Sergeant Stowe didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Neither did Armstrong. They both outranked Yossel, but when it came to clout… Armstrong had none, and as far as he knew Stowe didn’t either. Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, had all the clout in the world-and didn’t want to use any of it.
If he had wanted to use it, he would have been anywhere but here. Provo looked as if God had dropped a cigarette here and then ground it out with a hobnailed boot. The city had fallen weeks ago, but smoke still rose here and there. The smell of death lingered, too. By the urgent insistence it took on every now and then, some of the dead were a lot more recent than the fall of the town.
As Armstrong and his buddies slogged south, other soldiers came north. They were cleaner and better barbered, but their faded uniforms and hard, watchful faces said this wasn’t the first time they were heading up to the front. “What’s new?” one of them called in Armstrong’s general direction.
“You know about the fucking spigot mortar?” he replied.
“Sure do.” The soldier going the other way nodded. “Ka-boom! They had that the last time I went up.”
“Yeah, but now they’ve started loading the screaming meemies with mustard gas. They can carry a lot of it, too.”
“Well, shit,” the other soldier said bitterly. “If it’s not one goddamn thing, it’s another. If I have to put on that rubber gear, the heat’ll kill me.”
It was probably somewhere in the upper nineties. That wasn’t so dreadful as it would have been back in Washington or Philadelphia. As people from out West never got tired of saying, it was a dry heat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, though. And when you wore full antigas gear, you cooked in your own juices. Who needed humidity then?
A little blond girl came out of the ruins to stare at Armstrong. She was about eight years old, and would have been pretty if she weren’t scrawny and filthy and wearing what looked like a torn burlap bag for a dress. The stony hatred on her face didn’t help, either.
“Jesus!” He wanted to make the sign of the cross to ward off that look, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “She’ll shoot at us in the next go-round, and her kid’ll pick up a gun in the one after that.”
“We oughta just shoot all of these bastards and start over here,” Stowe said. “Treat ’em like the Confederates treat their niggers. Then we could do this place right.”
“You think Featherston’s fuckers really are doing that shit?” Armstrong said. “Seems hard to believe.”
“You’d better believe it-it’s true,” Yossel Reisen said. “My aunt knows more about that stuff than she ever wanted to find out. They’re filthy down there, really filthy.”
His aunt was likely to know if anybody did. Armstrong said, “Still seems crazy to me. Why would anybody want to do that to somebody else just on account of what he looks like? I mean, I’ve got no use for niggers, God knows, but I don’t want to kill ’em all.” He had no idea how many oversimplifications and unexamined ideas he’d packed into that, and was probably lucky he didn’t.
“People do it all the time,” Yossel said. “You’re not Jewish, that’s for sure.”
“Nope, not me.” Armstrong might have had more to say on the subject of Jews, too, but not where his buddy could hear it. You didn’t do things like that. Life at the front was tough enough as is. If you pissed off somebody who might save your ass one day soon, you only made it worse.
A sign led to the trucks that would take them back to the R and R center at Thistle. Before long, they’d have to leave again, but Armstrong looked forward to getting clean, getting deloused, and eating real food and sleeping on a real mattress.
As happened too often in the Army, somebody’d screwed up. There were far more soldiers than trucks to take them to Thistle or anywhere else. The men milled around, waiting for something to happen. A lot of Army life was like that. A captain climbed up on what was left of a brick wall and shouted that more trucks would be along in an hour or so. The cheers he drew were distinctly sarcastic. The catcalls, on the other hand, came from the heart. The captain turned red and got down in a hurry.
Armstrong didn’t know what drew his eye to the woman who walked toward the crowd of soldiers. Maybe it was just that she was a woman. Most of the ones he’d seen lately wore dungarees and carried rifles and wanted to kill him. He returned the favor the best way he knew how.
This one had on a dress, a baggy dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was pinched and pale. Maybe that was what kept Armstrong’s eye on her-not her good looks, though she wasn’t half bad, but her absolute determination. An alarm bell went off in his mind. He nudged Rex Stowe. “Sergeant, something’s wrong with that broad.” He pointed.
“Yeah?” Stowe didn’t see it for a second. Then he did. “Yeah.” He took a step toward her, and started to take another one-
And the world exploded.
Next thing Armstrong knew, he was on his back. Something that stung ran into his eyes. He put up a hand and discovered it was blood. He was bleeding from the leg, too, and from one arm. He looked around. Yossel Reisen, somehow, was still on his feet and didn’t seem to be scratched. Sergeant Stowe was down and moaning, both hands pressed to a swelling scarlet stain on his belly.
“She blew herself up!” The words seemed to come from a million miles away. Armstrong realized the bomb must have stunned his ears. He hoped they weren’t ruined for good.
He scrambled to his feet. Closer to the woman-who wasn’t there anymore, of course-the landscape was a surreal mess of bodies and body parts. How many had she killed? How many had she hurt? Armstrong watched a soldier pull a nail out of his arm. He realized the woman hadn’t just carried explosives. She’d had shrapnel, too. She’d done what she’d done on purpose, and she’d made sure she did as much damage as she could when she did it.
“You all right?” Yossel’s voice came from far, far away, too.
“If I’m not, I’ll worry about it later,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got to do what we can for these poor mothers.”
He bent beside Rex Stowe and gave him a shot of morphine. He might have wasted it; Stowe was going gray. He put a dressing on the noncom’s wound, but blood soaked through right away. “Corpsman!” Yossel Reisen shouted. But a dozen other soldiers were yelling the same thing, and no medics seemed close by. Who would have thought trouble might strike here?
Nobody would have. Nobody had. And that was probably why it had happened here. The men waiting for transport hadn’t paid any attention to the Mormon woman… till too late.
Yossel Reisen slapped a bandage on Armstrong’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said.
“It’s all right,” Yossel said absently-he had other things on his mind. In disbelieving tones, he went on, “She blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up on purpose.”
“She sure as shit did.” Armstrong liked that no better than his buddy did. “How do you stop somebody who wants to make like a bomb?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Yossel said. “Who would have thought anybody could be that crazy?”
“Mormons,” Armstrong said. The Mormons had caused so much trouble for the USA, and had notions so different from those of most Americans, that blaming things on them just because they were Mormons came easy. But even Armstrong, who was anything but reflective, realized more than that went into it. Despite the heat, he shivered. “A woman. She waited till she could hurt the most soldiers, and then-she did.”
“They could pull shit like this anywhere,” Yossel Reisen said, a new horror in his voice. “Anywhere at all. On a bus, in a subway, in a theater, at a football game-anywhere there’s a crowd. If you hate enough and you want to hit back enough… you just do.”