Harry Turtledove - Fallout

Air-raid sirens began their warbling screech. Daisy said something that would have made Simon Perkins look as if he’d just bitten into a green persimmon. The Russian Beagle bombers got bolder by the day. They zoomed across the skies of eastern England like malevolent bats, dropping bombs here and there and then disappearing.

“Run for the shelter!” a man who was taking his own advice shouted to Daisy.

Antiaircraft guns went off in the distance. The tracers arcing across the sky put her in mind of Guy Fawkes’ Day. She knew she was taking a chance staying out in the open. But it wasn’t a big chance. A Beagle might target East Dereham. There wasn’t anything about the place that would really tempt one of the marauders, though.

Here came a jeep. “Hey, good-lookin’!” an American voice called. “Wanna come for a ride with me?”

“I’d love to!” She hopped in. She was getting used to the right side’s not holding the driving seat. She leaned over to kiss Bruce-who would see her while she did it?

He put the jeep in gear. More antiaircraft guns bellowed. More tracers scribed lines of fire overhead. Bruce chuckled. “Maybe we should’ve worn-what do you call ’em over here?-tin hats, that’s it. Don’t want fragments coming down on our heads.”

“I wasn’t fretting about it,” Daisy said. “All I was thinking about was you, and us, and us later on.”

She could still see his grin. “I like the way you think, babe.” He swung the jeep onto the road that led southwest. “And now, on to wonderful, historical Watton.”

“Oh, rubbish!” Daisy said. “There’s no history to any of the little towns and villages around here. That means Fakenham, too, or it did before the bomb hit. People live in places like these because they want nothing to do with history. Only sometimes it comes calling whether you want it or not.”

“I guess so,” Bruce said. How much history had he carried in his B-29’s bomb bay? On whom had it fallen, whether they wanted it or not? He wasn’t thinking about that now. He went on, “The combo playing at the dance is Freddy Cullenbine and His Smokin’ Five. How come that sounds familiar?”

“Weren’t they the band at Yaxham, the first time we-?” Daisy felt herself blushing. She didn’t go on.

“You could be right.” Bruce set a hand on her knee. “I wasn’t paying much attention to what their name was. I had other things on my mind.” The hand moved higher.

With a laugh, Daisy knocked it away. “While you’re driving, kindly drive.”

Watton was bigger than Yaxham, smaller than East Dereham. It thought it had history-it boasted, and boasted of, a clock tower from the seventeenth century. A sign in front of the tower-barely readable now, as the light was failing-said the clock had got a new face in the 1930s. The dance was at the town social hall, a few doors down from the gray stone tower.

Freddy Cullenbine did prove to be the pot-bellied trumpeter who wished he were Satchmo. If he lacked genius, he and his bandmates had plenty of enthusiasm. Bruce steered Daisy out onto the dance floor.

“You’re perkier than you were before,” he said after a while. “You don’t fold up after a couple of numbers the way you used to.”

“I’ve got my strength back, or most of it,” she said.

He squeezed her. “I’m darn glad you do.”

“I wouldn’t mind sitting the next one out, though,” Daisy said. “I could use a pint of bitter-maybe even two.”

“Now you’re talking, honey!” Bruce said.

This was better bitter than they’d served in Yaxham, though not, to Daisy’s thinking, a match for what she’d sold at the Owl and Unicorn. To Bruce, who’d grown up with bilgewater like Pabst and Schlitz, all English bitter was a revelation. He downed two pints in quick succession.

“It’s stronger than you think,” Daisy said. “Will you be all right to drive?”

“I’d worry about it if there was gonna be any traffic,” he answered. “The way things are, the biggest thing I’ve gotta watch out for is running over a sheep in the dark.”

She laughed. “Fair enough.”

Sweat gleaming on his broad expanse of forehead, Freddy Cullenbine worked as hard as any of the dancers. He eventually took a break and got himself a pint. “Louis Armstrong would never do that,” Bruce said, clucking in mock disapproval. “He’d have a bourbon instead.” That made Daisy laugh some more. She liked laughing with someone. She squeezed Bruce’s arm.

Then jet engines roaring low over the social hall made everyone inside think twice about the contrast between the good time they were having and the deadly game of hunter and hunted in the sky above. “I hope they get him,” Daisy said.

“Yeah, me, too,” Bruce replied. But how far did he mean that? The Russians in their Beagles were part of his guild, as it were. The RAF and USAF fighter pilots belonged with the men in MiGs who harried invaders of their airspace. Daisy started to ask him, then decided she didn’t want to know after all.

Getting out of the crowded, smoky, sweaty social hall was a relief. It was a relief in several senses, in fact; Daisy paused to spend a penny in the ladies’ loo. Bruce smoked a cigarette waiting for her to come out. “You should have eased yourself, too,” she said.

“I’m okay,” he answered. “I can always stop and go behind a tree if I have to.” He drooped out his tongue like a panting dog and mimed lifting a leg. She giggled.

It was cool and clear outside. The moon had set not long before. With lights all across the country blacked out, though, stars sparkled bright and clear. The Milky Way gleamed, ghost-pale. Daisy squeezed Bruce again. They’d just driven the jeep out of town when more jet engines howled and antiaircraft guns thundered rage at them.

“Maybe it’s not such a hot night to stop anywhere,” Bruce said. “If you want, I’ll take you straight back to your place.”

“Don’t be silly!” Daisy shook her head. “You’ll do no such thing!”

“Okey-doke.” This time, he slid his hand under the hem of her dress and slid it up her stockinged thigh toward his target. He knew all about bull’s-eyes, too. “Then we’ll do something else.”

Which, when they found a secluded lane near a pear orchard, they did. More fireworks kept going off in the sky, but they had fireworks of their own. Daisy hardly noticed the show overhead, or even the roars of bombs going off. If Bruce did, he gave no sign she could sense, and all her senses were straining.

Afterwards, though, he did say “Lousy Beagles are busy tonight” as he peeled off his rubber. Then he laughed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am gonna walk over to one of those nice trees. Beer does take its revenge.”

Daisy’s manners were too good to let her tell him I told you so. She was distracted a moment later, anyhow. Another jet roared low over the quiet English countryside. Two more were right behind, shooting off machine guns and underwing rockets.

One of those rockets scored a hit. The fleeing plane-the Beagle?-blew apart in midair. Flaming wreckage pinwheeled toward the ground. One big blazing chunk flew straight at the jeep. Daisy watched it, open-mouthed…for a split second too long. Then she started to jump out.

–

Lieutenant Stanislav Kosior ran around keeping an eye on the men in his company like a mother hen herding along a new brood of chicks. “Come on!” he called. “Come on, come on! Into the trucks! Hurry up! Pile on in! You can do it!”

“Do you know what’s going on, Comrade Lieutenant?” Ihor Shevchenko asked him.

“They’re pulling this whole division out of the line,” Kosior said. “They have some other duty in mind for us. What that is, they haven’t told me yet. Whatever it is, I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Corporal, and so do you.”