Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

They kept coming without missing a beat, so evidently the plan was to clear out the blocks of flats right around here. Gustav smelled smoke, fresh and strong. Red Army heavy machine guns could fire incendiary rounds. Or any ordinary hot slug might have set something on fire above his head.

Time to leave, then. Burning a building down was one of the oldest ways to clear it of foes, and still one of the best. Time to leave, before he couldn’t get away. He fed the PPSh a fresh magazine, then bade that bathroom a none too fond farewell. Small sparkling pieces of the mirror crunched under the soles of his boots.

The rest of the flat was in even worse shape. When he got out into the hallway, he almost bumped into Rolf. They both started to raise their weapons, then stopped when they realized they were on the same side. “Sorry about that,” Gustav said with a sickly grin.

“It’s all right. That shit happens.” The ex-LAH man’s grin seemed more wolfish than sickly. “Don’t want to stay in the oven till you bake all golden brown?”

“Fuck golden brown. Fuck you, too,” Gustav said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Rolf started whistling something as they hurried down the stairs to the cellar. Gustav didn’t recognize it at first. Then he did, and almost tripped and broke his neck. It was “Heigh Ho! Heigh Ho! It’s off to work we go,” the dwarfs’ song from Snow White. Where the devil did that come from?

After another second or two, it made…some sense, anyhow. In German lore and legend, dwarfs were mostly underground beings, miners and tunnelers and the like. The German militiamen in Bochum and Essen and now Duisburg used the same skills. The cellars on this block and the next one over all had tunnels running from one to the next. You could move through them, as the two Germans were doing now, or, if you had to, you could fight in them.

“I haven’t had so much fun in I can’t remember when,” Gustav said as they tramped through the darkness toward the next block farther west.

“You want fun, go play with yourself,” Rolf answered. “We’ve got to stop the Russians. They’ve trampled almost the whole Vaterland now.”

“I never would have noticed if you hadn’t told me,” Gustav said. “Why the hell do you think we’re in goddamn Duisburg when we started out in Fulda?”

“But if Stalin conquers the whole Reich, he’ll Bolshevize it,” Rolf said, as if that were the worst thing he could imagine.

Gustav could think of worse ones. “If Stalin takes the whole Reich, odds are he’ll kill both of us by the time he does.”

“If all the Vaterland bows down to the hammer and sickle, I don’t want to live.” Rolf still sounded like a Waffen -SS man, all right.

“ I want to live,” Gustav said. “I want to throw him out of my country. I want to kill Russians. I’m not so very interested in dying myself, thank you very much.”

“Sometimes death in battle is necessary for the higher good.” Rolf couldn’t strike a pose here in the gloom, but he sounded as if he wanted to.

It wasn’t that he was wrong: more that an asshole who was right remained an asshole. “If you want to get killed, don’t let me stop you,” Gustav said. Then he froze as a flashlight beam speared him and Rolf from out of the black ahead.

“Come on, chuckleheads!” said a German voice behind the beam. “We’re going to blow this tunnel in a couple of minutes, to keep the Ivans from following you guys.”

That got Gustav and Rolf moving, as the soldier with the flashlight no doubt meant it to. Gustav wondered what kind of fieldworks they had on the next block, how long they could hold them, and how many Russians would die attacking them. He lit a smoke. He was starting to like Luckies. And he was still in there fighting.

It was past closing time. Gently but firmly, Daisy Baxter had herded RAF and USAF men out of the Owl and Unicorn into the blacked-out streets of Fakenham. Some of them were liable to fall off their bicycles on the way back to the base at Sculthorpe. They might get knots on their noggins and scrapes on their knees. They were unlikely to smash themselves up the way they could driving drunk in motorcars.

Surveying the mess, she let out a long sigh. The more they drank, the worse the slobs they became. Empty and almost empty pints everywhere, ashtrays overflowing with butts, cigarettes stubbed out on tabletops, potato-crisp and meat-pie wrappers tossed to the floor…At least no one tonight had thrown up before he could get to the toilets. She hated that.

Daisy sighed again. She wanted to go to bed herself. It had been another long day. But she had to clean up first. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t sleep till things were tidy. If you didn’t take care of it, the elves wouldn’t, either. You just couldn’t get good elves these days.

She lit a cigarette. After she’d done it, she wondered why she’d bothered. The smoke already in the pub left the air as thick and gray and curdled as a bad London fog. Just breathing had to give her as much nicotine as the Navy Cut between her index and middle fingers. But there it was, so she finished it.

Then she got to work. First she emptied the ashtrays and wiped the tables and the long bars clean. Then she swept the garbage off the floor. After she put away the broom and the dustpan, she got the carpet sweeper out of the closet to pick up what they couldn’t. She’d deal with the squadrons of mugs after she took care of that.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Oh, bloody hell!” Daisy exclaimed. She could swear if she felt like it-who was going to hear her and be shocked? And feel like it she did. Every so often, one of the flyers, Yank or British, would decide he had to have one more pint no matter what, and bugger the laws that said he couldn’t till tomorrow. That she’d lose her license for drawing him the pint never bothered him a farthing’s worth. Why should it? It wasn’t his license.

Sometimes, if she quietly went about her business and pretended the tipsy fool outside wasn’t there, he would give up and go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t, and then she’d have to deal with him. That was almost as much fun as visiting the dentist.

The one tonight wasn’t going away, damn him. He knocked, paused, knocked some more. Another pause. Some more knocks. He was as regular and persistent as a woodpecker. He had to have a head just as hard as a woodpecker’s, too.

Daisy muttered something she’d heard once from a liquored-up, belligerent ordnance sergeant. It should have made the tables and chairs catch fire. Muttering some more, she pushed out through the blackout curtains to the door.

She didn’t open it. Through the wood and the tiny windows-useless now, with no lights on the street-she said, “It’s past closing time. I can’t serve you.” She didn’t say So sod off! but her voice was full of the suggestion.

She waited for the angry, beery insistence. She’d been down this road too many times. She was sick of it. Right this second, she was sick of everything that had to do with running a pub.

But the American voice on the other side of the door didn’t sound beery at all: “I don’t want a pint. I just want to talk to you.”

She still had to finish cleaning the floor. She had to wash and dry the glass mugs. She found herself opening the door anyhow. “Well, then, you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

“Thanks.” Bruce McNulty stepped over the threshold. A little light leaked under the bottom of the blackout curtains: enough to make him seem to have suddenly materialized there. It was also enough to make Daisy shut the door behind him before the wandering air-raid warden walked by and started shouting at her.