Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Susie reached out and gave him a regretful squeeze. “Okay, I’m sold,” she said, all the kitten gone from her voice. “The trenches.” She ran for the bathroom, and emerged in her bathing suit by the time Oscar had his on again.

They weren’t the only scantily dressed people hurrying down the hallways. The sharp, flat boom! of a bomb bursting not far away made several people-not all of them women-scream and made everybody hurry faster. More bombs went off as Oscar and Susie raced across the lawn and scrambled down into a trench.

Antiaircraft guns at the fort added to the din. Sure enough, DeRussy was what the Japs were after. Most of their bombs fell on it-most, but not all. When a bomb burst on the hotel, it made a noise like the end of the world. Sharp fragments of hot metal hissed and screamed by overhead. The ground shook, as if at an earthquake. Blast stunned Oscar’s ears. As if from very far away, he heard Susie say, “Well, you were right.” She kissed him-more, he judged, from gratitude than passion.

And then an armor-piercing bomb, or maybe more than one, penetrated the reinforced concrete protecting the coast-defense guns in the fortress and their magazines. The explosions that followed made the ones from the bombs themselves seem like love pats. Chunks of cement and steel rained down out of the sky. Shrieks said some of them came down in trenches. Oscar wondered how many men Fort DeRussy held-had held, for they were surely dead now.

The raid lasted about half an hour. The antiaircraft guns kept firing for five or ten minutes after bombs stopped falling. Shrapnel pattered down out of the air along with debris from the fort. Oscar wished for a helmet. That stuff could smash your skull like a melon.

Despite the secondary explosions, people started climbing out of the trenches. “Christ, but I want a drink!” somebody said, which summed things up as well as Edward R. Murrow or William L. Shirer could have done.

Susie let out a wordless squawk of dismay. She pointed at what had been her room and was now nothing but smoking rubble. Oscar gulped. If they’d ignored the sirens and gone on with what they were doing, they might have died happy, but they sure would have died.

Then Susie found words: “What am I going to do? All my stuff was in there. God damn the dirty Japs!”

Oscar heard himself say, “You can move in with me for a while if you want to.” He blinked. He’d taken in stray kittens before, and once a puppy, but never a girl. It wasn’t even that he was all that crazy about Susie. If it hadn’t been for the war, they’d have screwed each other silly for a few days and then gone their separate ways. But he didn’t see how he could leave her stranded here with nothing but the bathing suit on her back.

By the way she eyed him, she was making some calculations of her own. “Okay,” she said after a few seconds. “But it’s not like you own me or anything. Whenever I want to walk out, I’m gone.”

“Sure,” Oscar said at once. “I don’t have any trouble with that. If you start driving me nuts, I’ll hold the door open for you. In the meantime, though…” He stuck out his hand. “Uh, what’s your last name?”

“Higgins,” she said as she shook it. Her hand almost got lost in his, but she had a pretty good grip. “What’s yours?” He told her. “Van der Kirk?” she echoed, and started to laugh. “You’re so brown, I would’ve figured you for a dago.”

He shrugged. “I’m out in the sun all the time. That’s one of the reasons I like Hawaii. You want to see the place? It’s only a few blocks mauka from here.” Susie Higgins looked blank again. “North. Toward the mountains,” Oscar told her. Hawaiian notions of directions had baffled him, too, when he first got to Oahu. Now he took them for granted. But he was on his way to becoming a kamaaina — an old-timer-here; he wasn’t a just-arrived malihini any more, the way Susie was. “Come on,” he said, and she went with him.

The apartment building plainly didn’t impress her. Well, it didn’t much impress Oscar, either. She did seem surprised when he opened his door without a key. Once she walked in, she said, “Oh, I get it. You don’t bother to lock it because you don’t have anything worth stealing.”

“Only things I own that are worth anything are my car and my surfboard, and my car isn’t worth much,” Oscar answered with another shrug. “You don’t need much to live here.”

Susie didn’t say anything about that. Even so, he got the idea she wasn’t going to stay there forever, or even very long-she was a girl who liked things. He could tell. What she did say was, “You want to lock the door now?”

“How come?” he said, and then, “Oh.”

She laughed at him. He deserved it. He laughed, too. She said, “We were doing something or other when that air raid started.” As if to remind him what, she peeled off her bathing suit.

The bed was narrow for two, but not too narrow. Things were going along very nicely when a great roar made the walls shake and the window rattle-it was a miracle the window didn’t break. Susie squealed. Oscar needed a bit to recover. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have needed a moment to recover after that. He’d just started again when another identical roar made Susie squeal again.

This time, though, it didn’t unman him, for he’d realized what it was: “More things blowing up at Fort DeRussy, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” Susie exclaimed. “Jesus!”

Oscar didn’t answer, not with words. After a while, he managed to distract her, which he took as a compliment to himself-distracting somebody from the thunder of those explosions was no mean feat. Susie’s gasp said he hadn’t just distracted her-he’d got her hot. A moment later, Oscar exploded too. He stroked his cheek. “Not so bad,” he said, and tried to believe it. What the hell had he got into, getting into Susie? Well, he’d find out.

AN AMERICAN SOLDIER showed himself. Corporal Takeo Shimizu’s rifle jumped to his shoulder. He steadied on the target, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger. Just like a drill, he thought as the Arisaka rifle kicked. The American crumpled. Shimizu ducked down deep into his foxhole in the pineapple field outside of Wahiawa.

He didn’t feel particularly proud of himself for shooting the enemy. The Americans were brave. He’d seen that since coming ashore. They were braver than he’d expected, in fact, even if some of them did try to surrender instead of fighting to the death. That made for amusing sport.

But shooting them hardly seemed fair. Hadn’t anyone taught them anything about taking cover? He was one of the veterans in his regiment who’d fought in China. You never saw the Chinese bandits till one of them put a bullet between your eyes. They didn’t have a lot of rifles, and even less in the way of heavy weapons, but they made the most of what they had, and of the ground on which they fought.

The Yankees, by contrast, were very well armed-better than Shimizu’s own men, probably. If their air power hadn’t been knocked out, they would have been tough to shift. But they didn’t seem to know what to do with what they had-and they paid the price for it, again and again.

Machine-gun bullets snarled over Shimizu’s head. He laughed. The Americans must have thought he’d stay upright waiting to get shot. They were like someone who covered his belly when you hit him there, then covered his face when you hit him there. They didn’t know what was coming next, and they didn’t think their foes did, either. And they paid the price for being so naive.

Behind Shimizu, a mortar started going pop-pop-pop. The bombs came down around the machine-gun position the Yankees had incautiously revealed. Shimizu hoped they knocked out the gunners. Even if they did, though, they were unlikely to put the gun out of action. A machine gun wasn’t so complicated that ordinary soldiers couldn’t handle it.