Page 80 of Tilting the Balance (Worldwar 2)

“How come you know so much about it?” Mutt asked him. “My old man, he runs a butcher shop up in Bangor, Maine,” Laplace answered. “There’s one thing I seen a lot of, Sarge, it’s bones.”

Mutt nodded, conceding the point Lucille Potter said, “That latticework arrangement is very strong-the English used it for the skeletons of their Blenheim and Wellington bombers.”

“Is that a fact?” Daniels said. He was just making talk, though; if Miss Lucille said something was so, you could take it to the bank.

She asked Freddie, “Do you think you can dig out his skull for me?”

“I’ll give it a try, ma’am,” Laplace said, as If she’d asked him up to the blackboard for a tough multiplication problem he thought he could do. He started scraping away more mud with the folding shovel. Lucille Potter made little eager noises, as if he were digging up a brand-new Chevy (not that there were any brand-new Chevies) and enough gas to run it for a year.

Try and figure women, Mutt thought, as he watched Lucille take a scalpel from her little case of instruments. A dead Lizard interested her… but a live sergeant didn’t.

Mutt sighed. He thought Lucille liked him well enough. He knew he liked her well enough, and then some. He knew she knew that, too; she could hardly have doubted it after the kiss he’d given her when he used her bottle of ether to take out the Lizard tank. But the spark that jumped one way didn’t come back the other.

He wondered if she’d left a sweetheart behind when she signed up as an Army nurse. He had his doubts about that; she had maiden lady written all over her. Just my luck he thought.

He was not a man to spend a lot of time brooding over what he couldn’t help. If he had been that sort of man, years of catching and then of managing would have changed him into a different sort: too many decisions to let any one reach earthshaking proportions, even if it didn’t work. If you couldn’t understand that down in your guts, you were liable to end up like Willard Hershberger, the Reds’ catcher who’d cut his throat in a New York hotel room after he called the pitch Mel Ott hit into the Polo Grounds stands for a ninth-inning game-winning homer.

And so Mutt went around to see that the rest of his squad was well dug in and that Dracula Szabo had picked a spot with a good field of fire for his BAR Daniels didn’t expect to be attacked here, but you never could tell.

“We got anything decent for chow tonight, Sarge?” Szabo asked.

“C-rations, I expect, and damn lucky to have those,” Mutt answered. “Better’n what we ever saw in France; you can believe that.” The only real thing Daniels had against the canned rations was that the supply boys had trouble getting enough of them into the field to keep him from being hungry more than he liked. With the Lizards controlling the air, logistics got real sticky.

Szabo had what Mutt thought of as a city slicker’s face: controlled, knowing, often with an expression that seemed to say he’d be laughing at you if only you were worth laughing at. It was a face that ached for a slap. Whether it did or whether it didn’t, though, Dracula had his uses. Now he reached under his poncho and showed Mutt three dead chickens. “Reckon we can do some better than C-rats,” he said smugly, grinning like a fox who’d just raided the hen coop.

That was probably Just what he was, too, Mutt thought. He said “We ain’t supposed to forage on our own people,” but his heart wasn’t in it. Roast chicken did go down better than canned stew.

“Aw, Sarge, they were just struttin’ around, no people anywhere close,” Szabo said, as innocently as if he were telling the truth. Maybe more innocently.

But he knew as well as Mutt that Mutt wasn’t going to call him on it. “I’m right glad o’ that,” Daniels said. “You go, ah, findin’ chickens where there is people around, you’ll have Miss Lucille diggin’ pellets outta your ass. Birdshot if you’re lucky, buckshot if you ain’t.”

“Not while I’m luggin’ a BAR,” Szabo said with quiet assurance. “Didn’t Miss Lucille say something about an auditorium somewhere in this park? If there’s any roof at all, cooking these birds gets a lot easier.”

Mutt looked around. Riverview Park was good-sized, and with the rain coming down in curtains he couldn’t see anything that looked like a building. “I’ll ask her where it’s at,” he said, and sloshed back to where she was playing mad scientist with the late, unlamented Lizard’s remains.

“Look at this, Mutt,” Lucille said when he came up. She used her scalpel to point enthusiastically at the Lizard’s jaws. “Lots of little teeth, all pretty much the same, not specialized like ours.”

“Yeah, I seen that when I captured a couple live ones not long after they invaded us,” Mutt answered, averting his eyes; the skull had enough rotting meat still on it to threaten to kill his appetite.

“You captured Lizards, Sarge?” Freddie Laplace sounded impressed as all get out Lucille just took it in stride, the way she did most things. Mutt would have been happier had it been the other way around.

Nothing he could do about it, though. He asked her where the auditorium was; she pointed eastward. He slogged in that direction, hoping some of the place was still intact. Sure enough, he discovered that, although it had taken a shell hit that left one wall only a baby brickyard, the rest seemed sound enough.

In the rain, finding anything more than fifty yards away wasn’t easy. Mud thin as bad diarrhea slopped over his boot tops and soaked his socks. He hoped he wouldn’t come down with pneumonia or the grippe.

“Halt! Who goes?” Szabo’s voice came out of the water, as if from behind a falls. Daniels couldn’t see him at all. Dracula might be a chicken thief, but he made a pretty fair soldier.

“It’s me,” Mutt called. “Found that auditorium place. You want to give me them birds, I’ll cook ’em for you. I grew up on a farm; reckon I’ll do a better job than you would anyways.”

“Yeah, okay. Come on this way.” Szabo stood up so Mutt could spot him. “Not gonna be any Lizards around for a while, though, Sarge-is it okay if I wander over there in an hour or so, and you’ll make sure there’s some dark meat left for me?”

“I think maybe we can do that,” Daniels said. “You put somebody here on your weapon before you go wandering, though, you hear me? In case we do have trouble, we’re gonna need all the firepower we can get our hands on.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Sarge,” Szabo said. “Even roast chicken ain’t worth gettin’ my ass shot off for.” He spoke with great conviction. From any other dogface in the squad, Daniels would have found that convincing. With Szabo, you never could tell.

He took the chickens back to the auditorium. Whoever had been there last, Americans or Lizards, had chopped up a lot of the folding wooden seats that faced the stage: more than they’d used for their fires. Taking advantag

e of the free lumber, Mutt built his blaze on the concrete floor where others had made theirs before him.

He pulled out his trusty Zippo. He wondered how long it would stay trusty. He had a package of flints in his shirt pocket, but the Zippo was burning kerosene these days, not lighter fluid, and he didn’t know when he’d come across any more kerosene, either. For now, it still gave him a flame on the first try.

He quickly found out why the previous occupants of the auditorium had been so eager to use the seats for fuel: the varnish that made them shiny also made them catch fire with the greatest of ease. He went back out into the rain to throw away the chicken guts and to get some sticks on which to skewer the pieces of chicken he was going to cook.

His belly growled when the savory smell of roasting meat came through the smoke from the fire. His grandfathers would have done their cooking in the War Between the States the same way he was now, except they’d have used lucifer matches instead of the Zippo to get the fire going.

“Chow!” he yelled when he had a fair number of pieces finished. Men straggled in by ones and twos, ate quickly, and went back out into the rain. When Lucille Potter came in for hers, Mutt asked jokingly, “You wash your hands before supper?”

“You’d best believe I did-and with soap, too.” Being a nurse, Lucille was in dead earnest about cleanliness. “Did you wash yours before you cleaned these birds and cut them up?”

“Well, you might say so,” Mutt answered; his hands had certainly been wet, anyhow. “Didn’t use soap, though.”

Had Lucille Potter’s stare been any fishier, she’d have grown fins. Before she could say anything, Szabo strolled into the auditorium. “You save me a drumstick, Sarge?”

“Here’s a whole leg, kid,” Mutt said. The BAR man blissfully started gnawing away. Daniels took half a breast off the fire, waved it in the air to cool it down, and also began to eat. He had to pause a couple of times to spit out burnt bits of feather; he’d done a lousy job of plucking the chickens.

---