by Dean Koontz
"I don't belong here," Lily Kain repeated.
"I know," Kelly said. "But-"
"I gave Liverwright the morphine," Nurse Pullit said, interrupting them, smiling and nodding at Kelly. "His hip looks worse than ever."
Nurse Pullit was the second person assigned to the hospital bunker to tend the wounded. Nurse Pullit was actually Private Pullit in drag, and Private Pullit was not a nurse at all. No one could say where Private Pullit had gotten the white uniform he wore, but it looked good on him. He had hemmed the skirt so that it fell just above his dimpled knees, a somewhat daring fashion, and he kept the uniform well starched. He wore a bandanna over his head to conceal his still predominately male hairline, a cheerful scarlet cap that made him look a bit like a Negro mammy. Except he wasn't a Negro. Or a mammy.
When he had first volunteered for hospital duty and had shown up in his uniform, with his legs shaved and his face lightly powdered, the wounded men had attempted to get up and return to their duty stations. Even Private Stoltz, whose left leg had been broken in two places and only recently set, argued with Major Kelly that he was well enough to return to his post. Stoltz had actually made it up four of the six steps to the bunker's door before he screamed and passed out, bumping back down and badly cutting his forehead on the concrete edge of the last step.
Now, however, the men were grateful that Nurse Pullit had been assigned to their unit as a laborer, for Nurse Pullit proved to be adept at suturing wounds, applying bandages, lancing infections, and offering sympathy. Besides, Pullit's legs really weren't that bad.
"Everything all right, Nurse Pullit?" Major Kelly asked.
"Poor Liverwright," Nurse Pullit said, quietly, casting a glance back at the man in the first cot against the far wall. Nurse Pullit's lips drew into a bow and made a tch-tch-tching noise.
Before he realized quite what he was doing, Major Kelly had put his hand on Nurse Pullit's ass. Rather than insult Nurse Pullit by drawing back, he kept his hand where he had inadvertently put it, though he certainly felt strange.
"Is there anything I can do, anything that you need?"
"We've got good supplies of medicine," Nurse Pullit said, batting her thick lashes over her blue eyes. No. His lashes, over his eyes. "We could do with a doctor, but that's up to that nasty General Blade. However, there is something I wanted to ask you..."
"Yes?"
"Well," Nurse Pullit said, "Lily has a delightful pair of white pumps in her costume trunk. The heels aren't really that awfully high. I could manage them, even on this dirt floor, and they would add so much to my uniform if I had them."
Major Kelly looked down at the combat boots on Nurse Pullit's feet. "I see your point," he said.
"Then I can have them?"
"Of course."
"Oh, thank you!" Nurse Pullit squealed. "I'm the happiest nurse in the world!"
* * *
6
The third person assigned to the hospital bunker was Private Tooley, the pacifist. Private Tooley was six feet tall, weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds, and had once lifted weights. His arms were like knotted hemp covered with tar, thick and rippled, lumped with muscle. He could do more work than any three men when a bridge needed to be repaired, and he never once complained about the eighteen-hour days a repair job might sometimes require. No one could understand, then, why Private Tooley was a chickenshit pacifist.
Sergeant Coombs, as bewildered about Tooley as everyone else, confronted the private in the HQ rec room one night, over a bottle of Jack Daniels. They had both been sitting in the small, board-walled room, sprawled on benches, backs against the wall, drinking and counting the spiders on the ceiling. The air was hot and thick, the night silence even thicker, and eventually they could not ignore each other any longer. At first, their conversation had been gruff, unconnected, meandering. With more liquor, and once they had all the spiders counted, it got spirited.
"What would you do if someone attacked your grandmother?" Sergeant Coombs wanted to know. "You're a pacifist, so what would you do?"
"Who would want to attack my grandmother?" Tooley had asked.
"Let's say it isn't sexual."
"She isn't rich, either," Tooley said.
"Seriously, suppose you were there, and someone attacked your grandmother with a gun. Would you shoot him first?"
"Do I have a gun too?"
Coombs nodded. "Yes."
"I wouldn't have a gun."
"Why not?"
"I'm a pacifist."
Coombs had reddened, but he said, "Suppose, just for the sake of this discussion, that you had a gun, a real gun." He took a pull of the whiskey, keeping his eyes on Tooley.
"How good am I with the gun?" Tooley asked.
Anticipating a loophole, Coombs said, "You're an excellent shot."
"Then I'd shoot the gun out of his hand."
Coombs took another drink, looked at the spiders, kept Ms temper in check, and said, "You're a lousy shot."
"You just said I was an excellent shot."
"I take it back."
"If I was a lousy shot, I wouldn't try to kill him," Tooley said. "I wouldn't dare try."
"Oh?"
"Yes. I might hit my grandmother instead."
Coombs stared at the bottle for a long time. When Tooley was about to touch him to see if he had passed out, the sergeant said, "Suppose you were driving a truck on a cliff road, too fast to stop. A little girl suddenly appears on the road, just around a bend. You either hit the little girl or drive over the cliff and kill yourself. You either crush and mangle this beautiful, blue-eyed, curly-headed little child-or you drive over the cliff. What would you do?"
"What happened to the man with the gun?" Tooley asked. "What did he do to my grandmother?"
"Forget him," Coombs said.
"How can I forget him? What if he kills Grandma while I'm out driving this truck?"
"Forget the first example," Coombs said. "Let's pretend you're in that truck. What would you do?"
"I'd blow my horn for the little girl to get out of the way."
"Your horn doesn't work."
"I'd wave and yell at her," Tooley said, raising his voice, almost as if the child were in front of him, as if this bench were the seat of a wildly careening truck.
"She couldn't hear you above the roar of the truck!" Sergeant Coombs said, standing, waving his fists for emphasis.
"Jesus Christ!" Tooley screamed. "How stupid is this kid? If she sees a truck bearing down on her, isn't she going to run for the bank and get out of the way?"
Triumphant, still standing, jumping up and down a little in his excitement, Coombs said, "She's too young to walk."
"Can she crawl?"
"No!"
"I'd drive over the cliff!" Tooley shouted. He grabbed the liquor, rocking the entire bench on which he sat, his eyes squinted tightly shut, waiting for the crash.
Coombs said, "Suppose your mother was in the truck with you?"
"My mother?" His eyes snapped open.
"Your mother."
"What the fuck would my mother be doing with me, in a truck, driving along a sheer cliff on a narrow road at sixty miles an hour? Why the hell isn't she back there helping my grandmother who's being attacked by the man with the gun who doesn't want to rape her?"
"I don't know anything about your family," Coombs said. "I only want to see how your chickenshit pacifism gets you out of this one?"
Tooley leaned back, hugging the liquor bottle to his chest. His eyes were white, unblinking. He licked his lips. Tense, thinking furiously, he was still a huge man, but he resembled a child. A frightened child. He said, "I'd slam on the brakes!" He leaned forward, as if hit in the pit of the stomach. "I'd try to stop before I hit the kid!"
"Hah!" Coombs roared.
"Hah?"
"You should hit the kid and save yourself and your mother. What the hell does a stranger mean to you, anyway?"
"But if I braked in time...?"
"Hah! You'd slam on the
brakes, going at sixty on a narrow road, send your mother through the windshield and kill her instantly. Bam. Dead. You'd fishtail past the little girl, smash her to jelly, plummet over the damn cliff, and crash through your grandmother's house and kill the old woman and yourself and several innocent bystanders. That's what would happen, and all because of your chickenshit pacifism!"
Tooley huddled into himself even more, stunned at the crisp, awful vision of ultimate catastrophe which he had been given.
"No, Tooley," Coombs had assured him, "it won't work. Pacifism is a wonderful idea, but it just isn't applicable to the real world."
Then he got up and walked out of the rec room, leaving Tooley glued to the bench.
However, Sergeant Coombs didn't manage to make Tooley change his outlook. The private still refused to pack a gun and spent most of his time helping the wounded in the hospital-especially Kowalski, who was the second patient, a regular zombie.
Fresh from talking with Nurse Pullit, Major Kelly walked to the end of the bunker and sat down next to Tooley on a gray cot which was drawn up close to Kowalski's cot. He pointed at the mute figure between the sheets, and he said, "How's your zombie doing today?"
"Same as usual," Tooley said, though he was disturbed by the major's choice of words.
Kowalski was lying quietly, his head heavily bandaged, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He had collected a piece of bridge support in the back of his head when the British bombed the gorge four weeks ago, and he had not moved or spoken to anyone in all the days since. He stared at the ceiling and dirtied his pants and took food from Tooley which, once he had digested it, he craftily employed to dirty his pants again.
"There's a plane coming in tonight," Kelly told Tooley. He saw a fat centipede skitter along the floor, near the end of the bunker. It gained a shadowed wall and disappeared, probably on its way to the ceiling. He wondered if there were anything clinging to the ceiling just above his own head.
The pacifist looked at the zombie and then at the major, and he said, "Do you think they would take him back where he can get good medical attention?"
"You know what they'd do with him, even if they did agree to take him. They'd open the bay doors and dump him out at twenty thousand feet"
Tooley winced.
Kelly looked around at the patients, back at Nurse Pullit and Lily Kain who were engaged in an animated conversation about the nurse's new pumps. Pullit kept pointing to his combat boots and making odd gestures. "Tooley, I didn't come to the hospital bunker to look in on the patients. I came to see only one person."
Tooley nodded, smiling. "Lily Kain, sir. Gorgeous jugs!"
"Not Lily," Major Kelly said.
Perplexed, Tooley scratched his head. "Nurse Pullit?"
"Not Nurse Pullit. Why would I come to see Nurse Pullit?"
"Nurse Pullit's got pretty good legs," Tooley said.
"Not Nurse Pullit," Major Kelly said. He wiped the back of his neck, which was sweating, and he finally glanced up at the low ceiling. In the dim circle of light from the nearest bulb, there were no centipedes over him.
"Kowalski, sir?"
Kelly looked dumbly at the pacifist. "What about Kowalski?"
"Is that who you came to see, sir?"
Kelly frowned. "No, Tooley. I came to see you."
"Me?" Tooley was genuinely surprised and pleased. "Well, this is nice of you, sir. I can't offer much in the way of entertainment, but-"
"Tooley," Kelly said, lowering his voice even further, his words hissing like sandpaper along the concrete ceiling, deadened by the dirt walls, rattling on the corrugated tin, "you're the only one I can trust. I know you wouldn't turn informer and leak information to the krauts, because you don't want to see either side win."
"Through force," Tooley amended. "I want us to win, but I don't really believe in force."
"Exactly," Kelly said. "But someone has been leaking information to the krauts, and we have to find out who he is."
Tooley nodded soberly. "You think this informer might have come to me, since I'm an avowed pacifist-might have thought of me as material for a second subversive in the camp."
"That's it."
"He hasn't," Tooley said. "But if he does, I'll let you know right away, sir."
"Thanks, Tooley," Major Kelly said. "I knew I could depend on you, no matter what everyone says about you."
Tooley frowned. "What does everyone say about me?"
"That you're a chickenshit pacifist."
"I'm a pacifist all right. But where do they get the other part of it, do you think?"
"I wouldn't know." Kelly said. He got up, scanning the ceiling for centipedes, pulling his collar tight around his neck. "Anyway, keep your eyes open for any unusual- incidents."
"Yes, sir."
Kowalski suddenly dirtied his pants.
* * *
7
Crickets worked busily in the darkness, telegraphing shrill messages across the flat, open runway area toward the trees which thrust up on all sides. The crickets, Major Kelly was sure, were working for the Germans.
The sky was overcast. The clouds seemed like a roof, lighted from behind by dim moonlight, low and even, stretched across the land between the walls of the forest. Occasionally, heat lightning played along the soft edges of the clouds like the flash of cannon fire.
At the eastern end of the runway which Danny Dew had gouged out with his big D-7 dozer, Major Kelly, Beame, and Slade waited for the DC-3 cargo plane. They stood close together, breathing like horses that had been run the mile in little more than a minute and a half. They stared toward the far end of the open strip, at the tops of the black trees, heads pushed a bit forward as they tried to catch the first rumble of the plane's engines.
A frog croaked nearby, startling Beame who jumped forward and collided with Kelly, nearly knocking the bigger man down.
"A frog," Slade said. But he didn't sound sure of himself.
The frogs, Major Kelly thought, were in league with the crickets, who were telegraphing messages to the Germans.
Abruptly, silencing the crickets, the sound of the plane's engines came in over the trees, low and steady and growing.
"Move!" Major Kelly said.
To the left and right, enlisted men struck matches, bent down and lighted tiny blue flares at each corner of the runway. They looked like overgrown altar boys at some alien worship. At the far end of the crude strip, another pair of men did the same, briefly lighted by an intense blue glow before they stepped back into the shadows under the trees. Now the pilot had a means of gauging the length and width of the runway. This really wasn't much for the pilot to judge by; he might as well have tried an audio landing with the sputtering of the flares as his only points of reference.
By the same token, the four blue lights weren't much for a random patrol of German night bombers to beam in on, either.
The pilot, Major Kelly knew, would already have begun to scream. He always began to scream when he started losing altitude a mile out over the trees to the west. When he came in sight of the blue flares, he would scream even louder. He said their permanent runway wasn't much better than the temporary affair he had first landed on. He said it was too short, too uneven, and too narrow. He said it wasn't macadamized, that the oil-and-sand surface was extremely treacherous. He said the four blue flares hurt his eyes and interfered with his judgment when he was putting down, even though he had to have the flares or not land at all. Besides, he said, the runway was behind German lines. Even if General Blade did have him by the short hairs, the pilot said, he had no right to send him and his plane and his crew behind German lines. He said this again and again, until Major Kelly went to great lengths to avoid him. The pilot had to shout about this to Major Kelly, because the general had forbidden him to tell anyone else that he had been behind enemy lines.
"What do you want to be behind enemy lines for?" the pilot would shout at Kelly, his face red, his hands fisted in the pockets of his flight jacket.
"
I don't want to be here," Kelly would say.
"But here you are."
"On orders," Kelly would say.
"That's your excuse," the pilot would say.
There was really no reasoning with the pilot, because he was consumed with terror the entire time he was at the clearing.
Now, by the south side of the HQ building, twelve enlisted men waited to unload the materials which would, when combined with sweat, remake the bridge. All of the enlisted men were as nervous as the pilot, but none of them was screaming. The first time the pilot had brought the big plane in, the enlisted men had screamed right along with him, bent double, faces bright with blood, mouths open wide, eyes watering, screaming and screaming. But Sergeant Coombs had been infuriated by this display of cowardice. He had punished them the following day with KP duty and a severe calisthenics session. Because they feared Sergeant Coombs more than they feared the Germans, the men were forced to express this nervousness in less obvious ways. They stood by the HQ building, in the shadows, snapping their fingers, popping their knuckles, grinding their teeth, slapping their sides, clicking their tongues. One of them was kicking the side of the corrugated tin wall as if he did not believe it were real, as if he were testing it. The enlisted men, more aware of their mortality than the officers, were always afraid that the krauts would catch the cargo plane on radar, would follow it and bomb the shit out of the runway and the camp. The Stukas were friendly. The Stukas, for some reason, only wanted the bridge. But a flight of German night planes couldn't be counted on to limit its objectives. So the enlisted men sweated out each landing and each takeoff, suffering from the same terminal disease that afflicted Beame: hope. They didn't understand that nothing improved, that it wasn't any use sweating out anything. Whatever would happen would happen. Then, when it did happen, that was the time to sweat.