The minutes ticked by in agonizing slowness. Finally, Jake continued his crawling trek. Maybe he was the fly, and he crawled upon the Earth’s face. Naw, that was stupid. One thing was certain; he knew where he planned to go. There was a shell hole thirty yards away. It looked deep. Likely it had water in the bottom, as it had been raining on and off for several days.
Every night Jake took off his boots and socks and checked his feet. He dried them all the time and used the tip of his knife to scrape dirt from under his toenails. He told Charlie and Lee to dry theirs. Fungus had started to spread among the newbies, that and athlete’s foot. If your feet went, you were done, kaput. Was kaput anything like Kraut?
Jake sighed. The word was that the Krauts had landed in Rochester. That couldn’t be good. He wondered what his dad was doing now. How was his mother? He thought about his old buddies. Man, Denver seemed like a lifetime ago. The strip club…what had ever happened to the girl he’d talked with? She’d been a babe, all right.
Will I survive the war?
He didn’t see how. He didn’t see how America would, either. We’re not the nation we used to be. How could he help America once again become the land of freedom? First, they had to stop the Krauts and throw the Chinese and Brazilians back home. Then, eventually, the real, old-fashioned Americans needed to take care of those who wanted to enslave the rest of them. Maybe once this is over it will be time for a civil war. The Davy Crocket Americans can set up their own country and the communist types can have their country, which won’t be America, but what the heck. It’s what they seem to want.
Jake decided that as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to use his last RPG to kill Dan Franks. The sergeant was a grade-A bastard. In Jake’s experience there was none worse. Franks deserved to die for the Americans he’d killed. The penal battalion militiamen were the real Americans, the kind who spoke up when those in power did something wrong. For evil to triumph, all good men must do is to do nothing. Some English theorist had said that a long time ago.
The statement told Jake several things. One, there were good men and there were evil men. Those who said otherwise were idiots. Those who said ideas and culture were relative and equal to each other didn’t know what they were talking about. Those who said people should accept everything as being equal to everything else were straight up fools, and America had been listening to the fools for far too long now. Why didn’t they listen to the Daniel Boone types? That’s why it had come to this. Having penal battalions was the socialist thinking of the schoolmen who wanted to brainwash the rest of America.
For evil to triumph, all good men must do is to do nothing.
Jake had spoken up, and that’s why he was in a penal unit. America, America: what had happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?
If I survive this, I’m going to change my country. I’m going to bring back Daniel Boone America. I’m going to fight to free her from the invaders, and then I’m going to fight to free her from the homegrown tyrants and their useful idiots.
Thinking such thoughts made Jake feel better. Then enemy artillery opened up. There were loud, thunderous booms in the distance. Giant flashes told of big shells on the way.
“That can’t be good,” Charlie said.
No. That wasn’t good. Jake wanted to speed up, but he continued the slow crawl. If he moved too fast, he was dead. So slow and easy won the game.
The enemy shells howled over them. Big, car-sized hunks of metal tumbled overhead. None landed among them. Was that a miracle?
Who knew?
Finally, Jake gained his great reward: a waterlogged shell hole. With infinite patience taught from the school of hard knocks, Jake slipped into the watery hole. The yellow water came up to his hips. Soon Charlie and Lee joined him, making tiny splashes as they hunkered down in the hole with him.
“Now what?” Charlie asked. “We made it and the enemy is pulverizing our lines.”
Jake squinted. He knew which outposts on their trench line were dummies and which were heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. He was pretty sure he knew the one that Sergeant Franks hid behind. If he lifted the RGP…
Don’t be stupid, Jake told himself. Franks has been watching me the whole time. He expects me to shoot at him. If you want to kill the sergeant, you’ll have to let the Sigrids pass and attack Franks for you.
That wasn’t a bad idea, but he kept it to himself.
The enemy artillery thundered. The shells hammered the ground, searching for puny men hiding in the Earth.
“Do you hear that?” Charlie asked ten minutes later.
“All I hear is pounding in my ears,” Jake said.
“Listen,” Charlie said.
“Get down,” Lee hissed. The corporal lowered himself into the yellow water until only his head remained above it. The RPG lay higher up beside the shell-hole lip. Lee must have figured he could pick it up later.
Jake still couldn’t hear a thing except for the artillery, but he followed Lee’s example. Charlie did likewise.
Soon enough, Jake heard the squealing, clanking noise of Sigrid drones. His stomach tightened and fear began to claw for his attention.
This is wrong. This is murder putting us out here. I should be safe in the trench. Why does it make any difference if we fire these from the front or the back of the machine?
“Sometimes,” Jake said. Then his mouth dried up. The words wouldn’t come now. He wanted to close his eyes and just slip his head underwater.
An AI Kaiser HK appeared in his limited gaze. The thing was monstrous, and it had a squat, ugly cannon. The 175mm gun was like a short stogie clenched between the teeth of a psychopath. The Kaiser had a host of antennae sprouting from its top. Jake had never been this close to one before. The monster had poking autocannons everywhere and heavy machine guns, and beehive flechette launchers up the ying-yang. The HK could murder them all, no sweat. The good guys didn’t have any heavy stuff, not out here in no-man’s land to take out Kaisers.
Behind the Kaiser appeared another, and then a third and a fourth.
Now we know where they enemy is making his main assault.
“What do we do?” Charlie whispered.
Jake stared at his friend from Idaho. The look said one thing: keep your yap sewed shut, thank you oh-so much.
The three penal militiamen waited in their watery slop-hole. Three puny RPGs waited below the lip like metal sandbags.
Trying not to look directly at the things, Jake counted seven Kaisers. There were probably more. He could only see so much ducked down in his hole. It was like being mice as a herd of elephants walked by, or being antelope as a hungry pride of lions trotted past.
Treads clanked. Gun turrets rotated and barrels elevated. The ground shook and trembled as the big tanks passed. Bits of dirt from the edge of the shell hole plopped into the yellow water. It was like doom coming, and Jake feared the three of them would be buried alive as a Kaiser squashed them as he might squash a beetle with his heel.
In the distance, artillery boomed.
Is that theirs or ours?
The artillery ended up being American, and it was aimed at the Kaisers, meaning the shells screamed down onto no-man’s land.