Harry Turtledove: End of the Beginning

He woke in the morning twilight with a Japanese guard’s boot in his xylophone ribs. The Jap wasn’t kicking him, just stirring him to get him up and moving. If he kept lying there, though, he would get kicked. He scrambled to his feet and bowed to the guard. Satisfied, the Jap went on to prod the next closest American awake.

Peterson took his place for morning lineup. Till the men were counted, they got no breakfast. They formed up in rows of ten, which made it easy for the guards to count them. Or that should have made it easy; some of the Japs seemed to have trouble with numbers as big as ten. Maybe Peterson was just being rude in thinking so, but it looked that way to him. A lot of the camp guards seemed to be peasants from the Japanese back of beyond. They were ignorant and mean, and reveled in their petty authority over the Americans.

About one morning in three, something went wrong with the count. This was one of those mornings. Americans muttered to themselves when no guards were looking their way. “Fuck up a wet dream,” somebody behind Peterson said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a wet dream. When you were slowly starving to death, dreams of pussy went right out the window.

The Japanese sergeant in charge of the labor gang wasn’t a bad guy. At least, he could have been worse. He plainly had orders about how much he was supposed to feed the POWs and how much work he was supposed to get out of them. Like just about every Jap Peterson had seen, he conscientiously obeyed his orders. Past what he had to do, he wasn’t cruel for the sake of being cruel. He didn’t beat people or behead them just because he felt like it, and he didn’t let his men do anything like that, either.

Now, though, he looked about ready to explode. “Shooting squads!” he yelled: one of the handful of English phrases he knew.

Ice ran up Peterson’s back. It always did when the prisoners got that command. As usual, the first thing he did was look around to see where Walter London was. He didn’t spot him right away. Telling himself that didn’t mean anything, he joined his comrades in misery. Along with them, he silently counted off: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… nine. No ten. Wherever London was, he wasn’t here.

“Oh, fuck,” somebody said very softly. It seemed more a prayer than a curse.

“How did he get loose?” Peterson’s voice was also soft, but very grim. They’d kept a watch on London through the night, taking turns gapped out of their exhausted sleep. The man they worried about, of course, hadn’t had to watch himself. He’d slept like a baby. Till last night, he’d slept like a baby.

“I had the last watch,” a guy from Oregon named Terry said. Naked fear widened his eyes until you could see white all around the iris. “I guess maybe I fell asleep again, on account of the Jap kinda poked me awake this morning. I didn’t think anything about it till-”

“Yeah. Till,” somebody broke in. “You just put all our necks in the noose, God damn you.”

“Too late to do anything about it. The asshole’s gone.” Peterson sounded even wearier than he felt-no mean trick. Under the laws of war, a sentry who fell asleep at his post could go up in front of a firing squad. He didn’t take his buddies to perdition with him, though.

Here came the Japs. No chance to sneak in somebody from another group that had already been counted. The Japs might have trouble getting to eleven without taking off their shoes, but they knew nine, and they knew nine wasn’t ten. They started pointing and yelling and jabbering in their own language. The gang-boss sergeant tramped up. He had no trouble getting to nine and not to ten, either. The POWs stood at ramrod-stiff attention. The sergeant might not have been a bad guy, but he lost his temper now. Peterson even felt a moment’s sympathy for him; he’d probably get in Dutch because of the escape, too.

“Zakennayo!” he yelled-a handy-dandy all-purpose Japanese obscenity. “Baka yaro!” he tacked on for good measure. Idiots! That also didn’t fit the situation too badly. But cussing wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He walked up to the closest POW in the shooting squad and slapped him in the face, hard.

He might not normally have beaten people, but things weren’t normal now. Japanese noncoms belted their own privates when they got mad. The privates took it without blinking and went on about their business. The prisoners had to do the same, or else they would get shot on the spot.

Wham! Wham! Wham! The sergeant wasn’t real tall, but he had a bull’s shoulders. He didn’t hit like somebody’s girlfriend when she got mad. He was trying to knock you ass over teakettle. Peterson had just time to brace himself before he got it. His head whipped to one side. He refused to give the Jap the satisfaction of staggering, though he tasted blood in his mouth.

The damn Jap came back along the row, smacking everybody again. He screamed at the Americans. It was all in Japanese, but he illustrated with gestures. He did excellent impressions of being hanged, being shot, and having his throat cut-the last complete with gruesomely authentic sound effects. Then he pointed at the POWs. This is going to happen to you.

Peterson had figured it would happen right there. It didn’t. The sergeant told off three guards and had them march the nine remaining members of the shooting squad back to Opana, the northernmost point on Oahu, to the POW camp where they’d been held since not long after the fighting stopped. The men got no food and no water. Whenever one of them stopped for any reason, the Japs set on him with their rifle butts.

After a day of that, Peterson decided he would take off when they stopped for the night. If they shot him trying to escape, he didn’t figure he’d lost much. And they were going to do in his buddies anyway, so he couldn’t get them into any worse trouble. Disappearing-if he could-looked like his best hope.

He never got the chance. The Japs herded the shooting squad into Waimea, on the north coast, just as the sun was going down. The men spent the night in one cell of the town jail-all of them crammed into one cell. The cell, naturally, had not been made with nine men in mind. They filled it to overflowing and piled onto one another when they lay down.

Nobody fed them. But, because the cell had been built by Americans and not by Japanese, it boasted a cold-water sink and a toilet. Jim Peterson drank till he thought water would start coming out of his ears. He washed his face and hands, too. Everybody else did the same thing. And none of them had heard a toilet flush for a hell of a long time.

When morning came, the Japs herded them out. They’d already used the sink again, expecting that they wouldn’t get any water the rest of the day. They turned out to be right about that. And, because they didn’t seem demoralized enough to suit their captors, the Japs quickmarched them north and east along the highway towards Opana. Now even slowing down meant a goose with a bayonet or a kick or a rifle butt in the kidneys or the ribs or the head.

Of course, quickmarching the prisoners meant the guards had to quickmarch, too. But they were well fed, and they hadn’t been killing themselves with hard physical labor. They might have been tired by the time they got up to Opana. Peterson felt ready for the boneyard.

And the Japs were ready to give it to him, too. Everybody from the shooting squad went into punishment cells. They weren’t big enough for anybody to stand up or lie down in them. The prisoners spent ten days in them, with only a little rice and a little water on which to stay alive.

When Peterson finally did emerge from his cell, he could barely stand. Everybody else in the squad was just as bad off. An officer strode up to them with an interpreter-a local Jap-in tow. That worried Peterson all by itself. If the Japs had something to say that they wanted the POWs to understand, it wasn’t going to be good news.