Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

McKinley went on, “You take any money or any other shit off a dead Jap?”

“Nope.” Peterson shook his head. “How come?”

“On account of if you did, I was gonna tell you to ditch it,” the sergeant answered. “The Japs catch you with any of that stuff, they figured you killed one of their boys. They’re even worse on you then than they are any other time.”

“Not me.” Motion up ahead made Peterson’s finger tense on the trigger. Then he relaxed. It was just a mynah bird, hopping across a lawn looking for worms and bugs. The birds had no idea what war was all about. Peterson wished he didn’t. He shot McKinley a sidelong glance. “You figure the Japs are going to catch us?”

“Don’t get me wrong-I’m still fighting,” McKinley said hastily. “But I don’t see the cavalry riding over the hill in the last reel. Do you?”

Before Peterson could say anything, a gunshot made him flinch. He hated doing that, but couldn’t help it. His only consolation was that almost everybody else did it, too. He said, “Looking at where we’re at, I’d say we could use the goddamn cavalry right about now.”

“Bet your ass,” Sergeant McKinley said. “But if we ain’t got it…”

That motion behind a hibiscus bush wasn’t a mynah. Peterson brought up his rifle, fired, and ducked away from the window, all in one smooth motion. He worked the bolt to chamber a fresh round. The brass cartridge from the last one clinked on the linoleum at his feet.

“You’re getting pretty good at this shit, Navy,” McKinley said. By now, he knew about Peterson’s disreputable origins.

“Up yours, Prez,” Peterson said mildly. “You can’t say I haven’t had practice.”

“You’re still breathing, so you musta done something right.” The sergeant laughed. “If you were in your right uniform, you’d be tellin’ me what to do instead of the other way round.”

“Damn near makes it worth my while,” Peterson said, and McKinley laughed again. An American machine gun a couple of houses over fired a short burst, then a longer one. Very cautiously, Peterson went to the window and peered out. If the Japs were up to something, he wanted to find out what it was. Some men in the dark khaki that they wore were moving a few hundred yards to the north, but he didn’t have a clear shot at them. He ducked away again.

“Well?” McKinley asked.

“Nothing much, I don’t think,” he answered. “I wish to hell this kitchen had two windows so we could look out from more than one place. Way things are, if a Jap sniper draws a bead on that one, he’s liable to punch our tickets for us.”

“You want to move? It’s okay by me,” McKinley said.

Before Peterson could answer, he heard freight-train noises in the air. He threw himself flat before the first shells started bursting. Japanese artillery was probably after that machine gun, but that meant it was coming down on his head, too. He was glad McKinley hadn’t spoken sooner. If there was anything worse than being upright and out in the open when shellfire started coming in, he didn’t know offhand what it might be.

“Just their lousy three-inch popguns,” McKinley shouted through the din.

“Yeah, I know,” Peterson answered. “But where’s our artillery?” Most of it had been wrecked, and most U.S. artillerymen were likely dead. Jap fighters and dive bombers had gone after the American guns with everything they had. It made sense. Rifles and machine guns were just nuisances on the battlefield. Artillery killed.

Artillery also pinned down U.S. infantry so Japanese foot soldiers could advance. If you rose up to shoot at the Japs, you asked to get flayed by flying fragments. If you didn’t, you had the enemy sliding around your flank.

Peterson and McKinley both rose up. You could take your chances with shellfire. Sometimes you had to. But if the Japs flanked them out of this position, where would they go? Into the Pacific, that was where. They had next to no place left to retreat.

And, sure enough, the Japs were coming. Both Americans fired. The Japanese soldiers went down. Some of them shot back. Others dashed past them, running all crouched over. Then they dove for cover and the ones in the rear advanced.

“Fire and move,” McKinley said, slapping in a fresh clip. “It’s pretty when you do it well, and those bastards know how.”

“Terrific.” Peterson snapped off another shot. This was one of the intricacies of ground combat he’d never imagined when he was flying fighter planes. The sailors coming up into the line from Pearl Harbor hadn’t, either. Maybe some of them did now. A lot of them had got shot before they could learn.

A shell slammed into the house with a rending crash. The walls shook. Part of the roof that hadn’t fallen in did now. A bullet came in through the window and clanged off a pot hanging on the far wall. Peterson waited for the American machine gun to start slaughtering the oncoming Japs. When it stayed silent, he glanced over to Sergeant McKinley. If Prez said this was the place to make a stand, he’d do it. This was part of what he’d signed up for.

But McKinley said, “We’d better fall back a couple of houses. We don’t want ’em to go sliding around behind us and cutting us off. That’s how you get captured.” He made a horrible face.

“Right,” Peterson said tightly, and made another one. They did fall back, and fell in with more Americans. It was only a tiny retreat. Now the Japs would have a tougher time breaking through. So Peterson told himself, over and over again. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.

BY THE TIME the train pulled into the station at Durham, North Carolina, Joe Crosetti, who’d never been out of California before, had stared out the window in fascination all the way across the country. Going over the Rockies had been something. Going across the Great Plains had been something, too-miles and miles and miles as flat as if somebody’d ironed them, half the time under a blanket of snow. Seeing all that white was pretty amazing by itself. It had snowed in San Francisco only two or three times in Crosetti’s life, and never since he was a kid. But there it was, white and silent and beautiful.

Joe thought so, anyway. Sitting next to him was a guy named Orson Sharp, who’d got on the train in Salt Lake City. “It’s just snow, for heaven’s sake,” he said. He was blond and pink-cheeked and earnest, with the start of a double chin. Aside from that, there was nothing soft about him; he was on the chunky side, that was all, the sort who would have played the line in football.

“Maybe it’s just snow to you, but it’s snow to me,” Joe answered. Orson Sharp only shrugged. Joe got the feeling he thought that was funny to the point of being ridiculous, but was too polite to say so. Most fellows his age would have razzed Joe unmercifully if they thought something like that. Crosetti eyed Sharp with something approaching suspicion, wondering what his angle was.

As the train got farther east, it rolled past-sometimes rolled through-forests full of bare-branched trees. That bemused Joe, too. Some of the trees in San Francisco lost their leaves: some, yeah, but not all. These looked like a horde of skeletons with their arms held high.

Streams and ponds had ice on them-not all, but the smaller ones. That was something else Joe hardly ever saw back home. San Francisco never got very hot, and it never got very cold, either. As far as he was concerned, that was the way things were supposed to work.

When he said so, Orson Sharp did laugh. “Maybe where you come from,” he said. “In Salt Lake, it can get up over a hundred and down below zero, too. Having the same weather all the time must get boring.”

“It’s not the same all the time,” Joe said. He didn’t think so, anyway. Maybe things looked different if you came from somewhere like Utah.