Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

“Moray, you off your fuckin’ gourd, man. That fuckin’ Moffa he’s sure to be plumb mad-dog crazy to’ve done all he’s done. You think he won’t kill you too, you just as loony as he is,” Saxon snapped.

Moffa used his jaw teeth—he no longer had any front ones adequate to the job—to draw the cork of the bottle of bourbon, all the while keeping his eyes and the muzzle of the automatic pistol locked unwaveringly upon Milo. After a long, gulping swallow of the alcohol, he lowered the bottle and spoke sadly.

“You shouldn’ of come in here, top. You know I’m gonna have to kill you, too, now. You know that, don’ you? And you dint never do nuthin’ to me, but I gotta kill you enyhow.”

He took another pull at the bottle then, impatiently waggling the pistol when Milo started to speak.

“See, top, them fuckers over there”—he jerked his head at the overturned table and the bodies that lay behind it—“they was gonna send me to break rocks in Leavenworth for the nex’ thirty years. Top, ain’ no fucker gonna send me to Leavenworth, and not back to that fuckin’ stockade, neither, you hear me. The fuckin’ bastids in that stockade, they done beat me and starved me and made me crawl for the lastes’ time. Naw, I’m gon’ make some fucker kill me, top, that’s what I’m gon’ do. I druther be dead and burnin’ in hell than in Leavenworth or back in that fuckin’ shithole stockade, top. So, like I done said a’ready, I’m sorry.”

There was a half-heard roar, a dimly seen flash of fire-streak from the muzzle of the heavy pistol, and, with unbearable pain, some irresistible force flung Milo backward to bounce off a wall and land, face down, in a heap beside the gory body of one of the dead military policemen.

He knew that he was dead. He knew that it would only be a matter of a very short amount of time before all sensation, all pain ceased. But he wished that before his mind stopped functioning forever, he could remember just who and what he had been before his awakening in Chicago, years ago.

But the pain did not stop. It got worse, if anything. He heard shouts from outside the room, heard them clearly. He even heard the wet gurglings as Moffa worked at the bottle of whiskey. Those wet gurglings it was that awakened in him a sudden, raging thirst for-whiskey, water, anything wet; his entire body was insistently clamoring for fluids.

Slowly, more than a little surprised that his arms and legs still would function, Milo gained first to hands and knees, then to his feet, swaying like a tree in a gale, groaning and biting his lips and tongue against the fireball of superheated pain lodged in his chest and back.

He did not see Moffa, who just stared at the blood-soaked apparition, wide-eyed, the pistol dangling from one hand and the near-emptied whiskey bottle from the other.

“Goddam you, top,” he finally gasped, “lay down! You dead , you fucker you! I put that slug clean th’ough your fuckin’ heart!”

Milo heard the words, though he did not see the speaker, not clearly. Later he was to remember those words. Nor did he see the fragmentation grenade that sailed through one of the shattered windows and bounced twice before it came to lie spinning in the middle of the floor.

But Moffa saw it. Dropping both pistol and bottle, he dived upon it, clasping it, his instrument of salvation, close against his chest and sobbing his relief, even while he used one foot to kick the nearest of Milo’s wobbly legs from under him.

Immediately in the wake of the searing explosion, the door came crashing inward and a burst of submachine-gun fire stuttered through the opening until a voice shouted and brought silence in place of the deadly noises.

In his second fall to the blood-slimed floor of the room, Milo had thumped his head hard enough to briefly take away his consciousness.

Captain John Saxon moved warily into the room, the still-smoking muzzle of his Ml Thompson at waist level, his horny forefinger on the trigger. One of the two men behind him took but a single look at what was left of Moffa, dropped his own Thompson with a clattering thud and was noisily sick.

“Somebody come in here and get Danforth,” said Saxon, in a quiet, gentle tone. “The poor li’l fucker and all the rest of you’s gonna see more and worse nor thishere when you gets in the trenches, over there.

“Somebody go ring up the medics and get some litters over here, on the double, seven … no, eight of ‘em. Sargint majer, have your men git all the weapons together and get ’em back to the arms room, then git back here, and don’t you swaller none of Jacoby’s shit ’bout ’em havin’ to be cleaned afore you can turn ’em in; allus remember, you outranks him.”

As he put the safety on his submachine gun and passed it to the waiting hands, he caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and spun about to see Milo, his uniform soaked in blood, his hands smeared and streaked with it, twitching feebly, his lips moving soundlessly.

“Sweet fuckin’ Christ,” Saxon whispered, then turned and roared out the doorway, “Git that big medical kit down here, fast , and tell the medical comp’ny to get a fuckin’ surgeon over here on the fuckin’ double. I think Moray’s still alive!”

By the time the medical officer arrived in the charnel house of a room, John Saxon was squatting beside the semiconscious Milo, an opened but unused medical kit behind him.

“The onlies’ thing I can figger happened, lootinant, is that the fuckin’ slug tore th’ough his shirt, in the front and out of the back—the holes is both there for to show for it. In dodgin’, someways he musta tripped over the MFs body and cracked his fuckin’ haid when he fell, and he fell right in a big puddle of the fuckin’ MP’s blood and Moffa just figgered he was dead meat. It ain’t no wounds on him, ‘cepting that goose egg on his fuckin’ knob. Don’t nobody but fools and Paddies mostly have that kind of luck.”

All of the injuries and deaths save only Moffa’s were determined to be L.O.D.—line-of-duty—and Milo found himself being accorded vast respect by officers and men alike for all that his personal choice of the real hero of that terrible day was old, combat-wise Captain Saxon.

“Now, goddam you, Milo,” Stiles had railed at him in private, “you’re not immortal, you know—you can bleed and die, too. You’re not paid to take that kind of stupid chance. That’s what we have eight hundred odd GIs in this battalion for. You’re too valuable to the unit. You’re too valuable to me, too, you fucker. I happen to know you’ve promised Martine to try to keep me alive through the rest of this war. How the bloody hell are you going to do that if you go and get yourself shot and killed for nothing?”

Then he had grinned. “By the way, even if our last trip up north had accomplished nothing for the division, at least it accomplished something positive for the future. Martine is pregnant again.”

Jethro Stiles had attested his belief in Milo’s mortality. But Milo himself was beginning to wonder about that subject, to entertain certain doubts. Much as he tried to rationalize these insanities away, still did they come back to haunt him.

Everyone else might believe Saxon’s assumption that the shot fired at him by Moffa had missed, but Milo knew them all to be wrong. What he had to face was that he had been shot in—or close enough not to matter—the heart with one of the most powerful and deadly combat pistols in existence and at a point-blank range of less than a dozen feet. He clearly recalled the force of being hit and flung against the wall, and he could still remember the agony of the heavy ball tearing through his body, though that particular bit of recall was slowly fading, he noted thankfully.