Staggering under the weight of the soldier he’d lifted, he carried him back to the wall behind which he’d laid the other wounded man. At the same time, the Lizard slowly backed out of the factory building. Nobody fired at it.
The tiny truce held for perhaps half a minute. Mutt rolled the second injured soldier off his shoulder, discovered he wasn’t breathing. He grabbed the fellow’s wrist; his finger found the spot just on the thumb side of the tendons. No pulse. The soldier’s arm flopped limply when he let it fall. “Aah, shit,” he said dully. The strange moment of comradeship had gone for nothing, lost in the waste that was war.
More Lizards dashed into the building. They fired their automatic weapons from the hip, not aiming at anything in particular but making the Americans keep their heads down. Only a couple of rifle rounds answered them. The fellow who shoots first has the edge, Daniels thought. He’d learned that in the trenches, and it still seemed true.
All at once, he realized that with Schneider dead, he was the senior noncom present. He’d been in charge of more men than these as a manager but the stakes hadn’t been so high-nobody shot you for hanging a curve ball no matter how much people talked about it.
The first wounded man he d dragged to cover was still very much alive. “Fall back!” Mutt yelled. He started crawling away, dragging the hurt soldier after him. Stand up now and you’d stop one of those sprayed bullets just as sure as sunrise.
A beam crashed down behind him. Flames crackled, then roared at his back He tried to crawl faster. “Over here!” somebody shouted.
He changed direction. Hands reached out to help pull the wounded man behind a file cabinet that, between its metal and the reams of paper spilling from it, probably could have stopped a Lizard tank round. Mutt got in back of it himself and lay there, panting like a dog on a Mississippi summer day.
“Smitty still alive up there?” asked the soldier already under cover.
Daniels shook his head. “For all I know, he could’ve been dead when I picked him up. Goddamn shame.” He didn’t say anything about the Lizard who’d refrained from shooting him. He had the strange feeling that mentioning it would take the magic away, as if it were the seventh inning of a building no-hitter.
The other soldier-his name was Buck Risberg-pointed and said, “The fire’s holding the Lizards back.”
“Good to know somethin’ can.” Daniels made a sour face. He was turning cynical fast in this fight I’m gettin’ old, he thought, and then, Gettin’? Hell, I am old. But he was also in command. He dragged his mind back to what needed doing right now. “Get Hank here out of this mess,” he told Risberg. “There ought to be a medic a couple blocks north o’here, less’n the Lizards drove him out by now. But you gotta try.”
“Okay, Mutt.” Half dragging, half carrying the now-unconscious Hank, Risberg made his way out of the firing line. The burning beam helped light his way through the gloom, and also provided a barrier the Lizards hesitated to cross.
Shells screamed down on the factory and the street outside: not from Lizard tank cannon, these, but out of the west from American batteries still in place on Stolp’s Island in the middle of the Fox River. The gunners were bringing the fire right down onto the heads of their own men in the hope of hitting the enemy, too. Daniels admired their aggressiveness, and wished he weren’t on the receiving end of it.
The incoming artillery made the Lizards who were poking their snouts into the factory building stop shooting and hunker down. At least, that was what Mutt assumed they were doing-it was certainly what he was doing himself. But all too soon, even in the midst of the barrage, they started up again with nasty three and four-bullet bursts that would chew a man to rags. Mutt felt as inadequate with the Springfield jammed against his shoulder as Pappy Daniels must have if he’d ever tried to fight Yankees toting Henry repeaters with his single-shot, muzzle-loading rifle musket.
Then from in back of him came a long, ripping burst of fire that made him wonder for a dreadful instant how the Lizards had got round to his rear. But not only did the Lizards usually have better fire discipline than that, the weapon did not sound like one of theirs. When Daniels recognized it, he yelled, “You with the tommy gun! Get your ass up here!”
A minute later, a soldier flopped down beside him. “Where they at, Corporal?” he asked.
Mutt pointed. “Right over that way; leastways, that’s where they shot from last.”
The tommy gun chattered. The fellow with it-not a man from Daniels unit-went through a fifty-round drum as if he were going to have to pay for all the rounds he didn’t fire off. Another submachine gun opened up behind Daniels and to his left. Grinning at Mutt’s surprised expression, the soldier said, “Our whole platoon cathes ’em, Corporal. We got enough firepower to make these scaly sons of bitches think twice about messin’ with us.”
Daniels started to say, “That’s crazy,” but maybe it wasn’t. Out in open country it would have been; a tommy gun fired a.45-caliber pistol cartridge, and was accurate out to only a couple of hundred yards. But in street fighting or building-to-building combat like this, volume of fire counted for a lot more than accuracy. Since the U.S.A. couldn’t match the Lizards’ automatic rifles, submachine guns were probably the next best thing.
So instead of cussing the high command for a worthless brainstorm, Mutt said, “Yeah, some of the German assault troops in France carried those damn things, too. I didn’t much care to go up against ’em, either.”
The tommy-gunner turned his head. “You were Over There, were you? I reckon this is worse.”
Daniels thought about it. “Yeah, probably. Not that that was any fun, mind you, but it’s always easier bein’ on the long end of the stick. And this here fightin’ in factories-I didn’t used to think they made anything worse’n trenches, but I’m comin’ round to believe I was wrong.”
An airplane roared by, just above rooftop height. “Ours,” the tommy-gunner said in glad surprise. Daniels shared it; American planes were all too few these days. The aircraft pounded the advancing Lizards for a few seconds, machine guns bellowing. Then came another bellow, an almost solid wall of noise, from the ground. The airplane’s engine stopped screaming; the machine guns cut off at the same time. The plane crashed with a boom that would have broken windows had Aurora had any windows left to break.
“Damn!” the tommy-gunner and Daniels said together. Mutt added, “I hope he came down on top of a whole pile of the bastards.”
“Yeah,” said the soldier with the Thompson gun. “I just wish he could have got away so he’d be able to hit ’em again tomorrow.” Daniels nodded; he sometimes thought no American ever lived to fly more than one mission against the Lizards. Using up pilots as fast as planes was a losing way to do business.
The tommy-gunner squeezed off a burst in the direction of the Lizards. He said, “Corporal, I’ll cover you if you want to slide away from here. You ain’t much good in this fight with just your old Springfield.”
Had he left off the second sentence, Daniels might have taken him up on the offer. But he discovered he had pride left to flick. He could think of himself as old and he’d already thought of his rifle as antiquated, but he wasn’t about to let this punk kid tell him he couldn’t cut it “I’ll stick,” he said shortly.
“However you want it,” the tommy-gunner said, shrugging. Mutt got the idea that only his stripes kept the kid from tacking Pop onto the end of the sentence.
The Lizards skittered forward, firing as they came. The flames that leapt from the burning beam lit them up but also helped screen their movements. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. “No good in a fight, am I?” The soldier beside him looked innocent “Did I say something?”