A buzzing in the air made him scoot back from that hole. Anything in the air nowadays most likely belonged to the Lizards. When machine guns began to yammer, he congratulated himself on his own good sense and hoped none of the new fish would get killed.
But the machine-gun bullets, by the sound of them, were slamming into the Lizard position, not his own. He grinned wickedly-the scaly bastards didn’t often screw up like that. The aircraft, whatever it was, passed right overhead. A bomb landed on the Lizards, close enough to batter his ears and make the ground shake under him.
Even the most cautious man will take a chance every once in a while. Daniels wriggled forward, ever so warily peeked out through the hole in the wall. He burst out laughing, a loud, raucous noise altogether at variance with the racket of combat.
“What the hell?” Muldoon grunted.
“You know what just strafed the Lizards, Muldoon?” Daniels held up a solemn hand to show he was telling the truth: “A so-help-me-God Piper Cub with a couple machine guns, one slung under each wing. Got away, too. Flew in maybe ten feet off the rooftops here, or what’s left of ’em, shot up the Lizards, dropped that light bomb, and got the hell out of there.”
“A Piper Cub, Lieutenant?” Muldoon didn’t sound as if he believed his ears. “Jesus God, we really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
“I dunno about that,” Mutt answered. “I heard somewheres the Russians been giving the Lizards fits with these little no-account biplanes, fly so low and slow they’re damn near impossible to stop until they’re right on top of you-they can do stuff a regular fighter plane can’t.”
“Maybe,” Muldoon said dubiously. “I tell you one thing, though, sir: you wouldn’t get me up on one of those little crates, not for all the tea in China. Hell, the Lizards can pick out which eye they’re gonna shoot you through. No, thanks. Not for me, no way, nohow.”
“Not for me, either,” Daniels admitted. “I ain’t never been on an airplane, an’ it’s too late for me to start now. But this here ain’t exactly a safe line o’ work we done picked ourselves, neither.”
“Boy, don’t I wish you was wrong.” Muldoon slithered up beside Mutt. “But them Lizards, half the time they ain’t aiming at me in particular. They’re just throwin’ bullets around, and if I happen to stop one, I do. But if you’re up there in an airplane and they’re shooting at you, that’spersonal, you know what I mean?”
“I guess maybe I do,” Mutt said, “but a dogface who stops one of those bullets with his head, he’s just as dead as the Red Baron who got shot down all personal-like.”
Muldoon didn’t answer. He was looking out through the hole in the wall. Mutt got up on one knee and peered through the window. The strafing run from the Piper Cub had taken the wind right out of the sails of the Lizards’ pounding of his position. That made him think he could maybe do a little pounding of his own.
“Stay here and give us some coverin’ fire,” he told Muldoon. “I’m gonna see if we can head south for a change, ‘stead o’ north.”
At Muldoon’s acknowledging nod, Daniels crawled through the trench to the ruins of the house next door. The men who had dug it had broken both gas and water mains, but, since neither had worked for months, that didn’t matter. A soldier he didn’t recognize gave him a hand up out of the trench.
He pointed southward. “They’re hurting there. Let’s go take us back some houses before they remember which end is up.”
The young soldiers cheered with an intensity that made him proud and frightened at the same time. They’d do whatever they thought it took, the same way a young outfielder would chase a fly ball right into a fence. Sometimes the fence would be wood, and give a little. Sometimes it would be concrete. Then they’d cart the kid off on a stretcher.
They’d cart a lot of these kids off on stretchers before the fight was through. Mutt tried not to think about that. They’d carted him off on a stretcher once already. Now he was back. He hoped he’d stay in there this time.
“Come on, we can’t waste time here,” he said. He told some men to move forward with him, others to stay back and give covering fire. The ones he told to stay back squawked and pouted like spoiled children deprived of a lollipop. He held up a hand: “Don’t get in a swivet, boys. This here’ll be fire and move. Soon as we find cover up ahead, we’ll hunker down and start shootin’ so you-all can move on up ahead of us. You’ll get your share, I promise.”Your share of shattered skulls and splintered bones and belly wounds. Exploiting such eagerness filled Mutt with guilt. He’d never again feel it himself.
Yelling like fiends, his men moved forward, some shooting from the hip to add to the Americans’ firepower and make the Lizards keep their heads down. Mutt dove behind the burnt-out hulk of somebody’s old Packard. Sheet metal wouldn’t keep bullets from biting him, not the way a good pile of concrete or dirt would. But if the Lizards couldn’t see him, they wouldn’t send as many bullets toward him.
A couple of men were down, one twisting, one ominously limp and still. The Lizards weren’t sending out the wall of lead they had before, though. Daniels waved for the troops who had been covering to move forward past and through the detachment that had accompanied him. Those men, in turn, laid down covering fire for their buddies. They did a better job than Mutt had thought they had in them. Maybe he would be able to push the Lizards out of their forward positions.
One Lizard had other ideas. He’d pop up in a window like a jack-in-the-box, squeeze off a few rounds, and duck back down before anybody could nail him. He was a good shot, too. Somebody brave and stubborn and lucky like that, whether human or twisty-eyed alien critter, could derail an advance.
Mutt gauged the distance from himself to the house in which the Lizard sheltered: maybe forty yards. The window the Lizard was using wasn’t a very big one, which wasn’t surprising-being a twisty-eyed alien critter didn’t make you stupid. The Lizard let loose with another burst. Off to Mutt’s right, a human voice started screaming.
He grimaced, shook his head, and took a grenade from his belt. His arm had got him to the majors, even if that was a long time ago-and even if his lousy bat hadn’t let him stay there. Almost without conscious thought, he went into a catcher’s crouch in back of, not the plate, but the trunk of the Packard.
He yanked the pin out of the grenade, popped up (knocking off his helmet with the back of one wrist, as if it had been a catcher’s mask), and let fly. He went down behind the car before the grenade sailed through the window. It went off with abang! different from those of the rifles and submachine guns and Lizard automatic weapons all around.
A GI dashed for that window. The Lizard didn’t pop up to shoot him. The young dogface leaned in (suicidally stupid, had the Lizard been playing possum), and fired a long burst from his tommy gun. “Hell of a peg, Lieutenant!” he yelled. “Little bastard’s raw meat now.” Cheers rang amid the shooting.
Move and fire, move and fire… and then the Lizards were moving and firing, too, in retreat. Mutt ran to a corner of the house where the tough Lizard had holed up, fired at its buddies as they pulled back. For the time being, a block of ruined North Side Chicago was back in American hands.
By the hideous standards of fighting in the city, that counted for a victory. He owed the kids a mental apology. They’d done great.
Ttomalss wondered again how any Tosevite ever lived to grow up. The hatchling he was hand-rearing was more than half a year old; it had also had a year and a half of growth inside the female who bore it. It was still helpless. It still had no control over its messy bodily functions; the chamber in which it lived-in which Ttomalss perforce did most of his living, too-smelled unpleasantly of stale Tosevite waste.