He’d had troopers who talked like that after they’d been through more battle than a man could stand. Shell shock, they’d called it back in the First World War; combat fatigue was the name it went by these days. Penny had been in only that one fight, but how many troopers got to watch their fathers turned to raw meat right before their eyes? You couldn’t guess beforehand what would send any one person over the edge.
You couldn’t tell what would snap anybody out of it, either. Sometimes nothing would. Some of his men weren’t fit for anything better than taking care of horses here in Lamar. A couple had seemed well enough to ride, but didn’t bother taking any precautions when they went up against the Lizards. They weren’t around any more. And a couple of others had been through the worst of it and got better again. No way to know who would do what.
He took her by the shoulders and hugged her, hard. She was an attractive girl, but it wasn’t like holding a woman in his arms. It reminded him more of the embraces he’d given his grandfather after the old man’s wits started to wander: the body was there, but the will that directed it wasn’t minding the store.
He let her go. “You’ve got to do this for yourself, Miss Penny. Nobody on God’s green earth can do it for you.”
“I think you’d best go now,” she said. Her face hadn’t changed, not even a little bit.
Defeated, he opened the door to her room and started for the stairs. In the room down the hall, the baby was still screaming bloody murder. A couple of doors farther down, a man and a woman shouted angrily at each other.
Almost too soft for Auerbach to hear, Penny Summers called after him, “Be careful, Captain.”
He spun around. Her door was already closed. He wondered if he should go back. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed down the stairs instead. Maybe he hadn’t lost, or not completely, after all.
Since the British army was swinging southward anyhow, the better to fight the remaining Lizard forces on English soil, Moishe Russie got to go into London for a day to see if he could find his family.
The instant he reached the outskirts of the great city, he realized he could throw off his Red Cross armband and desert, and no one would ever be the wiser. London had been battered before; now it seemed nothing but ruins. A man might hide in there for years, coming out only to forage for food. By the filthy, furtive look of a good many people on the street, that was just what they did. A lot of them in better condition carried guns. Russie got the idea those weren’t only for defense against possible Lizard paratroopers.
Making his way through the rubble toward his family’s Soho flat was anything but easy. Street signs had been missing since the Nazi threat in 1940; now whole streets had disappeared, so choked with rubble and cratered by bombs as to be impassable. Worse, a lot of the landmarks he’d used to orient himself as he went about the city were no longer standing: the tower of Big Ben, the Marble Arch in Hyde Park, the Queen Victoria Memorial near Buckingham Palace. On a cloudy day like this one, even knowing which way was south was a tricky business.
He’d walked along Oxford Street for a couple of blocks before he realized where he was: no more than a block from the BBC Overseas Services studio. The brick building that housed it had not been wrecked by bomb or shell. A man with a rifle stood outside. At first Russie thought he was one of the soldiers who had guarded the studio. He needed a moment to realize Eric Blair wore a tin hat and bandolier of cartridges.
Blair took even longer to recognize Russie. As Moishe approached, the Englishman brought the rifle up in unmistakable warning. He handled the Lee-Enfield with assurance; Moishe remembered he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War. Then Blair let the stock of the rifle fall to the grimy sidewalk. “Russie, isn’t it?” he said, still not quite sure.
“Yes, that’s right,” Moishe answered in his uncertain English. “And you are Blair.” If he could put a name to the other, Blair might be less inclined to shoot him. He pointed to the doorway. “Do we still work here?”
“Not bloody likely,” the Englishman said with a shake of the head that threatened to throw off his helmet. “London’s had no power for a fortnight now, maybe longer. I’m here to ensure that no one steals the equipment, nothing more. If we were doing anything, they’d set out fitter guards than I.” He scowled. “If any fitter are left alive, that is.”
Off to the south, artillery spoke, a distant mutter in the air. The Lizards in the northern pocket were dead, fled, or surrendered, but in the south they fought on. Moishe said, “My family-have you heard anything?”
“I’m sorry.” Blair shook his head again. “I wish I could tell you something, but I can’t. For that matter, I can’t say with certainty whether my own kinsfolk are alive or dead. Bloody war.” He started to cough, held his breath till he swayed, and managed to calm the spasm. “Whew!” he said. “Those tear me to pieces when they get going-I might as well be breathing mustard gas.”
Russie started to say something to that, but at the last minute held his peace. No one who hadn’t seen the effect of the gas at close range had any business talking about it. But, by the same token, no one who hadn’t seen it would believe it.
To his surprise, Blair went on, “I know I shouldn’t be speaking of it so. Gas is a filthy business; the things we do to survive would gag Attila the Hun. But Attila, to be fair, never had to contend with invaders from another world.”
“This is so,” Russie said. “Good luck to you. I go now, see if I can find my family.”
“Good luck to you, too,” Blair said. “You should carry a weapon of some sort. The war has made beasts of us all, and some of the beasts are more dangerous to a good and decent man than the Lizards ever dreamt of being.”
“It may be so,” Moishe answered, not meaning a word of it. Blair was a good and decent man himself, but he’d never been in the clutches of the Lizards-or the Germans, either, come to that.
Russie walked south down Regent Street toward Soho. A Lizard plane darted overhead. Along with everyone else close by, he threw himself flat and rolled toward the nearest hole in the ground he could find. When the plane had passed over, he picked himself up and went on. He hardly thought about it. He’d been doing the same sort of thing since 1939.
The only difference he could find between Soho and the rest of London was that misery was expressed in more languages in the cosmopolitan district. The Barcelona, a restaurant Eric Blair favored, was still open for business on Beak Street. Boards covered what had been a glass front; from the smoke that rose from the rear of the place, the proprietor used more boards with which to cook. If London’s electricity was gone, surely no gas flowed through its mains, either.
When Moishe trudged past the Barcelona, he knew his own block of flats was not far away. He picked up the pace, desperate to find out what had become of his wife and son and at the same time dreading what he might learn.
He turned off Beak onto Lexington Street and then to Broadwick, in which his block of flats lay. No sooner had he done so than he let out a long sigh of relief: the building still stood. That did not necessarily prove anything. The neighborhood, like all London neighborhoods he’d seen, had taken heavy damage. If Rivka and Reuven had been outside at the wrong moment… He did his best not to think about that.
In the street, strewn though it was with bricks, broken chunks of concrete, and jagged shards of glass, life went on. Boys shouted as they kicked around a football. The goal posts on the improvised pitch were upright boards undoubtedly scavenged from some wrecked house or shop. The boys played with the same combination of abandon and grim intensity their Polish counterparts would have shown, shouting and laughing as they ran. Not until later would they turn into the calm, undemonstrative Englishmen Moishe found so strange.