. They might fool you.”

“Sure, okay, yeah, but we can forget the old guys,” Jacobs said. “Then we’re liable to end up shooting at each other.”

Did I talk back to my officers in France like that?Mutt wondered. Thinking back on it, he probably had talked back like that. American soldiers were a mouthy lot, no two ways about it. That had been true for a long time, too, and even more so a long time ago. Some of the things his granddads said they’d called the officers over them would curl your hair.

He sighed and said, “Sonny, if you don’t want your buddies shootin’ at you, you better remember, that’s all.”

“Yeah, okay, sure, Lieutenant, but-” Jacobs quit bitching and stared out into the darkness. “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear nothin’,” Daniels said. But his voice came out as the barest thread of whisper. His ears were old-timers, and knew it. Jacobs couldn’t be a day over nineteen. He had more balls than brains, but he could hear. Mutt made sure he was under cover. Jacobs pointed at the direction from which the sound had come. Mutt didn’t see anything, but that didn’t signify.

He picked up a fist-sized lump of plaster, hefted it in his hand. “Be ready, kid,” he breathed. Jacobs, for a wonder, didn’t sayFor what? He just took a firmer grip on his rifle and nodded.

Mutt tossed the plaster underhand through the air. It came down maybe thirty feet to one side, clattering off what sounded like a brick chimney. Out in no-man’s-land, a Lizard cut loose with his automatic rifle, squeezing off a burst whose bullets whined through the area where the plaster had landed.

Jacobs and Daniels both fired at the muzzle flashes from the Lizard’s weapon. “Did we get him?” Jacobs demanded, shoving a fresh clip into his Springfield.