Upsetting the Balance

“You’re a sandbaggin’ son of a bitch, is what you are, Dracula,” Daniels answered. Szabo was the best scrounger he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some real pros, Americans and English and especially Frenchmen, in France during the First World War. Hadn’t been for Dracula, the platoon would have been hungrier and grouchier. Mutt still had a couple of precious cigarettes stashed against a day when he’d have to smoke one or die.

Dracula grinned, unabashed. As if Mutt hadn’t spoken, he took up where he’d left off: “-but the thing of it is, the spooks know where most of the stuff is, account of they’re the ones who stashed it in the first place. I’m just goin’ around, maybe finding things by luck, know what I mean? Luck’s a handy thing, no doubt about it, but having an angle’s a damn sight better.” He spoke with the calm assurance of a man who tucked an ace up his sleeve every now and again.

“I’m not saying you’re wrong, kid. Tell you what-next time we’re tryin’ to get somethin’ from ’em, you handle it. Tell ’em the lieutenant made you the official U.S. Army special duty supply bloodhound for the platoon. We’ll see how that goes for a while-if we don’t get pushed outta here and don’t walk into a shell.”

“Okay, Lieutenant, if that’s how you want it.” Szabo kept his voice so carefully neutral that Mutt had to put his sleeve up against his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He knew he’d just given the fox the keys to the henhouse. Dracula would be scrounging for himself, not just for the platoon, and he’d turn a handsome profit on some of the things he came up with. But he was smart enough to do that after the things that really needed doing. Or he’d better be smart enough, because if he wasn’t, Mutt would land on him like a ton of bricks.

From somewhere back not far from the shore of Lake Michigan, a mortar started lobbing bombs onto the Lizards over on Calumet Avenue. “Come on!” Mutt shouted, and ran forward toward a house that was more or less intact. The men he led came with him, rifles and submachine guns banging away as they sprinted from one piece of cover to the next.

More bombs fell, these just ahead of the advancing Americans, so close that a couple of fragments flew past Daniels with an ugly whistling noise. The mortars chewed up the landscape even worse than it was already. Mutt peered out from behind a corner of the house, fired a burst at what might have been a Lizard even if it probably wasn’t, and ran forward again to flop down behind a pile of bricks that once upon a time had been somebody’s chimney.

He rested there for a couple of minutes, breathing hard-hell, panting. War was a young man’s business, and he wasn’t a young man any more. As he tried to catch his breath, he wondered whether pushing the Lizards back across a couple of miles of landscape-turned-trash-dump was worth the blood it would cost.

He’d wondered the same thing Over There. Once you were in ’em, the stretches of shell-pocked German trenches you’d taken didn’t seem as if they could possibly make up for the guys who got shot while you were taking them. But you kept doing it, over and over and over, and eventually theBoches couldn’t stand the hammering any more and gave up.

Mutt had figured it was what Mr. Wilson called it: the war to end war. But then up popped Hitler and up popped the Japs, and you had to go off and do it all over again. And then along came the Lizards, and all of a sudden you weren’t fighting in some godforsaken place nobody’d ever heard of, you were fighting in Chicago, for God’s sake. Hell, Comiskey Park, or whatever was left of it, couldn’t have been more than a mile away.

Freight-train noises overhead said the Lizards were going after the mortar crews. Mutt didn’t wish those crews any harm, but he was just as glad to have the aliens’ artillery pounding at something in back of the line.

On his belly, he scrambled toward the hulk of a dead Model-A Ford that sat on four flat tires. Small-arms fire was picking up; the Lizards didn’t feel like leaving the neighborhood. He was almost to the car when he got shot.

He’d gone through months in France and more than a year in Illinois without a scratch. He hadn’t thought he was invulnerable; he knew better than that. But he hadn’t thought his number was up, either.

At first he felt just the impact, as if somebody had kicked him in the rear, hard. “Ahh, shit,” he said, as if an umpire had blown a close call at third base and wouldn’t change it back no matter how obviously wrong he was. He twisted around, trying to see the wound. Given where he’d been hit, it wasn’t easy, but the seat of his pants was filling up with blood.

“Jesus God,” he muttered. “Everybody goes and talks about gettin’ their ass shot off, but I went and did it.”

Then the wound started to hurt, as if he had a red-hot skewer stuck into his hindquarters. “Medic!” he bawled. He knew he sounded like a branded calf, but he couldn’t help it.