Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

The prisoners slept in bamboo huts thatched with whatever leaves and branches they could throw on top. It was about as wet inside the huts as outside. The bunks were better than lying in the mud, but only a little. “Jesus!” Peterson said, looking down at his hands as light leached out of the sky. They’d been battered and callused before he got here. They were worse now. The Japs here pushed POWs harder than they had anywhere else. This was punishment work, what prisoners did if the occupiers decided not to shoot them. Whether that was a mercy was an open question.

Somebody got up and shambled off toward the latrine trench. Most of the men who’d been here for a while had dysentery. Some of the new fish had already come down with it. Peterson hadn’t yet, but figured it was only a matter of time.

“Jesus!” he said again, and then, “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”

“Amen,” said Gordy Braddon, who came from his shooting squad. “And if that son of a bitch was in hell screaming for water, I’d give him gasoline to drink. Ethyl, no less.”

“Yeah,” Peterson said savagely. “Wasn’t for him, we’d be…” His voice trailed away. Even without London’s escape, their predicament wouldn’t have been anything wonderful. But it would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this.

He’d had that thought before. He’d had it several times since the surrender, in fact. Every damn one of them, he’d been wrong. If he turned out to be wrong again… I’m a dead man, he thought.

He might easily end up a dead man even if there was nothing worse than this. He knew that, too. And when he flopped back onto the bunk and closed his eyes, he sure as hell slept like a dead man.

A Jap banging a shell casing with a hammer made him pry his eyes open the next morning. Groans rose in the hut from those with the energy to give them. Not everybody sat up despite the racket of iron smashing against brass. The Japs came in and started kicking people. That got most of the POWs up and moving. One scrawny fellow just lay there. The guard who’d been shouting at him and booting him gave him a yank. He fell on the ground-plop.

The guard felt of him, then straightened up. “Shinde iru,” he said, and jerked a thumb toward the door, as if to add, Get rid of the carrion.

“Poor Jonesy,” said somebody behind Peterson. “He wasn’t a bad guy.”

Although the dead Jonesy couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, four POWs carried him out. Peterson was one of them. They were all just shadows of their former selves, and fading shadows at that. The graveyard didn’t have individual graves, just big trenches. Flies buzzed around them, even though the Japs did put down quicklime after a fresh corpse went in.

Thump! In fell the dead Jones. They tried not to put him on top of anybody else, but the trenches were filling up. Despite the lime, the stench was bad. “Could be one of us next,” a bearer said.

Stubbornly, Jim Peterson shook his head. “As long as we’re strong enough to carry, we won’t die right away. I aim to last till the US of A comes back.”

“How long do you figure that’ll be?” the other man asked him. He didn’t say, Ever? — which was something.

Peterson shrugged. “Damfino. I’m gonna stick it out, that’s all. The Japs are putting us in graves, but I’m gonna spit on one of theirs, by God.”

Even saying that was taking a chance. If one of the other three corpse-haulers ratted on him to the Japs, they might kill him out of hand. But they probably wouldn’t. He couldn’t do anything to them, no matter what he said. Odds were they’d just beat him up and put him back to work till he couldn’t work any more.

“We better get back,” he said. “If we aren’t at the lineup, they won’t feed us.”

That got his companions in misery moving. Losing out on food was the worst thing that could happen to you here, worse even than a beating. Food kept your motor turning over. Assuming you wanted to go on living, that was good. As Peterson and the other three walked back, men from another hut came past them with a dead body even skinnier than Jonesy’s had been. Peterson heard the final thud as it went in.

He didn’t look back.

The count for his hut was fouled up, as it often was when somebody died. The Japs always got all hot and bothered when they saw fewer men than they expected. They knew Jonesy was dead, but that somehow didn’t seem to matter. They had to fuss and fume and gabble and wave their hands till they remembered that so many live guys minus one dead guy equaled the number of guys swaying in front of the hut.

Rain started coming down when the POWs finally trudged off to get their morning rice. This wasn’t “liquid sunshine.” Up here in the mountains, when it rained it rained like a son of a bitch. Peterson’s shoes squelched in the mud. It leaked in through growing gaps between uppers and soles. Pretty soon, those shoes were just going to fall apart. He didn’t know what he’d do then. No, actually he did know: he’d damn well go barefoot.

For the first few minutes after food hit his stomach, he felt almost like a human being. He headed for the tunnel site.

Gangs who’d got there before him had built the road up to the mountains. It wasn’t paved, but it was heavily graveled-usable in all weather, without a doubt. If the tunnel ever went through, the Japs would have a shortcut between Honolulu and Kaneohe on the east coast of Oahu.

Did they care? Were the POWs working on the tunnel for its sake or just to work on something till they dropped? Some of each, was Peterson’s guess. From his point of view, it hardly mattered. Whether the Japs cared about the tunnel or not, the POWs were going to work till they dropped.

Guards didn’t carry picks and shovels. They carried rifles and, sometimes, axe handles. If they didn’t like the way a POW was moving, they’d whack him with one or the other, or sometimes haul off and kick him. A prisoner couldn’t strike back. If he did, the guards would bayonet him and let him die slowly. They knew which wounds would kill in a hurry, and avoided those.

There weren’t that many guards. Peterson sometimes thought a concerted rising here might succeed. If it did, though, so what? The prisoners would still be stuck at the ass end of the Kalihi Valley, and the Japs could easily seal off the outlet… whereupon everybody here would starve, since living off the land was impossible. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, he thought.

They did-and they were damned. Peterson grabbed a pick and shouldered it like a Springfield. Torches and candles threw the only light once Peterson and his gang got into the tunnel. Shadows swooped and leaped as men trudged past the flickering flames. Roman slaves sent to the mines must have looked on scenes like this. Peterson wondered whether anyone since had.

The sound of picks biting into volcanic rock drew him onward. Shovelers loaded the chunks the pickmen loosened into wicker baskets. Haulers lugged the spoil out of the tunnel, one basketload. The POWs argued about which job was worst. Because they argued, they switched off every so often.

There was the face of the excavation. Peterson swung up his pick and brought it forward. When he pulled it loose, basalt or granite or whatever the hell this stuff was came with it. A shoveler used his spade to get the stuff away from Peterson’s feet. Peterson swung up the pick again.

As it did on a road gang, work had a pace here. Prisoners growled at anybody who worked too fast. They had reason to growl: if one guy did it, the Japs would expect everybody else to. Why give the slant-eyed monkeys the satisfaction of busting your balls for their lousy tunnel? Besides, a lot of POWs couldn’t do anything more than they were doing. If the Japs made them work harder, they’d die sooner than they would have otherwise.