Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

He didn’t actually see a doctor. A pharmacist’s mate looked him over. “You don’t seem too bad, all things considered,” the man said after a very quick, very cursory check. “Just don’t try to fatten yourself up all at once.” He picked up a spray gun. “Shed the robe.” He sprayed both Fletch and the garment.

Fletch’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that stuff?” he asked. Whatever it was, it had a harsh, chemical tang. There were other kinds of bad smells besides those that sprang from filth and death.

“Shit’s called DDT-and now you know as much as you did before, right?” the pharmacist’s mate said.

“What you need to know is, it kills lice, mosquitoes, every kind of bug under the sun, kills ’em dead, dead, dead. You may not believe it, but you aren’t lousy any more.”

“What about the nits?” Fletch scratched automatically.

“Kills them, too,” the sailor said. “And if a louse does somehow hatch, what’s left of the DDT in your hair is plenty to make the little bastard buy the farm. I’m telling you, buddy, this shit is the straight goods.”

“Yeah? What’s it do to people, then?” Fletch asked.

“Diddly squat. Safe as houses. Greatest thing since sliced bread.” The pharmacist’s mate gave him back the robe. “Go feed your face. Not too much, though, you hear? Or you’ll be sorry.”

“Yes, Mother,” Fletch said, which made the other man laugh. He went on to the galley. They had biscuits there, with butter and jam. Flour had vanished from Oahu even before the American surrender. It all came from the mainland-and then it stopped coming. Butter and jam were only memories, too. “Thank you, Jesus!” somebody said: as short and sincere a grace as Fletch had ever heard.

And then the cooks brought out platters of fried chicken. At the sight, at the mouth-watering smell, several POWs burst into tears. One of them said, “But what’s for all the other guys?” That got a laugh and defused the tension that had built at the presence of so much food. Fletch felt the fear-somebody else might get more than he did. He had to remind himself there was plenty for everyone. His head might know that, but his belly didn’t.

He snagged a drumstick. The coating of batter crunched in his mouth. Then he was eating hot chicken. He wasn’t dreaming about it. It was real. Tears streamed down his cheeks. It was real. When he set the bone down, not the tiniest scrap of meat was left on it. No crumbs from the biscuits remained on his plate, either.

He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t feel starved. He didn’t even feel hungry. He could hardly remember what that was like. “Wow!” he said.

The man next to him grinned. “Right the first time, buddy.”

A sailor came by to pick up plates. A POW stopped him, saying, “I was at the Opana camp for a while, up at the other end of the island. That place was as big as this one, maybe bigger. Have you gone after the guys there, too?”

The sailor’s face clouded. “We can’t,” he said. “As soon as we got close to it, the Japs started shooting up the place. We weren’t ready for it then-we didn’t think anybody could act that bastardly. Shows what we knew.” He made as if to spit on the deck, then caught himself at the last second. “Don’t know for sure how many guys those fuckers murdered-gotta be thousands.”

“Jesus!” The prisoner who’d asked the question crossed himself.

Fletch was horrified but not surprised. Everything the Japanese had done since taking Hawaii showed POWs were nothing but a nuisance to them. They’d starved their captives, abused them, and worked them to death. Why wouldn’t they slaughter them to keep them from being rescued? It made perfect sense-if you fought the war like that.

“Thanks for getting to us before they did the same thing at Kapiolani,” he said. The gob hadn’t had thing one to do with it, but Fletch had enough gratitude to spread around to anybody in the U.S. military right now.

“Brass figured we’d better try,” the sailor said. “I’m gladder’n hell it went as well as it did.”

How many Japanese machine-gun bullets had snapped by within a couple of feet of Fletch? How many scrawny, starving men had those bullets killed? He didn’t know. He wondered if anyone would ever know exactly. He knew who would, if anybody ever did: Graves Registration. And yet here he was, on an American ship, his belly full-really full! — of American food. He was gladder than hell the rescue had gone as well as it had, too.

THE GUARDS IN THE KALIHI VALLEY WERE JUMPIER than ever. That made the prisoners tunneling through the Koolau Range jumpier than ever, too-those of them who kept the strength to worry. Jim Peterson still did. So did Charlie Kaapu. Peterson admired the hapa -Hawaiian’s strength and determination. He wished he could match them, but he’d been here much longer than Charlie, and he’d been in worse shape when he got here. His spirit was willing. His flesh? He had no flesh to speak of, not any more. He had skin, and he had bones, and only hunger between them.

“We got to get out of here,” Charlie whispered to him one evening before exhaustion knocked them over the head. “We got to. Those fuckers gettin’ ready to do us all in. You can see it in their eyes.”

Peterson nodded. He’d had the same thought himself. Every time artillery fire got closer, every time American fighters flew by overhead, they might have been twisting a knife in the Japs’ guts. The guards would lash out then, the way a kid who’d just lost a schoolyard brawl might kick a dog. They didn’t have any dogs to kick, though. They had POWs instead, and kicking was the least of what they did to them.

At the same time, Peterson shook his head. Even that took effort. “Go ahead, if you think you can get away. I’d just hold you back.”

“You can do it, man,” Charlie said. “Gotta be tough. Get back to Honolulu, you be okay.”

He might be okay if he got back to Honolulu. Flesh melted off him day by day, but he still had some. The first Jap who saw Peterson would know him for what he was-he didn’t think he weighed a hundred pounds any more. And that would be all she wrote. The outskirts of Honolulu weren’t more than three or four miles away. They might as well have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the good that did Peterson.

“I’m done for,” he said. “Not enough left of me to be worth saving.”

“Shit,” Charlie said. “Don’t you want to get your own back? Don’t you want to watch these assholes get what’s coming to ’em? How you gonna do that if you lay down and die?”

“I’m not laying down,” Peterson said, remembering how fiercely he’d sworn revenge back when captivity was new. “I’m not laying down, dammit, but I can’t go anywhere very far, either. Look at me.” He held out his arm: five knobby pencils attached to a broomstick. “Look. How am I going to run if we get spotted?”

Charlie Kaapu looked. He swore, his words all the more terrible for being so low-voiced. “I’ll go. I’ll bring back help. Bet I find American soldiers in Honolulu.”

Maybe he would. There’d been a hell of a lot of shooting from somewhere down that way a few nights earlier. Whatever it was all about, the guards had been even nastier since. Peterson wouldn’t have imagined they needed an excuse for that, but they seemed to. He said, “If you make it, tell ’em we’re up here. Far as anybody knows, I bet we’ve fallen off the edge of the world.”

“I’ll do it,” Charlie said. “You really can’t come, man?” Peterson shook his head again. The hapa — Hawaiian reached out in the darkness and set a hand on his bony shoulder. “Hang on, brother. I’m gonna get away. I’m gonna bring help.”