Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Fletch’s hopes sank when the guards didn’t count and recount the men lined up in neat rows. They would have if they thought they were missing people, wouldn’t they? The commandant scrambled up onto a table in front of the POWs. As soon as he got up there, all the prisoners bowed. There would have been hell to pay if they hadn’t. Much less athletically, a local Japanese in a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his tubby build clambered onto the table with the officer.

The Jap commandant shouted in his own language. He had one of those voices that could fill up as much space as it had to. A whole regiment could have heard his orders on the battlefield. The interpreter tried twice as hard and was half as loud: “We have captured four American soldiers. They did not surrender at the proper time. This makes them nothing but bandits. We treat bandits the way they deserve. Let this be a lesson to all of you.”

Guards marched in the four Americans. Poor bastards, Fletch thought. They’d been stripped to the waist. Their faces and torsos showed cuts and bruises. The Japs must have worked them over after they were caught. One of them staggered like a punch-drunk palooka. How many times had they hit him in the head? If he didn’t know everything that was going on around him, maybe he was luckier than his buddies.

None of them was Dave or Clancy. Fletch was glad of that. And then, in short order, he wasn’t glad of anything any more. To him, hung by the thumbs had always been a joke, something people said but nobody would ever do.

The Japs weren’t kidding. They tied ropes to a horizontal length of wood that had to be twelve feet off the ground, and to the Americans’ thumbs. They were viciously precise about it, too, making sure their captives had to stand on tiptoe to keep their thumbs from taking all their weight. Once they’d tied them, they gagged them. And then they walked away.

Another shout from the camp commandant. “Dismissed!” the interpreter said.

Japanese soldiers stood guard around the four Americans. They made sure none of the ordinary POWs drew near. The men they’d captured just hung there, without food, without water, without hope. Fletch didn’t need long to realize the Japs intended to let them die there. Every so often, one of them would sag down off his toes as weariness overcame him, only to be jerked up again by the agony in his hands. The rags tied over their mouths didn’t muffle all the noises they made.

It took six days before they hung limp and unmoving. The guards cut them down with bayonets. They crumpled to the ground. Even after that, though, one of them tried to roll himself up into a ball. The Japs stared at him, gabbling in their own language. One of them ran off to get an officer.

When the officer came back with him, he took a look at the feebly wiggling American, then snapped out a command in his own language. “ Hai! ” the guards chorused. Three of them raised their rifles and aimed them at the man they’d made into an example. The Arisakas barked together, too. After that, the American didn’t move any more.

With gestures, the guards ordered some of the POWs to drag the dead bodies to the burying ground. There already was one, for men who came down sick and couldn’t find the strength to get better on what the Japs fed them-and for men the Japs killed one way or another.

Fletch was the third man a guard pointed at. He didn’t try protesting that the Japanese couldn’t make him work. If he had, he figured two more POWs would have dragged him to the burying ground. The corpse whose ankle he had hold of didn’t weigh much; all the water was gone from it.

“You damn sorry son of a bitch,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” The corporal who had the other leg shook his head. “He’s liable to be the lucky one. It’s over for him. How long will it last for us?” Fletch had no answer. The dead man’s head bumped along the ground. Will that be me one day? Fletch wondered. He had no answer for that, either.

“WHERE ARE YOU going?” Hiroshi Takahashi asked.

“Away from here. Any place at all away from here,” Kenzo answered. They were both speaking English to keep their father from knowing what they were saying. “I can’t stand hanging around this miserable tent.” He didn’t come right out and cuss; his dad knew what swear words were, all right.

“You better be back before we go out again, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Hiroshi warned.

“Yeah, yeah.” Kenzo ducked out of the tent before his brother could nag him any more. The way his father kept taking fish to the Japanese consulate, and the way he kept coming back looking as if he’d just had tea with Hirohito… Some of the reverence for the Emperor Kenzo had learned as a little boy still lingered, but knowing that Hirohito reigned over a country at war with the USA carried more weight. No matter what his old man thought, Kenzo remained determined to stay an American.

He had to bow, though, when a Japanese patrol marched up the street toward him. He’d learned how to do that properly as a little boy, too. The noncom who headed up the patrol recognized him as a countryman and bowed back, which he wouldn’t have done for a haole. That made Kenzo angry, not proud, but he didn’t show what he was thinking.

He bowed again several times as he walked through Honolulu. His route would have looked random to someone who didn’t know the city well-and who didn’t know what had happened in it and to it since the Rising Sun went up over Iolani Palace. Since almost all food was supposed to go into community kitchens, the markets that had sprung up here and there were highly unofficial. Sometimes the Japs closed down one or another. More often, the people who ran them figured greased palms were part of the cost of doing business.

Fish here (sure as hell, he’d seen Eizo Doi selling some of what he got), taro there, rice somewhere else, yet another place for fresh vegetables… Yeah, you had to know your way around. You had to know your way around when you were buying, too, or you’d lose your shirt. The way things were these days, people with food they could sell had the whip hand.

But Kenzo wasn’t looking to buy. Going out on the Oshima Maru kept him fed. It also gave him food to bargain with. If he wanted a coconut, he could trade a flying fish for it. He didn’t need to lay out a stack of greenbacks fat as his fist. You could still buy almost anything if you had enough money, but enough swelled every day. People bargained frantically. Kenzo heard curses in half a dozen languages.

Whenever he saw a blond girl about his own age, he tensed. Was it…? Whenever he got close enough to tell, he added some curses of his own to the electric air because, again and again, it wasn’t. He began to wonder if he was wasting his time. That only made him shrug. How could he be wasting it if he was doing what he wanted to do?

And then, when he was almost sure he wouldn’t run into Elsie Sundberg, he did. She was carrying a cloth sack that looked heavy, but that didn’t show what it held. Smart, Kenzo thought-a lot smarter than carrying food out in the open. The hungrier people got, the likelier they were to steal.

He waved. For a moment, Elsie didn’t think that was aimed at her. For another moment, she looked alarmed that she’d caught an Oriental’s eye. Then she recognized him. He almost laughed at the look of relief that passed over her face before she smiled and waved back. He picked his way toward her past hard-faced sellers and excitable buyers.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you? How are things?”

“Hi, yourself,” Elsie answered. “Not… too bad. I want to thank you again for that fish you gave me. That really helped my whole family a lot.”