“I don’t want it,” Nejas said; now he knew what Ussmak was giving him. But Ussmak had never heard a more obvious lie. Nejas’ eyes never moved from the palm that held the ginger. When Ussmak brought his hand close to the other male’s muzzle, Nejas’ tongue flicked out and licked it clean.
Quietly, Skoob said to Ussmak, “We ought to report you for punishment when we get to an area where such things are possible.”
“Do whatever you’re going to do,” Ussmak answered, as weary as he ever remembered being. “The point is that we get to one of those places, not what we do afterwards.”
“Let’s go.” Nejas surged to his feet again. His eyes had a hectic glow to them, as if fires burned uncontrolled in his brain. Ussmak knew about those fires, and the herbal wind that fanned them. He hoped he hadn’t given the commander too much ginger. Voice crackling with unassailable certainty, Nejas pointed south. “That way. Before long we shall surely encounter one of our bases intended to hold down this land.”
Unless we encounter Big Ugly infiltrators first,Ussmak thought.If they were in Farnham, no reason they can’t have slipped south of it. They’re good at such things. After all, this is their planet. Over the days since the Race came to Tosev 3, he’d got a thorough education as to what that meant.
Something moved at the bottom of a hedgerow. He didn’t pause to wonder about what it might be; males who hesitated once seldom got the chance to hesitate twice. He fired a short burst, his first bullet an instant ahead of Skoob’s.
Only after his finger came off the trigger did he see what he and the landcruiser gunner had been shooting at: a round little spiny animal with a pointed snout. It was dead now, dead and torn and bleeding, its tiny black eyes staring up in blind reproach. For the first time since he woke up from cold sleep on Tosev 3, Ussmak felt guilty about killing something.
13
Mutt Daniels crouched in a broken house, peering out through the glassless window and down the wreckage-filled street. The Lizards were still moving forward; between their onslaughts and the stubborn American defense, Chicago was being ground to meal, and fine meal at that.
The wind that whistled through the window and through the gaping holes in the roof had a chilly edge to it. The sun was going down early these days, too, when you could see it through the clouds, both natural and of smoke.
“Never thought I’d be one rootin’ for an early winter an’ snow on the ground, but I sure as hell am,” Mutt muttered to himself. The winter before, the Americans had kicked the stuffing out of the Lizards, who didn’t seem to have a clue about fighting in the cold. In the summertime, though-Mutt marveled that he was still alive.
A noise from behind him made him whirl around. His first sergeant, a burly Irishman named Herman Muldoon, nodded to him and said, “We got some new fish comin’ in out of the north, Lieutenant; replacements, by Jesus! They’re all going to be green as paint, poor lads.”
“Yeah, well, that’s one thing ain’t nobody can say about the likes of us,” Mutt answered. Muldoon’s answering chuckle showed crooked teeth, a couple of them broken. He was a few years younger than Daniels; like Mutt, he’d been Over There in what had been optimistically called the War to End War. As best they could figure it, they’d been only a few miles apart in the Argonne, though they hadn’t met.
Muldoon took off his old British-style tin hat and ran a hand through matted hair that had been red but now was going gray. He said, “I seen a few of ’em when they was back a ways. Christ on His cross, they’ve got guns, they’ve got helmets, some of ’em even got uniforms. They look like soldiers on the outside, but inside a couple weeks-hell, maybe, inside a couple days-half of ’em’s gonna end up dead.”
“I know,” Mutt answered gloomily. “That’s the way it works. The ones who live, we’ll make soldiers out of some of ’em.”
“ ‘S true,” Muldoon said. “ ‘S a fuckin’ waste, but it’s true. The real bitch of it is, some o’ the ones who stop a bullet early would make pretty decent men if they had any luck. Just how you roll the dice.”
“Yeah,” Mutt said again. He fell silent. He didn’t like thinking about that, though he’d seen it in France and here in Illinois. If chance ruled, if skill played no part on the battlefield, you could die any old time, no matter how good a soldier you’d got to be. Of course you could. He knew that. Knowing it and contemplating it were two different things, though.
A couple of hundred yards off to the left, back toward Lake Michigan, shooting started up. It was just a spattering of rounds, but Daniels hunkered down without conscious thought. Muldoon said, “Probably some of the rookies coming into the line. They get up here, they think they gotta start shootin’.”
Mutt nodded. It had been like that in France. His granddad-hell, both his granddads-had said it was like that in the States War. It had probably been like that since the day Alley Oop, Jr., joined up with his dad and chucked a rock at the first dinosaur he saw.
More noises from the rear. The firing wasn’t spreading, not yet. Daniels risked a peek back over his shoulder. Crawling through the wreckage of what had been a quiet North Side residential neighborhood came six or eight-they weren’t dogfaces, not yet. Puppyfaces, maybe.
Those faces were all dirty, but only a couple of the rookies had struck up any serious acquaintance with a razor. To Mutt’s jaundiced eye, they all looked too pale and too skinny. Down in Mississippi, his first guess would have been hookworm. Here, he knew better. He thumped his belly, what was left of it. Nobody’d been eating good, not this whole past year-one more reason to hate the Lizards’ scaly hides.
Muldoon slid back and took charge of the kids, moving them into the houses to either side of the one Mutt was in. Daniels had the heady feeling of actually being part of a real fighting line again, not just a picket of a band of skirmishers. That quickly went away. The new fish not only wouldn’t know when to shoot and when not to, they wouldn’t shoot worth a damn when they did open up.
Sure as hell, one of them let loose with a long burst from a tommy gun. Through the racket-and after it abruptly fell silent-Daniels listened to Muldoon raking the kid over the coals: “You go blowin’ it off like that again, you worthless no-brain turd, and the lieutenant’ll chew on your ass, not just me. You don’t ever want that to happen, buddy, believe me you don’t.”
Mutt snorted rueful laughter as Muldoon came back to him by way of a battered trench (in France in 1918 it hardly would have deserved the name; they’d known how to build trenches then) that ran across what had been a neat urban lawn. When Daniels had been a noncom, he, too, had warned privates about the fearsome wrath of their officers. Now he was one of those officers, awesome and distant as some minor-league god. He hadn’t changed, but when he’d got his gold bar, the way people looked at him had, sure as the dickens.
The Lizards, worse luck, weren’t asleep at the switch. When somebody shot at them, they shot back. Mutt didn’t know if they really had all the ammo in the world, but they sure as hell acted that way. He threw himself flat; he’d return fire after the storm calmed down. A thump told him Muldoon had gone down on his belly, too. Muldoon knew how things worked.
A couple of houses away, somebody started screaming for his mother in a high, broken voice. Mutt bit his lip. One of the rookies had just found misfortune, or rather, it had found him. He hoped the kid wasn’t wounded too badly. Any kind of gunshot wound hurt enough and was bloody enough to scare the piss out of you, even if it didn’t set you pushing up daisies.
He looked out through a hole in the wall and saw a couple of Lizards skittering forward under cover of all the lead they were laying down. He fired in their direction. They dove for cover. He nodded to himself. Some ways, he had more in common with the Lizards these days than he did with raw recruits on his own side.