Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

She was thin. They were emaciated. Her clothes were worn. They still had on the tattered remnants of whatever they’d been wearing when they surrendered. She made do with cold-water showers without soap. By the way they looked-and smelled-they hadn’t bathed for more than a year. Some of them stood defiantly erect, and marched as if on parade at Schofield Barracks. Others, plainly, were on their last legs, and could barely stagger along.

One of them fell down in the middle of the street. Two Japanese guards stood over him, screaming what had to be curses. When he didn’t get up, they started kicking him. They paused after a minute or so to see if he would rise. He tried, but couldn’t get past his knees. They kicked him some more and paused again. When he still didn’t get up, two of them bayoneted him. He groaned and thrashed and bled.

Jane’s nails were short these days-whose weren’t? — but they bit into her palms anyhow. The Japs didn’t put the POW out of his misery. They left him there to die slowly. Then, laughing, they got the rest of the prisoners moving again.

It wasn’t Fletch, Jane thought as she willed her hands to uncurl. Whenever prisoners of war went through Wahiawa, she couldn’t help scanning their faces to see if she spotted her ex-husband. As decrepit and shaggy as the POWs were these days, he might have stumbled past her without her even recognizing him. She wondered why she bothered. She had no idea whether he was alive. She didn’t love him any more. Even if she did, what could she do for him? Nothing. Less than nothing. And if the Japs here found out she was an officer’s wife-even if she and Fletch had been getting a divorce-they might make things unpleasant for her. More unpleasant, she thought with a shiver.

But she couldn’t help looking. Getting a divorce wasn’t as final as lawyers made it out to be. She wished it were.

By the time the guards were out of sight, the prisoner they’d butchered had stopped moving. Sooner or later, someone would drag the body out of the street. Jane looked away from it as she scurried back to her apartment. What worried her was how little the atrocity upset her. She’d already seen too many others.

MARCHING UP THE KAMEHAMEHA HIGHWAY was more fun than paving it or building gun emplacements for the Japs. That was how Fletcher Armitage measured his life these days. He wasn’t quite so exhausted when he marched as when he worked. He didn’t starve quite so quickly, either. These were things to treasure, though he wouldn’t have thought so before December 7, 1941.

He understood Einstein better than he’d ever dreamt of doing. There was bad, and then there was worse. What would have looked like the worst thing in the world to him before the Japs overran Oahu now didn’t seem bad at all. If that wasn’t relativity, what the hell was it?

When the POWs worked, the guards pushed them hard. Why not? The Japs didn’t do any road work or digging themselves. But when they marched, the pace stayed bearable. If the Japs made the prisoners doubletime, they would have to doubletime themselves, and they wouldn’t have cared for that one bit. A few of them were actually plump.

Fletch’s standards about what constituted a proper human form had changed radically since the surrender-so radically, he didn’t altogether realize it himself. The Americans with whom he labored seemed normal to him. They were, after all, the people he saw every minute of every day. He forgot how scrawny they were because they surrounded him.

But they made the Japs, some of whom were prewar average and a handful even heavier than that, seem grotesquely obese by comparison. Why didn’t they fall over dead from carting that extra weight around all the time?

Intellectually, Fletch knew he’d had that much flesh himself once upon a time. Emotionally, he didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. If everyone who mattered to him seemed made of sticks and twigs, then anyone who didn’t had to have something wrong with him.

“Wahiawa ahead,” somebody said.

“Hot damn.” That wasn’t Fletch; it was a Texan named Virgil Street. He added, “Who gives a damn, anyways? We went through this lousy place fallin’ back when we still had guns in our hands. Goin’ through it forwards doesn’t mean anything, on account of the Japs got the guns now.”

Fletch kept his mouth shut. Wahiawa meant something to him. He wondered if he’d see Jane. He also wondered if she’d care if she saw him. Not likely, he feared. He never had figured out why she dumped him. He hadn’t seen it coming. (That he hadn’t seen it coming said a good deal about him, but one of the things it said was that he wouldn’t understand what it said.) He still loved her, as much as he had before. If only…

He laughed. He had a picture of the Jap sergeant who bossed the work gang letting him fall out for a heart-to-heart with his ex. It was right next to his pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

And even if the sergeant did, would Jane listen to him? That was another fat chance. She hadn’t wanted to hear a word he said, not after she threw him out of the apartment. Suddenly and powerfully, he wanted a drink. Thinking of Jane made him think of bourbon. He’d done a hell of a lot of drinking after she dumped him. What with forcibly separating him from hooch, the Japanese invasion might have saved him from turning into a lush.

“Shit,” he muttered. Without even thinking, he could have named a dozen pretty damn good officers, all the way up to bird colonel, who drank like fish. If that wasn’t a great Army tradition, he didn’t know what was. He would sooner have sacrificed his liver for his country than what he was going through now.

As the POWs came into Wahiawa, the guards strung themselves out along either side of the slow-moving column. When they were out in the country, the guards mostly relaxed. Prisoners couldn’t very well run, and couldn’t disappear for long. Here, though, there were side streets to duck down, houses and apartments to break into, all sorts of places to hide. The Japs weren’t dummies. They could figure that out as well as white men could.

They could do all kinds of things as well as white men could, and maybe better. Back before the shooting started, Fletch wouldn’t have believed it, any more than any other U.S. Army officer would have. To him, Japs had been little bucktoothed monkeys who could turn out cheap copies of just about anything, but who flew planes made from tin cans and didn’t have the balls to fight a real war.

He knew better now. He laughed again, bitterly. One whole hell of a lot knowing did him!

“One run, nine die!” shouted a corporal who spoke English of a sort. Everybody in each shooting squad automatically looked around to see where the other men whose fate was tied to his were and what they were doing. Each squad had one or two guys reckoned less reliable than the others. You wanted to be sure they couldn’t light out for the tall timber.

Fletch caught Street’s eye. They nodded to each other. Everything seemed under control. If anybody held their shooting squad together, they were the ones. Fletch had an idea about how to lead, having been an officer. Street was a man who commanded respect regardless of rank. There were soldiers like that. Fletch was glad the two of them got along.

Into Wahiawa they came. Civilians on the street bowed to the approaching Japanese. That was ingrained into everybody by now: local Japs, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinamen, haoles. You had to show respect. The world hadn’t shown Japan respect before, and everybody was paying for it now.

Wahiawa looked poor. It looked like a mainland town where the factory had closed down and everybody’d been out of work for a long time. Everybody wore shabby clothes-not so bad as the rags the prisoners had on, but shabby. People looked fearful, too, as if expecting something worse would happen if they weren’t careful. They were bound to be right, too.