Worldwar_ Upsetting The Balance Part 13

Karpov's gaze followed hers. "An NKVD b.a.s.t.a.r.d, eh?" he said roughly-but he didn't raise his voice, either. "I thought as much, just from the way the order was framed. No help for it that I can see. Go gather your belongings and get into the wagon-you'll see it when you come out of the tunnels here. Wear something civilian, if you can; it will make you less likely to be shot at from the air. And good luck to you, Ludmila Vadimovna."

"Thank you, Comrade Colonel," Ludmila saluted again, then walked back down the hall to her chamber. Mechanically, she packed up her flight suit, coveralls, and pistol. She had no civilian blouses, but at the bottom of her duffel bag she did find a flowered skirt. She couldn't remember the last time she'd worn it.

When she came out of the tunnels, she blinked like a mole suddenly in daylight as she replaced the gra.s.s-covered netting that concealed the entrance. As Colonel Karpov had said, a high-wheeled panje panje wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of the wagon waited there, the driver in the baggy blouse, trousers, and boots of the muzhik, muzhik, the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds. the horse making the most of the moment by pulling up weeds.

The wagon carried a load of straw. When Georg Schultz sat up in it, he looked like a scarecrow, although Ludmila had never seen a scarecrow with a coppery beard. He was dressed in his old Wehrmacht Wehrmacht tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn't have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from. tunic and Red Army trousers; he didn't have any civilian clothes this side of wherever in Germany he came from.

He grinned at her. "Come on back here with me, liebchen," liebchen," he said in his mixture of Russian and German. he said in his mixture of Russian and German.

"One minute." She rummaged in her pack until she found the Tokarev automatic pistol. She belted it on, then climbed into the wagon. "You never listen to me when I tell you to keep your hands where they belong. Maybe you will listen to this."

"Maybe." He was still grinning. He'd faced worse things than pistols. "And maybe not."

The driver twitched the reins. The horse let out a resentful snort, raised its head, and ambled off toward Moscow. The driver whistled something from Mussorgsky-after a moment, Ludmila recognized it as "The Great Gate of Kiev." She smiled at the reference, no matter how oblique, to her hometown. But the smile quickly faded. Kiev had pa.s.sed from the n.a.z.is' hands straight into those of the Lizards.

Although they moved ever farther from the front line, the countryside showed the scars of war. Bombs had cratered the dirt road that ran northeast toward Moscow; every couple of hundred meters, it seemed, the panje panje wagon had to rattle off onto the verge. wagon had to rattle off onto the verge.

Georg Schultz sat up again, spilling straw in all directions. "These stinking dirt roads played h.e.l.l with us, all through Russia. The map would say we were coming up to a highway, and it'd either be dust and dirt like this or mud when it rained. Didn't seem fair. You d.a.m.n Russians were so backwards, it ended up helping you."

The driver didn't move a muscle; he just kept driving. In spite of that, Ludmila would have bet he knew German. If he was from the NKVD, he'd have more talents than his rough-hewn exterior revealed.

Every so often, they'd pa.s.s the dead carca.s.ses of tanks rocketed from the air by the Lizards before they ever reached the front. Some had been there long enough to start rusting. Most had their engine compartments and turret hatches open: the Soviets had salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage.

Even as sc.r.a.p metal, the T-34s looked formidable. Pointing to one, Ludmila asked with no small pride, "And what did you think of those when you were up against them, Comrade Panzer Gunner?"

"Nasty b.u.g.g.e.rs," Schultz answered promptly, ignoring the ironic form of address. "Good armor, good gun, good engine, good tracks-all better than anything we had, probably. The gunsight, not so good. Not the two-man turret, either-the commander's too busy helping the gunner to command the panzer, and that's his proper job. He should have a cupola, too. And you need more panzers with wireless sets. Not having them hurt your tactics, and they weren't that great to begin with."

Now Ludmila hoped the driver was listening. She'd been aiming to twit the German tankman; she hadn't expected such a serious, thoughtful answer. Being a n.a.z.i didn't automatically make a man a fool, no matter what propaganda claimed.

The journey in to Moscow took two days. They spent the first night in a stand of trees well off the road. The Lizards still flew by at night, smas.h.i.+ng up whatever they could find.

Moscow, when they finally reached it, made Ludmila gasp in dismay. She'd last been there the winter before, after she'd flown Molotov to Germany. The Soviet capital had taken a beating then. Now...

Now it seemed that every building possibly large enough to contain a factory had been pounded flat. A couple of the onion domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil's had crumpled. Walls everywhere were streaked with soot; the faint odor of wet, stale smoke hung in the air.

But people hadn't given up. Babushkas Babushkas sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn't see what was in them, they wouldn't know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung. sold apples and cabbages and beets on street corners. Soldiers carrying submachine guns tramped purposefully along. Horse-drawn wagons, some small like the one in which Ludmila rode, others pulled by straining teams, rattled and clattered. No guessing what they held, not with tarpaulins lashed down tight over their beds. If the Lizards couldn't see what was in them, they wouldn't know what to bomb. Flies droned around lumps of horse dung.

The driver knew which bridge over the Moscow River was in good enough repair to get them up to the Kremlin, and which parts of the battered heart of Moscow-of the Soviet Union-were still beating. He pulled the panje panje wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse's head, and said, "I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov." But for the s.n.a.t.c.hes of whistling he'd let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he'd made since he set out from the air base. wagon up in front of one of those parts, stuck a feed bag on the horse's head, and said, "I am to escort you to Colonel Lidov." But for the s.n.a.t.c.hes of whistling he'd let out from time to time, that was almost the first sound he'd made since he set out from the air base.

Some of the walls in the corridor were cracked, but the electric lights worked. Off in the distance, a petrol-fired generator chugged away to keep the lightbulbs s.h.i.+ning. "Wish we we had electricity," Schultz muttered under his breath. had electricity," Schultz muttered under his breath.

The corridor was not the one down which Ludmila had gone on her earlier meeting with Boris Lidov; she wondered if that part of the Kremlin still stood. The wagon driver opened a door, peered inside, beckoned to her and to Georg Schultz. "He will see you."

Ludmila's heart pounded in her chest, as if she were about to fly a combat mission. She knew she had reason to be nervous; the NKVD could kill you as readily, and with as little remorse, as the Germans or the Lizards. And Lidov had made plain what he thought of her after she got back from Germany. She might have gone to a gulag gulag then, rather than back to her unit. then, rather than back to her unit.

The NKVD colonel (Ludmila wondered if his promotion sprang from ability or simply survival) looked up from a paper-strewn desk. She started to report to him in proper military form, but Schultz beat her to the punch, saying breezily, "How goes it with you, Boris, you scrawny old prune-faced b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

Staring, Ludmila waited for the sky to fall. It wasn't that the description didn't fit; it did, like a glove. But to say what you thought of an NKVD colonel, right to his prune face... Maybe he didn't follow German.

He did. Fixing Schultz with a fishy stare, he answered in German much better than Ludmila's: "Just because Otto Skorzeny could get away with speaking to me so, Sergeant, does not mean you can. He was more valuable than you are, and he was not under Soviet discipline. You, on the other hand-" He let that hang, perhaps to give Schultz the chance to paint horrid pictures in his own mind.

It didn't work. Schultz said, "Listen, I was one of the men you sent on the raid that gave you people the metal for your bomb. If that doesn't buy me the right to speak my mind, what does?"

"Nothing," Lidov said coldly.

Ludmila spoke up before Schultz got himself shot or sent to a camp, and her along with him: "Comrade Colonel, for what mission have you summoned the two of us away from the front line?"

Lidov's look suggested he'd forgotten she was there, and utterly forgotten he'd ordered the two of them to Moscow for any specific reason. After a moment, he collected himself and even laughed a little. That amazed Ludmila, who hadn't suspected he could. Then he explained, "Curiously enough, it has to do with Soviet-German friends.h.i.+p and cooperation." He'd answered Ludmila in Russian; he translated the reply into German for Schultz's benefit.

The panzer gunner laughed, too. "Till the Lizards came, I was giving you cooperation, all right, fifty millimeters at a time."

"What are we to do, Comrade Colonel?" Ludmila asked hastily. Lidov had warned Georg Schultz twice. Even once would have been surprising. Thinking he'd forbear three times running was asking for a miracle, and Ludmila, a good product of the Soviet educational system, did not believe in miracles.

Lidov's chair squeaked as he turned in it to point to a map pinned to the rough plaster on the side of the wall. "Here by the lake-do you see it?-is the city of Pskov. It is still in the hands of mankind, although threatened by the Lizards. Some of the defenders are Wehrmacht Wehrmacht troops, others partisan members of the Red Army." He paused and pursed his lips. "Some friction in the defense has resulted from this." troops, others partisan members of the Red Army." He paused and pursed his lips. "Some friction in the defense has resulted from this."

"You mean they're shooting at each other, don't you?" Schultz asked. Ludmila had wondered if he was too naive to see what lay beneath propaganda, but he proved he wasn't. Gobbels probably used the same techniques as his Soviet counterparts, which would have sensitized Schultz to them.

"Not at present," Lidov said primly. "Nonetheless, examples of cooperation might prove to have a valuable effect there. The two of you have done an admirable job of working together, by all the reports that have reached me."

"We haven't worked together all that close," Schultz said with a sidelong glance at Ludmila. "Not as close as I'd like."

She wanted to kick him right where it would do the most good. "By which you mean I don't care to be your wh.o.r.e," she snarled. Before she said something worse to him, something irremediable, she turned to Boris Lidov. "Comrade Colonel, how are we to get to Pskov?"

"I could have you sent by train," Lidov answered. "North of Moscow, rail service works fairly well. But instead, I have a U-2 waiting at a field not far from here. The aircraft itself will prove useful in defending Pskov, as will the addition of a pilot and a skilled mechanic who can also serve a gun. Now go-you spent too much time getting here, but I was unwilling to detach a plane from frontline service."

Ludmila was unsurprised to find the driver waiting for them when they left Colonel Lidov's office. The driver said, "I will take you to the airport now."

Georg Schultz scrambled up into the panje panje wagon. He reached out a hand to help Ludmila join him and laughed when she ignored it, as if she'd done something funny. Once more she felt like kicking him. Being sent to Pskov was one thing. Being sent there in the company of this smirking, lecherous lout was something else again. wagon. He reached out a hand to help Ludmila join him and laughed when she ignored it, as if she'd done something funny. Once more she felt like kicking him. Being sent to Pskov was one thing. Being sent there in the company of this smirking, lecherous lout was something else again.

She brightened for a moment: at least she would be escaping Nikifor Sholudenko. And-exquisite irony!-maybe his reports on her had helped make that possible. But her glee quickly faded. For every Sholudenko she escaped, she was only too likely to find another one. His kind was a hardy breed-like any other c.o.c.kroaches, she thought. she thought.

Atvar nervously pondered the map that showed the progress of the Race's invasion of Britain. In one respect, all was well: the British could not stop the thrusts of his armored columns. In another respect, though, the picture was not as bright: the Race's armor controlled only the ground on which it sat at the moment. Territory where it had been but was no longer seethed with rebellion the moment the landcruisers were out of sight.

"The trouble with this cursed island," he said, jabbing a fingerclaw at the computer display as if it were actually the territory in question, "is that it's too small and too tightly packed with Tosevites. Fighting there is like trying to hold a longball game in an airlock."

"Well put, Exalted Fleetlord." Kirel let his mouth fall open in an appreciative chuckle. Atvar studied the map with one eye and the s.h.i.+plord with the other. He still mistrusted Kirel. A properly loyal subordinate would have played no role in the effort to oust him. Yes, next to Straha, Kirel was a paragon of virtue, but that was not saying enough to leave the fleetlord comfortable.

Atvar said, "The cost in equipment and males for territory gained is running far higher than the computer projections. We've lost several heavy transports, and we cannot afford that at all. Without the transport fleet, we'll have to use stars.h.i.+ps to move landcruisers about-and that would leave them vulnerable to the maniacal Tosevites."

"Truth, Exalted Fleetlord." Kirel hesitated, then went on, "At best, computer projections gave us less than a fifty percent chance of succeeding in the conquest of Britain if the campaign in the SSSR was not satisfactorily concluded first."

Kirel remained unfailingly polite, but Atvar was not in the mood for criticism. "The computer's reasoning was based on our ability to s.h.i.+ft resources from the SSSR after we conquered it," he snapped. "True, we did not conquer it, but we have s.h.i.+fted resources-after the Soviets exploded that atomic bomb, we've scaled back operations in their territory. This produces something of the effect the computer envisioned, even if by a different route."

"Yes, Exalted Fleetlord." If Kirel was convinced, he did a good job of hiding it. He changed the subject, but not to one more rea.s.suring: "We are down to our last hundred antimissiles, Exalted Fleetlord."

"That is not good," Atvar said, an understatement that would do until a bigger one came along, which wouldn't be any time soon. As was his way, he did his best to look on the bright side of things: "At least we can concentrate those missiles against Deutschland, the only Tosevite empire exploring that technology at the moment."

"You are of course correct," Kirel said. Then he and the fleetlord stopped and looked at each other in mutual consternation-and understanding. With the Race, saying something was not happening at the moment meant it would not happen, certainly not in a future near enough to require worry. With the Big Uglies, it meant what it said and nothing more: it was no guarantee that the Americans or the Russkis or the Nipponese or even the British wouldn't start lobbing guided missiles at the Race tomorrow or the day after. Even more unnerving, both males had come to take that possibility for granted. With the Tosevites, you couldn't tell.

Kirel tried again: "We continue to expend the antimissile missiles at a rate of several per day. We also seek to destroy the launchers from which the Deutsch missiles come, but we have had only limited success there, as they are both mobile and easy to conceal."

"Any success on Tosev 3 seems limited," Atvar said with a sigh. "We might do better to blast the factories in which the missiles are manufactured. If the Deutsche cannot produce them, they cannot fire them. And missiles require great precision; if we destroy the tools needed to make them, the Big Uglies will be a long while coming up with more." He realized he was once more reduced to buying time against the Tosevites, but that was better than losing to them.

"This course is also being attempted," Kirel said, "but, while it pains me to contradict the exalted fleetlord, the Tosevite missiles are astonis.h.i.+ngly crude. Their guidance is so bad as to make them no more than area weapons, extremely long-range artillery, but the prospect of large weights of high explosive landing behind our lines remains unpleasant; some have evaded our countermeasures and done considerable damage, and that situation will grow far worse as we run out of countermissiles. The corresponding point is that they are far easier to build than the missiles that shoot them down. We attack factories we've identified as producing missile components, but the Deutsche continue to produce and launch the pestilential things."

Atvar sighed again. There in an eggsh.e.l.l was the story of the war against the Big Uglies. The Race took all the proper steps to contain them-and got hurt anyhow.

A screen on his desk lit up, showing the features of his adjutant, Ps.h.i.+ng. Atvar immediately started to worry. Ps.h.i.+ng wouldn't interrupt his conference with Kirel for anything that wasn't important, which meant, in practice, for anything that hadn't gone wrong. "What is it?" Atvar demanded, putting a fierce snarl into the interrogative cough.

"Forgive me for troubling you, Exalted Fleetlord," Ps.h.i.+ng said nervously, "but Fzzek, commander of invasion forces in Britain, has received under sign of truce a disturbing message from Churchill, the chief minister to the petty emperor of Britain. He requests your orders on how to proceed."

"Give me the message," Atvar said.

"It shall be done." Ps.h.i.+ng swung an eye turret to one side, evidently reading the words from another screen. "This Churchill demands that we begin evacuating our forces from Britain in no more than two days or face an unspecified type of warfare the Tosevites have not yet employed against us, but one which is a.s.serted to be highly effective and dangerous."

"If this Churchill uses nuclear arms against us, we shall not spare his capital," Atvar said. "The island of Britain is so small, a few nuclear weapons would utterly ruin it."

"Exalted Fleetlord, Churchill specifically denies the weapons he describes are nuclear in nature," Ps.h.i.+ng replied. "They are new, they are deadly. Past that, the British spokesmale declined detailed comment."

"Having begun the conquest of Britain, we are not going to abandon it on the say-so of a Tosevite," Atvar said. "You may tell Fzzek to relay that to Churchill. For all we know, the Big Ugly is but running an enormous bluff. We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived. Relay that to Fzzek as well."

"It shall be done," Ps.h.i.+ng said. The screen holding his image went blank.

Atvar turned back to Kirel. "Sometimes the presumption Tosevites show astonishes me. They treat us as if we were fools. If they have a new weapon, which I doubt, advertising it will produce nothing from us, especially since we've seen for ourselves what liars they are."

"Exactly so, Exalted Fleetlord," Kirel said.

Mutt Daniels crouched in ruins, hoping the Lizard bombardment would end soon. "If it don't end soon, there ain't gonna be nothin' left of Chicago," he muttered under his breath.

"What's that, Lieutenant?" Dracula Szabo asked from the shelter of a sh.e.l.l hole not far away.

Before Mutt could answer, several Lizard sh.e.l.ls came in, close enough to slam him down as if he'd been blocking the plate when a runner bowled him over trying to score. He thanked his lucky stars he'd been breathing out rather than in; a blast could rip your lungs to bits and kill you without leaving a mark on your body.

"Come on," he said, and charged west across the ruined lawn of Poro College toward the rubble that had been shops and apartments on the other side of South Park Way. Szabo followed at his heels.

Somewhere close by, a Lizard opened up with an automatic rifle. Daniels didn't know whether the bullets were intended for him, and didn't wait to find out. He threw himself flat, ignoring the bricks and stones on which he landed. Bricks and stones could hurt his bones, but bullets... he shuddered, not caring for the parody on the old rhyme.

Bela Szabo returned five with his BAR. "Ain't this a h.e.l.l of a mess?" he called to Mutt.

"You might say that, yeah-you just might," Mutt answered. Off to the west, some Americans still fought in the Swift and Armour plants; every so often, little spatters of gunfire rang out from that direction. The plants themselves were worse rubble than the Bronzeville wreckage amidst which he crouched. The Lizards had finally pushed around them and driven halfway toward Lake Michigan. That put them and Chicago's American defenders smack in the middle of Bronzeville, Chicago's Black Belt. n.o.body had any real solid claim to the land between the packing plants and where Mutt now lay.

Dracula jerked a thumb back at what had been, in happier times, Poro College. "What the h.e.l.l kind of place was that, anyways?" he asked. "I seen pictures of colored women all gussied up scattered along with all the other junk."

"That there was what they call a beauty college," said Mutt, who'd seen a sign on the ground. "I guess that's where you went to learn how to gussy up colored folk, like you said."

"Not me, Lieutenant," Dracula said.

"Not me, neither, but somebody," Mutt answered. Like most white men from Mississippi, he automatically thought of Negroes as ignorant sharecroppers who were fine as long as they kept to their place. Barnstorming against black ballplayers in the winter and endless travels through the north and west, where things worked a little differently, had softened his att.i.tude without destroying it.

That complicated life at the moment, because Bronzeville held, along with Lizard a.s.sault troops and American defenders and counterattackers, a fair number of Negro civilians living in cellars and makes.h.i.+ft shelters cobbled together from the wreckage of what had once been fine houses. They were nonpareil scavengers; that they'd stayed alive in the h.e.l.l Chicago had become proved as much. They found all sorts of goodies-canned food, medicine, sometimes even smokes and booze-for the Army units fighting hereabouts. But not for Mutt: as soon as they heard his drawl, they dummied up. One, more forthright than the rest, said, "Mistuh, we came no'th to git away from that kind o' talk."

As if picking the worry from Mutt's mind, Dracula Szabo said, "Lieutenant, we gotta get some more help from the spooks around here. I mean, I ain't the worst scrounger ever born-"

"You're a sandbaggin' son of a b.i.t.c.h, is what you are, Dracula," Daniels answered. Szabo was the best scrounger he'd ever seen, and he'd seen some real pros, Americans and English and especially Frenchmen, in France during the First World War. Hadn't been for Dracula, the platoon would have been hungrier and grouchier. Mutt still had a couple of precious cigarettes stashed against a day when he'd have to smoke one or die.

Dracula grinned, unabashed. As if Mutt hadn't spoken, he took up where he'd left off: "-but the thing of it is, the spooks know where most of the stuff is, account of they're the ones who stashed it in the first place. I'm just goin' around, maybe finding things by luck, know what I mean? Luck's a handy thing, no doubt about it, but having an angle's a d.a.m.n sight better." He spoke with the calm a.s.surance of a man who tucked an ace up his sleeve every now and again.

"I'm not saying you're wrong, kid. Tell you what-next time we're tryin' to get somethin' from 'em, you handle it. Tell 'em the lieutenant made you the official U.S. Army special duty supply bloodhound for the platoon. We'll see how that goes for a while-if we don't get pushed outta here and don't walk into a sh.e.l.l."

"Okay, Lieutenant, if that's how you want it." Szabo kept his voice so carefully neutral that Mutt had to put his sleeve up against his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. He knew he'd just given the fox the keys to the henhouse. Dracula would be scrounging for himself, not just for the platoon, and he'd turn a handsome profit on some of the things he came up with. But he was smart enough to do that after the things that really needed doing. Or he'd better be smart enough, because if he wasn't, Mutt would land on him like a ton of bricks.

From somewhere back not far from the sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan, a mortar started lobbing bombs onto the Lizards over on Calumet Avenue. "Come on!" Mutt shouted, and ran forward toward a house that was more or less intact. The men he led came with him, rifles and submachine guns banging away as they sprinted from one piece of cover to the next.

More bombs fell, these just ahead of the advancing Americans, so close that a couple of fragments flew past Daniels with an ugly whistling noise. The mortars chewed up the landscape even worse than it was already. Mutt peered out from behind a corner of the house, fired a burst at what might have been a Lizard even if it probably wasn't, and ran forward again to flop down behind a pile of bricks that once upon a time had been somebody's chimney.

He rested there for a couple of minutes, breathing hard-h.e.l.l, panting. War was a young man's business, and he wasn't a young man any more. As he tried to catch his breath, he wondered whether pus.h.i.+ng the Lizards back across a couple of miles of landscape-turned-trash-dump was worth the blood it would cost.

He'd wondered the same thing Over There. Once you were in 'em, the stretches of sh.e.l.l-pocked German trenches you'd taken didn't seem as if they could possibly make up for the guys who got shot while you were taking them. But you kept doing it, over and over and over, and eventually the Boches Boches couldn't stand the hammering any more and gave up. couldn't stand the hammering any more and gave up.

Mutt had figured it was what Mr. Wilson called it: the war to end war. But then up popped Hitler and up popped the j.a.ps, and you had to go off and do it all over again. And then along came the Lizards, and all of a sudden you weren't fighting in some G.o.dforsaken place n.o.body'd ever heard of, you were fighting in Chicago, for G.o.d's sake. h.e.l.l, Comiskey Park, or whatever was left of it, couldn't have been more than a mile away.

Freight-train noises overhead said the Lizards were going after the mortar crews. Mutt didn't wish those crews any harm, but he was just as glad to have the aliens' artillery pounding at something in back of the line.

On his belly, he scrambled toward the hulk of a dead Model-A Ford that sat on four flat tires. Small-arms fire was picking up; the Lizards didn't feel like leaving the neighborhood. He was almost to the car when he got shot.

He'd gone through months in France and more than a year in Illinois without a scratch. He hadn't thought he was invulnerable; he knew better than that. But he hadn't thought his number was up, either.

At first he felt just the impact, as if somebody had kicked him in the rear, hard. "Ahh, s.h.i.+t," he said, as if an umpire had blown a close call at third base and wouldn't change it back no matter how obviously wrong he was. He twisted around, trying to see the wound. Given where he'd been hit, it wasn't easy, but the seat of his pants was filling up with blood.

"Jesus G.o.d," he muttered. "Everybody goes and talks about gettin' their a.s.s shot off, but I went and did it."

Then the wound started to hurt, as if he had a red-hot skewer stuck into his hindquarters. "Medic!" he bawled. He knew he sounded like a branded calf, but he couldn't help it.

Dracula Szabo slithered over to him. When he saw where Mutt was. .h.i.t, he started laughing. "Sorry, Lieutenant," he said after a moment, and even halfway sounded as if he meant it. "I was just thinkin', I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'm gonna kiss it and make it better."

"I ask for a medic an' I go an' get W. C. Fields," Mutt said. "You got a field dressing on you?" At Szabo's nod, he went on, "Stick it on there, will you?"

"Sure thing. Lift up a little, so I can get your pants down and get at where you're hit." When Mutt obeyed, Dracula bandaged him with cool competence that spoke of the practice he'd had at such things. His appraisal also told of that experience: "Doesn't look too bad, sir. Not quite a crease, but it's a through-and-through, and it's just in the ham, not in the bone. You sit tight an' wait for the medics to take you outta here. You're gonna be okay, I think."

"Sit tight?" Mutt rolled his eyes. "I ain't goin' anyplace real fast, not with that, but I don't wanna sit on it, neither."