Harry Turtledove: Fallout

So the screaming man in there went right on screaming for the next two hours. As far as Gustav could tell, he fell silent of his own accord, not because anyone killed him. Even after he did, though, the noises he made echoed and reechoed inside the German’s head. That could be me , they said. That could be me .

–

A Red Army man with a sergeant’s shoulder boards said something in Russian to Istvan Szolovits. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, pal,” the Hungarian Jew replied in Magyar.

That was as much gibberish to the Ivan as Russian was to Szolovits. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” the noncom snarled.

Istvan did understand that particular unendearment. Not letting on that he did, though, seemed the better part of valor. The Russian looked very ready to use the PPSh clamped in his hairy paws. Since it had a seventy-one-round snail drum attached, if he started shooting he wouldn’t stop till he’d pureed whatever had pissed him off.

Taking a calculated risk, Istvan asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” If a Hungarian and a Russian had any language in common, German was the top candidate. Of course, if the sergeant did speak German, he was liable to order Istvan to do something that would get him killed. That was where the risk came in.

But the Russian just looked disgusted. “Nyet!” he answered proudly, and spat at Szolovits’ feet. Istvan stood there with his best stupid expression plastered across his face. The Russian spun on his heel and stomped off. Every line of his body radiated rage.

“He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?” Sergeant Gergely said from behind Istvan. Istvan jumped. He hadn’t heard his own superior coming up. Gergely could be cat-quiet when he chose.

“Sure is, Sergeant,” Szolovits said.

Gergely’s chuckle had a nasty edge to it. It often did. Coming from that ferret face, the wonder was that sometimes it didn’t. “You’re thinking the asshole was just like me,” he said, daring Istvan to deny it.

Deny it Istvan did: “No, Sergeant, honest to God, I wasn’t thinking that at all. That Russian, he was only a bruiser.”

“And I’m not…only a bruiser?” Gergely could be most dangerous when he seemed smoothest-which went a long way toward proving he wasn’t only a bruiser.

“You know damn well you’re not,” Szolovits blurted.

For a split second, Sergeant Gergely preened. He had his share of vanity: maybe more than his share. But he came by it almost honestly. He’d worn a Stahlhelm and fought in Admiral Horthy’s Honved when Hungary joined Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Not only that, he’d survived the horrible Russian siege and conquest of Budapest near the end of the war.

And he was still a soldier, now for the Hungarian People’s Army. A Soviet-style helmet covered his dome. Instead of the old Honved ’s tobacco-brown khaki cut almost in Austro-Hungarian style, his uniform, like Istvan’s, looked Russian except for being made from greener cloth. No mere bruiser could have performed that handspring of allegiances so acrobatically. He might be ugly and nasty, but his brains worked fine.

He carried a PPSh like the Russian’s, though he fed his with thirty-five-round boxes rather than snail drum-he said he could change and charge them faster. He gestured with the muzzle. “C’mon, kid. Let’s see what’s going on up there. What we don’t know can kill us.”

“So can what we do know,” Istvan said in hollow tones, but he followed Gergely through the ruins of Raesfeld. The village lay east of Wesel, in the middle of the forest called the Dammerwald. The forest had also been pretty comprehensively ruined; eye-stinging woodsmoke hung in the air, partly masking the wartime stink of death.

He knew he wouldn’t move with such smoothness and silence as the sergeant showed if he stayed in the Hungarian People’s Army for the next fifty years. He was tall and loosely put together-shambling, if you wanted to get right down to it. With light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a nose-shaped nose, he didn’t look especially Jewish. Only his mouth really gave him away.

Out in the forest, an American rifle cracked. Whether an American or a German fired it, Istvan didn’t know. The Red Army and its fraternal socialist allies seined the areas they occupied with a coarse net. Little fish could slip through the mesh and make trouble later on.

Most of the soldiers in Raesfeld were Russians. They either ignored the Hungarians or sneered at them, depending on whether they took them for countrymen or recognized that they belonged to a satellite army. There was that sergeant who’d growled at Istvan. He’d liberated a bottle of wine from somewhere and was guzzling it down. Of course, he’d be more used to vodka. If that was what you drank most of the time, you could pour down a lot of wine before you felt it.

That American rifle barked again. A Russian major not ten meters from Istvan threw his hands in the air and let out a high-pitched, bubbling screech as he fell over. Blood puddled on the paving under him. A Red Army private ran up to drag him to safety, and the sniper shot him, too. He went down without a sound and lay motionless. Istvan had seen enough horror to be sure he wouldn’t get up again.

A machine gun started hosing down the edge of the Dammerwald. Maybe it would punch the rifleman’s ticket for him, maybe not. The bastard had already earned his day’s pay any which way.

And, as soon as the machine gun quieted, a defiant rifle round spanged off brickwork too close to Istvan for comfort. A furious Soviet officer ordered men into the forest to hunt the sniper down.

“Those fuckers are like cockroaches,” Sergeant Gergely said. “You can never step on all of them, no matter how hard you try.” An A-bomb would do it, Istvan thought. How could you have people hiding in the woods if you eliminated both woods and people?

The machine gun banged away to help the hunters advance. As soon as it eased back for a bit, the sniper out there squeezed off a couple of rounds to remind the Russians they hadn’t killed him. A Red Army soldier near the edge of the woods bellowed in pain and let out a horrible stream of profanity. Istvan understood only bits of it, but admired the incandescent flow of the rest.

“That Yank or Fritz out there will be disappointed,” he remarked as aid men brought the wounded soldier back to Raesfeld. “He didn’t kill that guy-he just put him out of action for a while.”

“Half the time-more than half-that’s all a sniper wants,” Sergeant Gergely said. “Look. Two guys are taking him back to a hospital tent. A doctor will have to work on him there. He’ll lie on his ass in a bed for a while, and more people’ll need to feed him and wash him and change his bandages. A wounded man makes more trouble than a dead one. If somebody catches a round in the ear and just drops, you plug in a replacement and go on. This way, a whole bunch of people have to waste days dealing with the fucker.”

“Huh.” Istvan wasn’t a dope, or he didn’t think he was, but he’d never looked at war’s economics from that angle before. The Russian machine gun started up once more, and Ivans with machine pistols wasted ammo on whatever their imaginations fed them. When they stopped, the sniper took another shot at somebody. That made Istvan say, “They ought to drop an A-bomb on the woods. That would settle the son of a bitch, sure as hell.”

To his surprise, Gergely cuffed him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. “You wanna watch what you say, sonny, to make sure it doesn’t come true.”

“How do you mean?”

“Say the Russians throw the Americans out of West Germany. Only thing I can see stopping Truman from using A-bombs here is, the West Germans are on his side. But if they’re all in Russian hands, how much does he care any more?”