Jim Shepard - Paper Doll

The new group closed like the first without firing, sliding from side to side slightly as if they were projectiles out of control or a squadron of drunks, and Gabriel said, “Smart bastards, smart bastards,” and Bryant understood from an earlier briefing that the sliding represented their keeping watch in case any of the bomb group’s escort were still around, and knew then that these were veterans, old bomber killers, and felt himself wanting to urinate with nothing left and whipped his guns from one target to another, and at the very last moment they started firing, yellow and white lines looping past his turret like liquid light, and his tracer lines ratcheted out and too low and they roared overhead still in line, firing at the Forts behind. He skidded his turret around to the rear and fired short bursts but they were gone and pieces were flying from bombers way behind them in the stream.

Subsequent lines were sawing through the upper squadrons. A bit of debris with something fluttery on it went by his turret from above.

“Oh, God,” Eddy was warning. In the distance Bryant could see below the massed fighters slow sprays of specks lifting off postage stamp airfields, new planes rising all along the corridor ahead.

“Look at them all!” Snowberry said. “Look at them all! There’s a jillion of ’em!”

Lewis called in the lines that had gone through and were regrouping behind the formation. Piacenti called in the groups to the right passing them for another head-on attack. Snowberry and Eddy were trying to estimate the numbers ahead.

“Get off the goddamn interphone, everybody off the interphone,” Cooper said. “It’s like a Chinese fire drill.”

They were momentarily silent, watching the filling sky. Bryant could feel in the silence a dawning awareness on everyone’s part that something had gone, and was going to go, very wrong.

“Glad to see you’re still with us, Lootenant,” Lewis finally said from the tail.

More lines of fighters were separating out toward them from the groups ahead. Bryant registered the formation above him closing up, filling the gaps left by the last passes, and he watched two lines of seven Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts apiece bear down on them and felt keenly the isolation and helplessness of this kind of war, hanging there in his sling and aluminum capsule, as exposed, as far away from a place to hide his head, as anyone could be.

He could see growing to the left of center in his gunsight the narrower nose and longer wings of a Messerschmitt, the pale blue of the spanner visible even at this distance. The lines came on with the Focke Wulfs echeloned behind and above the Me-109’s, and they all opened fire together. Bryant was reminded of plugging in the lights on a Christmas tree. He was hearing hits on Paper Doll and other rows of fighters were detaching from the mass and coming on, one after the other, and Bryant fired and fired, worrying now about overheating guns, trying hard to keep his bursts short. Paper Doll rocked back and bucked with all the forward firing guns going, the notion of ammo conservation gone forever.

The sky went white from a blinding flash and above him a Fort’s tail flew upward alone from a huge fireball, the concussion shoving Paper Doll down and the explosion audible through their headphones.

The fighters went through ragged and uncertain, disconcerted by the light and the blast. The tail had fallen through the formation without producing a chute and there was nothing else left. Whoever they were, Eddy called, they musta taken a shell in the bomb bay.

Hirsch seemed the first to recover and was shouting in new lines.

“Get your nose up! Nose up!” Snowberry was calling in frustration. “Give me air!” He could see the oncoming fighters but couldn’t fire, with Paper Doll ’s nose above him too close to his aiming point. “Give me air!” Snowberry was calling and Bryant was firing and firing and the three-Fort vee in front of them went yellow and white and jerked upward and Bryant was blinded. He could feel the whole ship rock backward violently in the shockwave and when his vision returned with ghostly afterimage colors all three planes that had been flying in the vee ahead were gone. Paper Doll was wallowing stupidly along, nosing around for something to follow. Bryant could see the dorsal gunner in Plum Seed beside them with his hands on his head in a melodramatic gesture of shock and surprise.

“They’re all gone!” Snowberry cried. “They’re all gone! Where are they?”

“Christ amighty,” Gabriel said. “All three of them just like that.”

“What? What?” Lewis shouted. “What happened?” Bryant could imagine his frustration, as tail gunner in an endless series of head-on attacks.

“They got the whole element in front of us,” he told him. “One swoop.”

“Who was it? Who was it?” Lewis called. He had friends everywhere in the formation.

“ Banshee. I’se a Muggin’. Training Wheels ,” Gabriel said.

Lewis was silent. Eddy was screaming at his guns. Snowberry was crying and asking for air, a clear shot. He said Gabriel was an idiot and they were all going to get killed.

A beautiful and horrible diamond of fighters swam free ahead in a long loop and dropped deftly and in perfect order down toward them, resolving itself into a line staggered upward in altitude, each following plane higher than the one before it. The effect was that of an immense javelin or spear coming through the formation. Bryant’s arms hurt and his eyes hurt and he tracked and sighted and fired with a furious haste and effort as pass after pass became simply horrible and intense work. The casing shells overflowed from the huge metal chutes flanking his legs in the turret and rang and clattered past his feet to the floor of the fuselage, spilling further down the companionway to the hatchway door below to Eddy and Hirsch’s stations.

There were further explosions from ahead and above, and a man went spinning by his turret, a startled look on his face, knees up as if executing something tricky off the high board. A hatch door flipped by, and a flak helmet.

“Four o’clock!” Piacenti cried, “High!”, but when he looked there were no fighters up there but two B-17’s inexplicably together, frozen in contact for a moment as they collided, until they exploded in a long liquid tongue of fire, wings and control surfaces spinning outward.

The fighters behind them were banking around to return. The fighters ahead were circling to gain altitude, a few minutes away. Cooper called in a lightning oxygen check, station by station. Quarterback beyond Archangel was streaming gasoline from its number three engine, the sheets of fuel fluttering into rain as they left the wing. Every so often pieces flew from the shattered dorsal turret.

“Man,” Piacenti said from the waist, evidently getting an eyeful. Quarterback could not keep up. “We’re a losin’ ticket,” he said. Bryant flashed on Snowberry’s journal and its warning about Piacenti.

“Close up! Close up!” Gabriel was calling to Quarterback ’s pilot. It drifted further back, and soon hung distantly off Archangel ’s tail, Lewis reporting as it slipped still further back. From the belly Snowberry called in other losses in a congested voice. “ WAAC Hunter, ” he said. “Paddlefoot. ”

Bryant looked up and back into the main body of the formation. Prop wash from the massed planes was deflating and collapsing the small parachutes that were drifting downward. He watched one of the white ovals puff and fold and thought, Survival is out of your hands.

“More more more,” Eddy said. “And my fucking gun is shot.”