Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

His back was to Daniels. Mutt had grown up hunting squirrels and possums for the pot. He swung the rifle up to his shoulder, exhaled, saw the front of the Lizard’s head explode in a red mist a split second before he threw himself away from his firing position.

“Nailed the son of a bitch!” he shouted through the din of gunfire and explosions. The other Americans sheltering in the ruined factory raised a cheer. Such a clear-cut cry of victory came their way too seldom. Had the Lizards had the numbers to match the might of their marvelous machines, Daniels knew the fight would have been long since lost.

Nor did he get more than a moment to exult in his successful piece of sniping. Bullets from the tank’s machine gun lashed the factory building. He huddled in back of another broken power tool, grateful for the heavy chunk of iron and steel that shielded him from flying death.

“Good job, Mutt,” Sergeant Schneider bawled. “You diverted him from the advance he was making. Taking us out doesn’t mean a thing strategically.”

Daniels wondered whether he’d be any less dead if he got killed in an action strategically meaningless. He didn’t think so. “Damn shame,” he muttered. He also marveled that Schneider could still think and talk like a professional soldier while being hosed down by machine-gun slugs.

Then there was a sudden hot yellow glare outside, as if the sun had come on in the middle of the street. The roar that accompanied it was loud, the wham-crash! of the shell from the tank’s big gun even louder. Chunks of brick rained down on Daniels; a timber that would have smashed him like a bug was instead smashed itself against the machine behind which he cowered.

The tank gave the factory two more rounds: flash, boom crash; flash, boom, crash. Mutt screamed for all he was worth, but couldn’t hear himself or anyone else. He wondered if he’d ever hear anything again. At the moment, it was the least of his worries. He realized he’d wet his pants, but he didn’t care about that, either.

When he tried to scramble away, his arms and legs shook so much he could hardly move. “Shell shock,” he said, feeling the words on his lips but not hearing them at all. He’d seen men like this in the trenches after a good German barrage. Other soldiers would jeer at them, but not too hard-it wasn’t as if the poor bastards could help themselves. He marveled at being alive.

“Hey, Schneider,” he called, “you think them Lizards are fucking diverted enough for now?”

He didn’t hear Schneider answer, but that was all right-he hadn’t heard himself ask the question. He glanced over to where the sergeant had been hiding. Any further jokes stuck in his throat. The veteran was nothing but splashed blood and raw meat ground not too fine.

Daniels gulped. “Jesus,” he whispered. Schneider was the best soldier he’d ever known-by a wide margin in this crazy war and, he thought, also better than any of the top sergeants he’d served under in France. One way you told good soldiers from bad was that the good ones lived to learn new things while the bad ones bought their farms in a hurry. Seeing a good soldier dead reminded you that you could end up the same way yourself. Mutt didn’t want reminders like that.

He smelled smoke, sharp and fresh. It was a reminder, too, a reminder there were nastier ways to die than getting chewed to pieces by a storm of shell splinters. Schneider, at least, never knew what hit him. If you roasted, you’d have plenty of time to regret it. All at once, Daniels’ shaky limbs worked, if not perfectly, then well enough.

He looked around the gloomy inside of the factory building-considerably less gloomy now that the Lizards had done some fresh ventilation work on the front-for the rest of the Americans who’d been in here with him. A couple of them weren’t going anywhere: they lay dead as gruesomely as Schneider. Three or four others, as lucky as he’d been himself, were getting away from the fire as fast as they could. And a couple of wounded men flopped on the floor like fresh-landed fish in the bottom of a boat.

Both Mutt’s grandfathers had fought in the War Between the States, and both, as old men will, told stories to the wide-eyed boy he’d been. He remembered Pappy Daniels, long white beard stained with tobacco juice, talking about the Battle of the Wilderness and how wounded men there had shot themselves before any of the little blazes all the musketry had started could wash over them.

That memory-one he hadn’t called to mind in years-told him what he had to do. He hurried forward, grabbed one of the injured soldiers, and dragged him away from the spreading flames over to a tumbledown wall that might shelter him for a little while.

“Thanks,” the fellow gasped.

“It’s okay.” Daniels quickly bandaged the worst of the man’s wounds, then went back to pick up his comrade. He had to sling his rifle; the other fellow had passed out, and was a two-hand carry. He’d just taken him onto his shoulders when a Lizard infantryman skittered into the factory.

He was sure he was dead. After what seemed an age but had to have been only a heartbeat, the Lizard pointed the muzzle of its rifle to the floor, gestured with its free hand: get your wounded buddy out of here.

Sometimes-far from always-the Germans had extended that courtesy in France; sometimes-just as far from always-the Americans returned it. Daniels never expected to encounter it from a thing that looked like one of the monsters in the serials his ballplayers liked to watch.

“Obliged,” he told the Lizard, though he knew it couldn’t understand. Then he raised his voice to the men hiding somewhere in the ruins: “Don’t shoot this one, fellas! He’s all right.”

Staggering under the weight of the soldier he’d lifted, he carried him back to the wall behind which he’d laid the other wounded man. At the same time, the Lizard slowly backed out of the factory building. Nobody fired at it.

The tiny truce held for perhaps half a minute. Mutt rolled the second injured soldier off his shoulder, discovered he wasn’t breathing. He grabbed the fellow’s wrist; his finger found the spot just on the thumb side of the tendons. No pulse. The soldier’s arm flopped limply when he let it fall. “Aah, shit,” he said dully. The strange moment of comradeship had gone for nothing, lost in the waste that was war.

More Lizards dashed into the building. They fired their automatic weapons from the hip, not aiming at anything in particular but making the Americans keep their heads down. Only a couple of rifle rounds answered them. The fellow who shoots first has the edge, Daniels thought. He’d learned that in the trenches, and it still seemed true.

All at once, he realized that with Schneider dead, he was the senior noncom present. He’d been in charge of more men than these as a manager but the stakes hadn’t been so high-nobody shot you for hanging a curve ball no matter how much people talked about it.

The first wounded man he d dragged to cover was still very much alive. “Fall back!” Mutt yelled. He started crawling away, dragging the hurt soldier after him. Stand up now and you’d stop one of those sprayed bullets just as sure as sunrise.

A beam crashed down behind him. Flames crackled, then roared at his back He tried to crawl faster. “Over here!” somebody shouted.

He changed direction. Hands reached out to help pull the wounded man behind a file cabinet that, between its metal and the reams of paper spilling from it, probably could have stopped a Lizard tank round. Mutt got in back of it himself and lay there, panting like a dog on a Mississippi summer day.

“Smitty still alive up there?” asked the soldier already under cover.