Fallout

10

Cade Curtis wasn’t used to wearing a captain’s bars on his shoulders. He knew damn well he hadn’t done anything brave or clever to earn them. He’d got them because he was an officer who’d had the dumb luck not to be under either of the A-bombs Stalin dropped on South Korea.

They needed officers, needed them desperately. Even a captain had no real business commanding a regiment, but there you were. And here Cade was, giving it his best shot. He wondered if he was the first regimental CO still too young to vote. It might have happened, on one side or the other, during the War Between the States. He would have bet it hadn’t since.

His men were holding, or anyway trying to hold, a ridge line about halfway between Chongju and vanished Pusan. The Red Chinese had poured through the gap the second Russian atom bomb tore in the American defenses. If this line didn’t hold, the town of Kaeryong behind it wouldn’t, either, and a bad situation would get worse. Shit would be out to lunch, if you wanted to get right down to it.

“Where’s that air, dammit?” Cade asked a radioman hooked into the Navy network-most surviving U.S. planes in Korea flew off carriers these days.

“Inbound this way, sir,” the sergeant with the earphones answered. “Suppose to be here in, like, five minutes.” An 81mm mortar round thudded down in front of their trench, showering them both with dirt. Cade wondered whether they had five minutes left.

The Reds didn’t have a lot of tanks. Stalin was using the ones he did have in Europe, not passing them along to Mao and Kim Il-sung. That meant machine guns counted for as much here as they had at places like Verdun and the Somme. Nothing like a well-sited machine gun for making infantry wish it had never been born.

Several Brownings were stuttering bullets at the Red Chinese dug in farther down the slope. They were less eager to throw in human-wave assaults than they had been during the days just after they swarmed over the Yalu. They still did it now and then, but not all the time any more.

Then again, they used more mortars than they had then. They also had more mortars to use. Mortars were the poor man’s artillery, and Mao’s men were nothing if not poor. Sheet metal for the tube, loose tolerances…If you were a blacksmith, you could just about go into the mortar business in your back yard.

One of the bastardly little bombs burst in a kink of the trench, fifty yards down from Cade. Somebody over there started screaming for a medic. That wasn’t good, but maybe wasn’t so bad as if he were screaming for his mother.

Here came the Corsairs. Cade whooped when he saw the long-nosed fighter-bombers with the inverted gull wings. They were as obsolete as the rest of the prop jobs left over from World War II. Where there were no jets to claw them out of the sky, though, they could still do a fine job of turning human beings into raw-or sometimes burnt-meat.

Some of them carried rockets under those kinked wings. They ripple-fired them at the Red Chinese. Others had napalm bombs instead. Flame leaped and splashed when those went in. Next to the atomic fire the Russians had rained on Korea, it was puny and cold, but you sure wouldn’t think so if you were luckless enough to have it come down on you.

Cade whooped again, and pumped his fist in the air. He knew that was an un-Christian thing to do. The Red Chinese were men, just like him. But they were also men trying their goddamnedest to kill him. Maybe he should have regretted their untimely demise, but he didn’t.

The Corsairs banked and wheeled in the air for another attack run. They all had eight .50-caliber machine guns in their wings, so they could put a lot of lead in the air when they strafed trenches. If the rockets and the napalm didn’t do for the Red Chinese, some good, old-fashioned slugs might turn the trick.

Waggling their wings in farewell, the Corsairs roared back toward the Sea of Japan. Cade cautiously stuck his head up over the parapet to see how they’d done. The napalm still blazed. Smoke rose from the rocket hits. And quite a few Chinamen in dun-colored uniforms legged it northward. They’d had more than flesh and blood could take.

Not all of them, though. A bullet cracked past Cade’s ear, close enough so he thought he felt the wind of its passage. He ducked down in a hurry. He was just glad that wasn’t a permanent reminder he hadn’t come here to play tourist.

He was a captain in charge of a regiment. His company commanders were second lieutenants, except for a couple of sergeants. One of the lieutenants asked, “You want we should move forward and push out the rest of the Chinks, sir?”

“Howie, I just want to sit tight and make sure they can’t push us out,” Cade answered. “We’ve got to hold on to Kaeryong, and they won’t be coming after us here right away, not after that pounding.”

“Okay, sir.” Howard Sturgis’ tone said it really wasn’t. He was in his thirties. He’d been a sergeant when the fighting here started, and won a battlefield commission for gallantry. He attacked first and worried about it later.

He did when you let him, anyhow. Cade wasn’t about to. “Hey, look, eventually the States’ll do a proper job of reinforcing us,” he said. “Till then, we’ve just got to hang on so they’ll have something to reinforce.”

“Sir, they’re way the hell over there. The ports on the West Coast are fucked up. The Panama Canal’s fucked up. Now Pusan’s fucked up, too, and that was the best harbor we had over here.” Sturgis pointed north with heavy patience. “But all the Chinks in the world, they’re right across the goddamn Yalu.”

“I know about that, thanks,” Cade said dryly. “I was up at the Chosin Reservoir.”

For the first time, he got Sturgis’ undivided attention. The older man stared at him. “But they killed just about all o’ those guys,” he said.

“I know about that, too.” Curtis pointed at his own chest. “Just about all, but not quite. So if they give us too much trouble down here, who knows what happens? Maybe Peiping goes up in smoke, or Shanghai, or some other big cities.”

“Wouldn’t break my heart,” Sturgis said.

“Only thing that worries me is, will anybody have anything left to rebuild with by the time this war is over?” Cade said. “In the meantime, we’re gonna sit tight, let the enemy come to us, and slaughter him when he does. I can’t think of any better way to keep our casualties down, so we’ll do it like that.”

“Got it,” Howard Sturgis said reluctantly. “Uh, sir.”

“Good.”

“Sir?” Sturgis said. When Cade nodded, the veteran went on, “Sir, no shit, you made it back down from the reservoir?”

“Yeah,” Cade said, in lieu of Screw you if you think I’m lying. He added, “I never would’ve if I didn’t get help from the Korean Christians. They live up to the name better than a bunch of folks back home, and you can sing that in church.”

“Huh.” Sturgis sounded thoughtful: not a usual sound from him. “Guess they love Mao even better’n they love old Kim, then.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Cade agreed.

He might have said something more, but all the American machine guns started going off at once. Airplane engines roared in at treetop height. Cade flung himself into a dugout. The Red Chinese couldn’t call in Corsairs from carriers, but they had Shturmoviks. Those carried rockets and bombs and guns, too. The machine gunners on the ground were wasting ammo. The Russian attack planes laughed at that kind of fire. Only an F-80 or F-86 could make them say uncle, and not a whole lot of those were left over here.

Nothing came down too close to Cade, for which he thanked heaven. Of course, heaven had just decided to visit hell on some other sorry bastards instead, so how grateful should he have been, exactly? He shook his head. When you started asking yourself questions like that, where did you stop? Anywhere?

–

Konstantin Morozov climbed out of the bathtub. He took it slow and easy; he had about as much strength and endurance as a sand castle. He clucked sadly as he looked down at his naked body. He was a man. Ever since his beard came in, he’d been hairy like a man, with a mat on his chest, tufts at his armpits and crotch, and some pretty fair fuzz on his arms and legs.

Women liked men that way, dammit. It let them know they weren’t lying down with another girl.

But, as far as Konstantin could tell, he had no more sprouting from his hide than a plucked chicken. It had all fallen out. And not just on his body. He hadn’t had to shave since he came to the military hospital. He had no hair on his dome. He had no hair in his nose or ears, and no eyebrows or eyelashes, either.

“Will it ever grow back?” he’d asked a doc when he’d been a lot sicker than he was now, when he thought the tide was rolling in on that poor sand castle.

She’d only shrugged. “If you live, we think it will. Eventually.” How long eventually was, she hadn’t said. Maybe she didn’t know, either.

He was still alive. He was pretty sure now he’d stay that way for a while, and he was even beginning to believe he might want to. All of his crewmen were still alive, too, though for Vladislav Kalyakin it was a close call. The driver wouldn’t stop bleeding out his asshole, so they had to go in there and do…something. Konstantin was hazy on the details, but it seemed to have helped.

Even if it had, though, Kalyakin wouldn’t be fit to fight again for a long time, if he ever was. Morozov, Eigims, and Sarkisyan were in better shape than that. Konstantin had puked blood only once, and not a whole lot of it. Food was starting to taste good to him again.

The Balt and Armenian were about where he was. They’d had their brush with the scythe-carrying skeleton in the black robe, but Old Man Death wasn’t quite hungry enough to gnaw on them.

Yet. Konstantin knew too well it was always yet. He’d survived a near miss from an atom bomb? Okay, fine. As soon as he was healthy enough, the Red Army would throw him into another tank and try to expend him some other way. A mine, a bazooka rocket, a shell from an English tank he didn’t spot soon enough…Any one of those would do to kill a man, even if they didn’t murder by carload lots like the big son of a bitch full of atoms.

He made it back to his cot without getting too exhausted. Lying on the lumpy mattress couldn’t have been much more boring. Even Konstantin had to admit it beat the hell out of lying at the bottom of a hole two meters deep with dirt shoveled in on top of him.

A doctor came by to check on him: an East German man who spoke Russian with the precision of a bright schoolboy. “You are feeling well?” he asked.

“Not too bad, Doc,” Morozov answered. Then he opened his mouth so the man in the white coat could stick a thermometer under his tongue.

“Oh, this is excellent!” the Fritz said when he looked at Konstantin’s temperature. “You have no fever now for two days in a row. This shows your immunity to infection is recovering.”

“Good.” Konstantin supposed it was good. It sounded good, anyway. He asked, “How much can you do for radiation sickness, anyway?”

“Less than we would like, I am sorry to say,” the fraternal socialist ally replied. (What had he done in the last war? Patched up guys for the Wehrmacht? Morozov wouldn’t have been surprised-he was plenty old enough.) After a moment, he continued, “We treat the symptoms as they develop, to the best of our ability. We give supportive care-we keep patients comfortable and well-nourished, to help them recover from the dose of radiation they have received. But we cannot do anything about the radiation itself. If it is too much…” He let his voice trail off.

Konstantin held out his right hand, fingers in a fist, thumb pointing down. The German doctor nodded. Konstantin asked, “How close did my crew and me come to getting too much?”

“No one had a Geiger counter in your tank, so I cannot measure that exactly,” the doctor replied. “I have seen people who were sicker than you men recover. I have not seen people who were much sicker than you recover.”

“I get you.” That marched pretty well with the way Konstantin had felt right after they brought him here. Then he asked, “How many other people with radiation sickness have you seen?”

“More than you think, perhaps. Remember, the Americans have used these horrible bombs against the German Democratic Republic. So my colleagues and I have had practice with our fellow citizens.”

“Ah.” Morozov left it there. As a matter of fact, he’d forgotten the Yankees had dropped A-bombs on this part of Germany. Like most Russians who’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, he had trouble working up much sympathy for Fritzes.

The doctor produced a lancet and a microscope slide. The slide had a label with Morozov’s name and service number written on it. Well, actually the label said MOROZOW, not МОРОЗОВ, but that was what the Latin alphabet and German language did to it.

“Give me your finger, please,” the man said. With a small sigh, Konstantin did. He couldn’t begin to remember how many times he’d got stuck since he came here. One more went on the list he wasn’t keeping.

He’d taken more wounds, real wounds, than he could keep track of in this war and the last one. Gunshots, fragments, burns…He’d known some serious pain. Next to all that, a little poke with the lancet should have been as nothing. But it wasn’t. It hurt, every single time.

As the doctor smeared his blood onto the slide and put a cover glass over it, Konstantin asked him about that. “Is it my imagination?” he wondered.

“Nyet,” the doctor said, sounding very Russian indeed for one word. “For one thing, hands have more nerves than other parts of the body. For another, most wounds happen when you do not look for them. You know I shall stick you. You almost feel it before it happens.”

“What do you know?” Konstantin said thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “That makes sense. Thanks, Doc.” He wasn’t in the habit of thanking Germans, but he did here.

“It is nothing.” The doctor put the slide with Morozov’s blood on it into the breast pocket of his white coat. One of the things radiation poisoning did to you was give you a fierce anemia. They took all the blood counts to see how people came back from it.

When the German came to the sick, bald artilleryman in the next bed, the fellow sang out: “Here’s the vampire again!”

The Red Army soldiers in the ward laughed, Konstantin as loud as any of them. The doctor’s smile was the kind you used when you wanted to clout the guy you were smiling at. “It is necessary so that we may help you regain your health again,” he said primly.

“Sure, pal, but it’s still no fun,” the artilleryman said, echoing what Konstantin had been thinking.

Lunch was stewed liver. Liver stew, liver cooked with onions, chopped liver, liver dumplings, liver paste (that one had been a favorite German ration in the last war)…The cooks fed the men with radiation sickness every kind of liver dish they could come up with. They said it helped build blood. About the only things they didn’t do were drip it in with a needle and serve it in suppository form.

Konstantin liked liver. Or rather, he had liked liver. He’d taken plenty of those tinfoil tubes of liver paste off dead Fritzes. He’d enjoyed them, too. They’d tasted like victory. Now…If they ever let him out of here, he didn’t think he’d ever touch the stuff again. He’d had it up to there, and then some.

But at least he could think about escaping this place. Compared to how he’d felt when he got here, that was progress with a capital P.

–

Advancing! Gustav Hozzel wasn’t used to advancing against the Russians. Last time around, he’d started fighting in the east just about when the Germans began their long, bitter, grinding withdrawal toward and then into the Vaterland. He’d lived through his first couple of scrapes as much by luck as anything else. After that, he’d started to see what he needed to do.

By the time the war ended, he was one of the hard-bitten veterans who kept the Reich on its feet for a year, maybe even a year and a half, after it should have fallen over. He’d retreated from somewhere near Rostov-on-Don to Germany, almost every centimeter of the way on foot.

He’d hardly ever gone forward. Oh, local counterattacks sometimes took back a few square kilometers of lost ground, but never for long. Things had worked the same way in this new war, too. There were just too many Russians. There were always too many Russians.

But if you blew a swarm of them to hell at once…Of course, the drawback to that was that the Amis had also blown a swarm of Gustav’s countrymen to hell. They hadn’t done that as long as they saw any chance of hanging on to West Germany. Once they didn’t see that chance any more, they didn’t hesitate, either.

Gustav’s regiment moved east through the wreckage of Wesel two days after the bomb fell there. He had no idea whether that was safe. All his time in Russia had taught him not to ask inconvenient questions.

It was even worse than he’d expected. He knew what bombs did. He’d seen plenty of cities smashed flat from the air, and from the ground. He’d helped scorch Russian earth himself.

But the center of Wesel wasn’t just knocked into ruins, the way ordinary bombs did. It wasn’t just scorched, either, or even baked. It was incinerated, melted. The stump of the cathedral spire left after Russian guns bit off the top and the observers up there had flowed like candle wax. Stone wasn’t supposed to do that, dammit.

In his pocket, Gustav carried a little piece of greenish glass-melted rock and concrete-he’d picked up near the doubly destroyed spire. He wanted something to remember Wesel by, and that seemed to fit. It was probably radioactive, but he hoped it wasn’t too radioactive.

To his surprise, Rolf was all for the atom bombs. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” said the ex-LAH man, who wasn’t long on original thoughts. “As long as we kill Russians, what else matters?”

“You don’t have any relatives in Wesel, do you?” Max Bachman asked, beating Gustav to the punch.

“If I did, I’d rather see them dead than living under the Bolsheviks,” Rolf said. The really scary thing was, Gustav believed him.

Right under where the bomb went off, they found no dead at all. The A-bomb had simply erased them, as it had erased much of Wesel. As they moved farther east, they did come across corpses, but so charred and shrunken that Gustav had no idea whether they were men or women, Germans or Russians.

A little farther on yet, the bodies were burned and melted, but still recognizable as human beings. As far as Gustav was concerned, that was worse. A flamethrower might do such things, but to a few people at a time, not to hundreds or thousands at once. The smell was more of roasted meat than dead meat, though the latter was starting to gain.

They went past Russian tanks that could have blasted them to hell had anyone inside them remained alive. But the men in there were dead, and so were the tanks. The ones closer to the A-bomb had cannons that drooped like limp dicks. Farther away, they looked ready to go-but they weren’t.

Then the advancing Germans came across people who weren’t dead but who wished they were. Atomic fire could do things to bodies not even flamethrowers matched. Eyes seared and welded to cheeks…Several soldiers gave the coup de grace to horribly burned men and women who thanked them for it.

Gustav had done that in Russia. He’d always hoped someone would do it for him if he needed it. This was worse, somehow. That line from the Poe story wouldn’t get out of his mind. And the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

“If this is what winning looks like, I’m not sure I want anything to do with it,” he said, hoping the last rations he’d eaten would stay down.

Rolf snorted. “Oh, come off it, man! Do you think the Ivans haven’t done the same thing wherever they could?” Gustav couldn’t answer that. He knew they had.

Here and there, Red Army men and units kept trying to fight back. But so much of what they’d had at the front was gone, gone forever. Also gone was the illusion they’d carried that atom bombs wouldn’t come down on them but were just for cities behind the lines.

Along with the holdouts were plenty of Russians not just willing but eager to surrender. Some of them had doses of radiation sickness; the prevailing winds carried fallout from the bomb blasts into territory the Soviet Union occupied. Others had simply had enough fighting to last them for the rest of their lives.

Most of the Ivans in their late twenties and early thirties knew bits and pieces-sometimes more than bits and pieces-of German. They would have been the ones who’d fought their way into the Reich in 1945 and then settled down to occupy it after Hitler blew his brains out and everything he’d struggled for was kaput.

Gustav didn’t think much about that one way or the other. To him, a prisoner who could understand what he said was easier to handle than one who couldn’t, and that was about it.

Rolf had other notions. Whenever a Russian who spoke fair German gave himself up, the Waffen-SS veteran would ask, “And what did you do in the last war, you fucking Arschloch?”

One Ivan still had his pride. “Walloped the snot out of you Fritzes, that’s what,” he answered.

Two seconds later, he lay twitching on the grass, a bullet hole in his forehead, the back of his head blown out. “Any sack of shit who thinks he can give me sauce, it’s the last stupid thing he’ll ever do,” Rolf said, chambering a fresh round in his rifle.

“No,” Gustav told him. “Don’t do that. It isn’t 1945 any more. You can’t get away with killing prisoners this time around.”

“Says who?” Rolf’s gray stare measured him for a coffin.

Gustav didn’t care. If he hadn’t long since quit worrying about his own neck, he wouldn’t have picked up a gun when the new fighting started. “Says me, dickface. You don’t like it, we can settle things right now.”

“It won’t be a fair fight, either,” Max Bachman added.

Rolf glared at him, too. But the ex-LAH man tried to defuse things with a joke: “Who’s been feeding you two raw meat?”

“Not funny, Rolf,” Gustav said. “They take war crimes a lot more seriously than they ever did in your old unit. And if you think the guys here won’t squeal on you, you’re the one who’s Scheissevoll.”

“Kiss the Amis’ asshole,” Rolf jeered. “Go ahead.”

“Crap,” Max said. “War’s bad enough any which way. But we fought cleaner against the Amis than we did against the Ivans last go-round. The Russians haven’t murdered POWs for the fun of it this time around. We won’t give them the excuse to start, either.”

“Christ, I never figured I joined the motherfucking Salvation Army,” Rolf said. “I supposed you clowns never found one of your buddies with his dick cut off and stuffed in his mouth.”

“Who didn’t?” Gustav said stonily. “But Max is right. They aren’t doing that shit this time. We’re not going to, either.”

The finger Rolf gave him was borrowed from the Yanks he despised. Gustav ignored it. But he didn’t like having friends who might be more dangerous than the enemy.

–

Cold rain drummed down on the tent where Daisy Baxter lay in a cot. She felt like hell. She had about as much hair left as a ninety-year-old granny, and more came out every time she dragged a comb across her scalp. She didn’t do that as often as she should have; she didn’t have the energy.

Seven other women from Fakenham lay in the tent with her. It was one from the British Army, made to hold eight cots. Some of the other ladies had burns, others had had things fall down on them when the A-bomb hit Sculthorpe. All of them had radiation sickness, some cases worse than Daisy’s, one or two from the east end of town not quite so bad.

Most of the survivors were here, in this tent city that had sprouted on the sheep meadows like toadstools coming up after a rain. Toadstools would be coming up after this rain. Daisy languidly wondered if she’d ever get the chance to see them.

One of the women held up her hand. A harried-looking sister got up off the folding chair where she’d been reading an Agatha Christie and came over to her. “Yes, Mrs. Simpkins? What is it?” What is it now? was what her tone said.

“I’m sorry, dear, but I need to use the bedpan,” the middle-aged woman answered. None of the patients was strong enough to walk to the latrine trenches. Mrs. Simpkins couldn’t have anyway; her left leg was splinted.

“Well, all right.” The sister’s brisk nod admitted that was an acceptable reason for summoning her. She slid it into place and used a sheet to give Mrs. Simpkins what privacy she could.

Like the other women in the tent, Daisy looked away. They all pretended nothing was happening. English politeness came as close to being reflexive as made no difference.

The sister, by contrast, peered into the bedpan as she took it away. “Oh, jolly good!” she said, sounding genuinely pleased. “Hardly any blood in your urine at all.”

Daisy was pleased for Mrs. Simpkins, too. She hadn’t had much bleeding of that sort herself, but the older woman had. If it was easing off, she might pull through after all.

An orderly in a rain slicker came by on the hour to take the bedpan away. Then another one fetched lunch for the patients and the sister: U.S. military rations, one more product of America’s endless abundance. However abundant the rations were, they weren’t very good. Daisy didn’t eat much. But she wouldn’t have eaten much if a fancy French chef from the Ritz were doing the cooking here. Her appetite was gone. She had to fight to keep food down.

It went on raining. The grass under the cots turned to mud. The sister squelched when she walked. There was nothing at all to do but lie there. Daisy wished for a wireless set or, that failing, a wind-up gramophone. Wish was all she could do.

After a while the raindrops drumming on canvas lulled her into a doze. That was good: she wasn’t bored while she slept. But it was also bad: if she napped in the afternoon, she might lie awake at night.

Toward evening, a doctor who looked even more worn than the sister came to check on the tentful of women. “How are you feeling?” he asked Daisy.

“If this is a rest cure, I’d sooner be working,” she said.

“It’s no holiday, I know. We’re at full stretch, dealing with a disaster like this. The little personal touches are right out, I’m afraid.” But the man used a little personal touch a moment later. Instead of taking her temperature, he laid a hand on her forehead, nodded to himself, and started toward the next bed.

“It’s all right?” she asked him.

“Oh, yes. Normal, or near enough.” He nodded. So did she. A mother could gauge temperatures like that, and he was bound to have more practice than any mother in captivity. He added, “No sign of infections, is what that means. You people are vulnerable to them for a while.”

By you people, he meant you people who had an atom bomb smash your town to pieces. But Daisy was glad she had no infections. One of the first things a doctor had done for her was pick bits of glass out of the cuts on her feet with tongs and then paint the wounds with merthiolate. It hurt like anything.

She did have trouble sleeping during the night. Lying there in the dark trying to stay quiet so as not to bother the other women snoring around her wasn’t easy. She’d gone to bed alone ever since Tom took ship overseas for the last time. Having company gave her trouble any time. When she’d napped and didn’t particularly need sleep…She passed a bad night.

Morning cuppas for everybody in the tent came in a big vacuum flask, with milk and sugar on the side. The tea was strong and bitter enough to open her eyes a bit. She wouldn’t have minded American instant coffee that morning. It was foul, but she needed all the caffeine she could get.

At least the rain had stopped. That was good. The tents were leftovers from the last war, and they’d seen hard use. Daisy thanked heaven the one she was stuck in hadn’t started leaking. She didn’t know what anyone could have done if it had. Stuck a bowl under the drip and forgotten about it, probably.

Breakfast was more American food. Canned scrambled eggs, even with ham, made her think that, if you had to eat them all the time, you’d let the enemy capture you just to get a change of diet.

She kept feeling she ought to be dusting or sweeping or putting another cask of best bitter under the tap. The Owl and Unicorn was gone, though. Gone. She had no idea whether the insurance covered atom bombs. One more thing she’d worry about later.

At half past nine-an unexpected hour-the tent flap opened, showing muddy grass and watery sunshine outside. Daisy noticed them for only the shortest fragment of a split second. Into the tent ducked Bruce McNulty. He looked dashing in his dark blue U.S. Air Force uniform.

Daisy, on the other hand, looked like hell and knew it. She got a desultory sponge bath every other day. She hadn’t had her hair, what there was of it, washed in much too long.

But all the other women in their cots, and even the much cleaner and healthier sister, stared as McNulty came over to stand by her. He took off his officer’s cap and held it in both hands. “How are you, sweetie?” he asked.

“I feel better now you’re here,” she said, which was sappy but true.

“Yeah, well-” He left it there. Had he been at Sculthorpe when the Russian bomb fell, he would have been blasted to vapor. He had to know it, and to know she knew it, too. Instead, he was fine.

And why was he fine? Because he’d been up in his B-29, visiting the same hell that had fallen on her on untold thousands of people on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was everything she admired in a man-and he was also a killer with more deaths on his shoulders than all but a few of the most heinous Nazi murderers.

Did the Russian who’d bombed Sculthorpe wonder about such things, assuming the fighters hadn’t shot him down? How could he not? He was a man, wasn’t he?

“I just came to see how you were doing,” Bruce said.

“They think I’ll get better,” she answered. “I haven’t the faintest notion what I’ll do once that happens. Not much left of Fakenham, is there?”

“I drove past it on my way here. It got knocked around pretty good, yeah,” McNulty said. “Anything you need that I can take care of, though, you just have to ask. Anything at all. You know that, right?”

“It’s good to hear,” Daisy said quietly. That was also true. She had no claim on him, none he was obliged to honor. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Look, babe, I gotta go. But I’ll come see you first chance I get, promise.” He bent to kiss her cheek. Then he left. Daisy noticed the sunshine this time.