The Year of Counting Souls

by Wallace, Michael

  Chapter Two

  The red suns on the wings of the Japanese planes were like glaring eyes as they passed overhead. Louise caught a glimpse of a young man with a leather aviator hat staring down at her from the first plane, and then the enemy planes were past.

  The American seaplane was too far into its descent to pull up and flee. It came in gracefully, skating over the water as it slowed. Soldiers on the waterfront aimed small arms at the approaching Zeros, who ignored them. Instead they trained their guns on the seaplane.

  The first Zero overshot its target. Its bullets disappeared harmlessly into the sea, and it raced past, banking around for another attack. The second and the third, however, struck the American plane, and one of these shots punctured a fuel tank or engine. There was a muffled explosion, a geyser of flame, and the whole thing was on fire. The doors opened, and the crew flung themselves into the bay.

  By the time Louise got to the waterfront, the burning seaplane was already slipping beneath the waves. The Japanese fighters had turned around and were coming in to strafe the people on the shore. Two Filipino soldiers with rifles took aim while an American officer shouted and waved to get people to shelter in the nearby buildings.

  Suddenly the officer’s body danced a grotesque jig, and all around him men and women were screaming and falling as bullets tore through them. Louise threw herself to the ground for a second time. The noise was terrible. The sick taste of fear came up in her mouth. And then the enemy was gone.

  Not only had she forgotten about the injured civilians in the building, but she’d lost track of her companions. As she rose shakily to her feet, she saw that Maria Elena, Corporal Fárez, and the dog were all uninjured. Maria Elena was crying, and Fárez was still and pale, his brown eyes wide, as if he was in shock. The dog remained flattened on the ground, as if instinctively trying to make itself as small as possible.

  Louise’s heart was ready to hammer free from her chest, but she didn’t have time to be terrified. She found Dr. Claypool, who was already at work trying to stop the bleeding of a man whose leg was torn apart in the attack. He called for help. A woman stood next to him but seemed not to hear his pleas.

  The woman’s name was Frankie Dover, and she’d been chief nurse at the hospital. Twelve years in the army, and an exacting, demanding head, but you wouldn’t have guessed at her experience or authority the way she stood rooted in place. Her face was slack with fear as she searched overhead. The blood of the injured man was splattered like red paint across her face and white dress, but she didn’t seem to notice it. She only had eyes for the sky, for the feared return of the enemy.

  Louise pushed Frankie aside. She took off her cap and pressed it on the injured man’s wound, allowing Claypool to remove his own hands and work. She didn’t look at the wound, told herself it was just meat. Just flesh. A little blood didn’t bother her at all. That’s what she told herself as she put her hands into a wound that looked like something from butchering day on the farm.

  The man writhed and screamed, tried to push her hands away. So much blood was leaking out, and the pain soon gave way to shock. By the time the doctor organized his instruments to enact an emergency roadside surgery, the wounded man was fading. There was nothing to be done for him, and he was soon dead in a small lake of blood. Soldiers came to ask if they could help, only to turn away, looking ill.

  Two small miracles. First, the Japanese Zeros didn’t return. They buzzed around over the city and flew south, where there was the sound of gunfire and artillery.

  Second, the attack had done less damage than Louise feared. The three soldiers—the American giving orders, and the two Filipinos with rifles—were dead, as was the man she and Dr. Claypool tried to save. An older Filipina woman who nobody seemed to know, but someone thought might be the mother of one of the dead soldiers, had also died in the attack.

  An army lieutenant by the name of Kozlowski took charge of the survivors. First, he organized a rescue of the aviators who’d escaped the burning seaplane; then he got a radioman to call for another evacuation. The radioman looked up after a tense, shouted conversation that seemed to involve someone incredulously squawking on the other end about the impossibility of sending in more planes. And trucks? Were they nuts? The bloody Japanese army was on the outskirts of town, and artillery shells were raining down all around.

  The conversation continued, with Kozlowski unwilling to relent. At last he got the army to commit two trucks and a Jeep escort.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Kozlowski said. “The trucks will take us to Bataan. Essential personnel only. The doctor, nurses, injured Americans only.”

  Once more, that cruel ledger. Still, Louise was relieved. She’d been nervous about the plan to retreat to Corregidor. It seemed like a death trap. There was nothing to stop the Japanese naval and air forces from pounding the island night and day while they waited for the defenders to starve. Only a miracle would have got them off that rock alive.

  Bataan, on the other hand, was salvation. She knew little about it except that it was rugged terrain, jungle, and crawling with American and Filipino forces. Soldiers had assured her that MacArthur could hold out indefinitely on the peninsula, while sailors promised it was only a matter of time before the United States Navy roared back into battle and sent the arrogant Japanese fleet to the bottom of the South China Sea.

  The nurses used the delay to see to their patients. Many of them shouldn’t have left their beds under any circumstances, but ugly rumors of enemy atrocities had circulated through the wards. So far it didn’t seem that the Japanese were bayoneting prisoners the way they had in China, but nobody wanted to fall into their hands and sample the offerings of a Japanese POW camp.

  Louise and her fellow nurses changed dressings, helped Dr. Claypool suture busted stitches, administered ointments, irrigated burns with saline, gave morphine, and handed out quinine pills to those suffering malarial chills. The war hadn’t abolished the old tropical ailments, and in addition to malaria, patients suffered from dengue, dysentery, and yellow fever. So many miserable men—Louise’s heart ached to see them sweltering under the tropical sun.

  The young Filipina nurse, Maria Elena, fell in with her American counterparts, and there no longer seemed to be any talk of leaving her behind when the rescue came.

  “It’s been fifteen minutes,” Miss Frankie said. Her tone held an edge of desperation. “What are they doing? Why don’t they come here at once? We have to get out of here!”

  Louise sized the woman up, surprised to see her still shaken. Frankie had been calm enough that morning during the evacuation of the hospital. They’d drilled many times, preparing for war long before the events of the “date which will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt called the attack on Pearl Harbor, but with more and more urgency in the last few weeks. Manila would fall; it was only a matter of time. How would they get as many patients and staff to safety as possible?

  During the drills, Frankie had been her usual self, giving orders, bossing the younger nurses to the point of bullying. She got on fine with soldiers and doctors but had a more complicated relationship with other women. Clarice McGillicuddy, the fourth nurse in their little group, had once told Louise that the head nurse’s bad attitude toward women came from romantic disappointment. She’d lost a man to a rival.

  Army nurses were single by requirement, and Frankie was in her thirties and still unmarried, so it was reasonable to assume that in so many years she’d caught the eye of at least one man. Why hadn’t she married him? Who could say? Louise’s inner gossip had been awakened by the younger nurse’s claim, and she’d pressed for details. Clarice had few.

  Louise doubted the whole story, only knew that Frankie was driven, focused. Yet now, their first time seeing such danger firsthand, she’d been left rattled, irritable. Almost panicking from the attack of the Japanese Zeros.

  Cries caught Louise’s ear, the pleas of an injured man writhing on his cot. The commotion came from Private Higgs, lying on his
belly beneath a canopy, squeezed in with three others to shield them from the sun. His back was badly burned from an attack on a fuel dump, and gauze enveloped his face. Louise struggled to control the churning in her stomach every time she had to change his bandages and inspect his injuries. Poor kid.

  “Private Higgs,” Louise told Frankie. “Do you know when he got his last morphine?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Frankie asked irritably, not even sparing a glance at the injured man. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Frankie!” Louise said sharply.

  Maria Elena was over at the tent with the injured men and had looked over when Louise and Frankie began to talk. Some of the men were watching, too, expressions anxious.

  Frankie looked around, seemed to catch herself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “When did Higgs get his morphine?” Louise asked again.

  “I’m—I’m not really sure. Not too long?” Frankie shook her head. “We were treating so many people.”

  “He’s in a lot of pain,” Maria Elena called over. “He says it’s been forever.”

  It was always forever when you were suffering. They had plenty of morphine, but Louise didn’t want to kill him with an overdose. With Frankie paralyzed, should she hazard a guess?

  Thankfully the older nurse seemed to get hold of herself before Louise was forced to make the call. “Let me think,” Frankie said. “It was before the hospital evacuation. Let’s call it an hour before we left.”

  Louise glanced at her watch. “That makes it at least four hours since his last injection. Probably five.”

  The soldier moaned again, and Maria Elena called for instructions.

  “Give him a half dose,” Frankie told her. “If that doesn’t take, we’ll give him more later.”

  Frankie grabbed at a passing soldier. “Where are those trucks? Why aren’t they here?”

  The man looked annoyed to be taken from his duties and snapped that he didn’t know. The trucks would come when the trucks came.

  Frankie looked ready to set off for Lieutenant Kozlowski, but just then the promised vehicles finally rumbled around the corner. There were two six-by-six US Army cargo trucks, together with a Jeep carrying four armed soldiers. There was saluting, some cheers, then a mad scramble for the vehicles as shells began detonating a few blocks away.

  “Hurry up, you!” one of the men from the Jeep shouted at the stragglers, those too injured to hop into the truck without aid from the nurses and their fellow sailors and soldiers. “Damn Japs are in the city already. You don’t get up here, you’ll be left behind, so help me.”

  In all, it took a half hour from the destruction of the seaplane until the trucks were rolling away from the waterfront. Louise sat up front in one of the cargo trucks with the driver, a Filipino civilian with a cigarette hanging from his lips who shifted gears with the intensity of a man trying to wrestle a pig to the ground.

  Maria Elena sat on Louise’s lap, and Frankie squeezed in next to the window. They tucked their legs beneath them as crates of medical supplies ate up the rest of the space. Boxes of bandages and syringes piled against the window, reducing visibility out the front. The driver spoke heavily accented English and apologized to the nurses every time he hit an especially jarring pothole.

  Louise’s was the first truck behind the armed escort, and occasionally one of the men in the Jeep communicated back with the driver using hand signals. They changed course twice as they picked their way through the city, trying to get around burning vehicles and craters in the road. Then the Jeep took a right turn that the truck didn’t follow. Louise glanced past Frankie at the side mirror. The other truck followed them, not the Jeep.

  “Why aren’t we following our escort?” Frankie demanded.

  “They send us to pick up a government official, miss,” the driver said. “We take a . . .” He stopped, searching for a word.

  “Detour?” Louise suggested.

  “Yes, detour. Government official is no longer this way. The Jeep goes to get the man—we meet again in a few minutes.”

  “They’ll be killed,” Frankie told the other two nurses. “We’ll be killed. We need an escort. How are we supposed to find our way out of here? Stop the truck! Pull over. I want to talk to whoever is in charge.”

  Louise could no longer hold her tongue. “Oh, hush. Our driver is a native. He knows the city better than whoever was driving that Jeep.”

  “Actually, I am not from Manila, miss,” the man said. “I am from the island of Lubang.”

  “You see!” Frankie cried.

  Engaging the head nurse wasn’t helping to calm her, so Louise decided to ignore her. Instead she called back to Clarice on the other side of the canvas, asking about the patients. All was well. What about up front, Clarice asked? Nothing to report, Louise said.

  A few minutes later the truck hit the end of the macadamized road and rolled to a stop. They were still in the city. The second truck pulled up beside them, and the driver of the other vehicle leaned across his passengers to shout a question. The two drivers argued back and forth in Tagalog.

  “Bet they’re lost,” Frankie said. She turned to Maria Elena. “You speak that jibber jabber, right? What are they saying?”

  “We were supposed to meet the Jeep right here,” Maria Elena said. “But it was going to get here first. Now they don’t know what to do.”

  “I knew it! We’ve got to get out of here, we’re going to be bombed.”

  “Please!” Louise said. “Let’s all stay calm, shall we?”

  She studied the drivers, wondering what was going to happen.

  One of the passengers in the front seat of the second truck was Corporal Fárez. Stumpy sat on his lap, and when Fárez spotted Louise, he held the dog up and lifted its paw to wave. Louise shook her head but couldn’t keep the grin off her face. Silly dog. And silly man—he’d done it, after all, managed to evacuate a common street dog in the teeth of a Japanese invasion.

  An officer with a rifle came up front from the rear of the second truck. It was the same man who’d been directing traffic at the harbor, Lieutenant Kozlowski. He seemed to have kept his cool as he scanned the road ahead of them, and Louise studied him more closely, relieved by what she saw.

  Kozlowski had a sharp, intelligent gaze, a square jaw, and a confident posture. The man simply looked like a fighting man. He wore khaki, but he could have easily dressed like a Roman soldier or a redcoat from the revolution, and he would have looked equally the warrior. And a good thing, too. Without the Jeep, Louise felt stripped down and vulnerable.

  Kozlowski nodded at the driver. “Keep going. We’ll get another escort if we can.”

  “Sir, there is smoke rising ahead of us,” the driver said.

  “And there’s smoke behind us, smoke rising at the bay, smoke to the south and east. Manila is an open city, but that doesn’t mean the Japs are going to let us walk out of here. Only way out of it is straight ahead.”

  The two drivers had another brief exchange in their native tongue, and then Louise’s driver said to the lieutenant, “But we have to head south, sir, to get north. The road ahead isn’t open.”

  “Then go south.”

  “And if we judge wrong, sir, and we meet the enemy on the road—”

  “I don’t care how you do it,” Kozlowski said. “Make for Route 3 and get us out of here. That’s an order. And if you see the damn Japs on the road, you run ’em down. Now move!”

  They were back in motion moments later. The high walls of the old fort and the cathedral towers receded behind them, and the buildings thinned into fields of long, stiff grass, rice paddies, and wallows for carabao, the water buffalo that were everywhere in the countryside. It wasn’t raining at the moment, but the road was soft and pocked with ruts filled with muddy water. It splashed up on the hood when they churned through each hole. The driver had stopped apologizing, and hunched over the steering wheel, staring tensely out the windshield. The roads were suspiciously em
pty.

  A man cried out in pain from the back, and Clarice called up for help.

  Frankie scowled. “Better see what that’s about. Doc gave us all the bad cases.”

  Of course he did. Why else were all four nurses in this one truck? Louise threw back the tarp separating them from the passengers in the back. Men were packed onto the two benches, legs held up against chests so that other, more seriously wounded men could lie down on the aisle between them. It smelled of sweat and blood, and eyes were wide with pain and fear. Clarice was tucked into a tiny corner, looking small and frightened.

  Before Louise had a chance to see who was crying out in pain, shouts came from the front seat, and she whipped back around. The road had suddenly filled with bicyclists, and she thought at first that they’d overtaken a group of refugees fleeing the city. But they were all headed the wrong direction, toward their truck and the city, not away from it.

  Japanese soldiers. Dressed in khaki and wearing helmets with canvas flaps to shield their necks from sun, each had a bedroll tied to the back of his bike, a rifle slung over his shoulder, and a canteen at his belt. It was an entire company of men, maybe a hundred and fifty in all. They were a mud-splattered, sweaty-looking bunch.

  Maybe it was the exhaustion of riding their bikes in through the late-afternoon heat, or the surprise of seeing US military vehicles on a road they must have been told was clear of enemies, but the Japanese were slow in reacting. Some lurched to the side to get free of the lumbering trucks while a handful of alert men jumped from their bikes and fumbled with rifles. Others shouted and ducked for cover.

  The trucks were almost through the enemy soldiers when they encountered a thick pocket of men who couldn’t steer clear before the trucks hit. Their truck’s driver was still accelerating, hitting every pothole with a bone-jarring shake, and he plowed into the men in the road. Bicycles crumpled and went flying. Soldiers rolled beneath the heavy tires or were dragged down the road.