by Dean Koontz
Despite Pullit's genuinely lovely gams, Kelly didn't want to put it to anyone but Lily Kain.
The other bunker was always in use by men who slept there. The rec room, which was the mess hall, which was half of the rickety HQ building, was never without a few men playing cards, bullshitting, or arguing. That left the great out-of-doors.
When they had first searched for a secluded place for their amorous activities, Major Kelly and Lily Kain had chosen the slopes of the ravine beneath the bridge. It seemed certain to be the most private place available. No one ever went near the bridge, because no one could ever be sure when the krauts would bomb it again. Once the bridge had been rebuilt, it was taboo. And, though making love under the bridge meant that they courted instant death from a Stuka attack, they went back again and again. What was instant death, after all, compared to a brief moment of orgasmic pleasure?
Besides, they only went under the bridge at night, when the Stukas never attacked, when they could forget their fear and indulge their senses. Sex, Kelly had long ago concluded, was essential if a man were to hang on. If a man couldn't fuck now and then, he'd start taking chances, lose his grip. You can't hang on if your grip is gone.
Sex was as important to survival as was cowardice.
That night, two days after the Panzers, Major Kelly and Lily Kain went down the green slopes-which were actually mostly brown and burnt and all muddied by the tracks of dozers and other equipment, but which appeared nonetheless Elysian to them in their rutting heat-went under the bridge to a patch of generally undisturbed grass by the edge of the oiled, burbling, light-flecked river. There, with little time for the niceties of civilized romance, the major undressed her and lowered her to the grass, preparatory to putting it to her.
Overhead, on the bridge floor, there were sounds like autumn leaves rustled by the wind-or like a gentle rain pattering out of the open heavens. It was good background music for their performance.
Now and then during the day when the major caught a glimpse of Lily Kain in her dancer's costume as she was on her way to or from the mess hall, he would comment to Lieutenant Beame, his right-hand man, on the fine structure of the woman. He would say, under his breath because he actually was breathless, "She has one of the finest bodies I've ever seen!"
Beame was a virgin, though he thought no one knew he was. He believed that his best defense against discovery and ridicule was cool indifference, since he thought the world's greatest lovers were really rather coolly indifferent except when they were in bed. Beame would say, "Oh, well, a body is a body."
"Tits," Major Kelly would say. "She has the finest pair of tits I've ever seen, big and round and pointing right at the sky."
"Tits are tits," Beame would say.
"And those legs! Sleek, trim-longest legs I've ever seen!"
And Beame would say, "Legs are legs."
One day when he felt like teasing Beame, Kelly had gone his usual horny litany, then added, "She has the sexiest thumbs I've ever seen!"
And Beame had said, "Thumbs are thumbs." Then he had realized what he'd said. He blushed. "Yeah," he had added, "she does have nice thumbs."
And she had a nice body, too. It was all breasts and hips and firm buttocks and legs. Very little waist. Right now, Major Kelly didn't care about her mind or her personality, her religion, politics, or even about her moderately bad breath. He only cared about her wonderful body. He lay beside her, kissing her forehead, her eyes, her pert nose, then her lips, sucking on her tongue until he thought he might swallow it. He took handfuls of her jugs which she offered him with a graceful arching of her back, and he pondered the engineering miracle of those breasts. They were engineering miracles. He should know: he was an engineer. He tested those jugs for solidity and texture, squeezing and releasing them, massaging them with his fingertips and palms. He swept his hands up their undersides to gauge their thrust, took the big hard nipples between thumb and forefinger and gently turned them this way and that, making them even larger. A miracle. Two miracles, perfectly matched. He caressed and bounced and licked those miracles until he felt he was ready to explode with an infusion of divine power.
Overhead, the pattering sound ceased and was replaced by the soughing of the wind.
Major Kelly let the wind help build the atmosphere of sweet sensuality, and when he felt that it had been built high enough, he took off his own fatigues. He seemed to be moving through syrup, undressing so slowly that he would never finally be unfettered and able to achieve penetration. A man on a slow-motion film, he peeled off his shirt and, an eternity later, pulled off his shoes and then his trousers. It was, he thought, like that old mathematical riddle: if a chair is ten feet from the wall, and if you keep moving it half the distance to the wall, how many moves will it take until the chair is touching the wall? The answer, of course, is that the chair will never be touching the wall. It will get closer and closer through an infinite number of moves but can never, theoretically, be finally there. Right now, as he pulled off his shorts, Kelly thought that he was the chair while Lily was the wall. They were never going to get together.
And then he was nude and between her legs. He lifted her buttocks, another pair of engineering miracles, and guided himself into her, all the way, moaning in the back of his throat as she moaned in the back of hers.
The gentle breezes above were punctuated by hard, regular gulping sounds, like something thick and wet being dropped down a pipe, sounds that did not belong here in the midst of romance. As these gulping noises increased, grew louder and more frequent and finally dominated the night, Major Kelly broke his embrace of Lily Kain with a wet, mournful sucking noise of rudely disengaged organs. He got to his feet and, utterly unashamed of his own nakedness, walked out of the shadow of the bridge floor, and looked up at the twenty or thirty men who were lying on the bridge and hanging over the edge watching the action.
"We can forget the patter of feet," Kelly said, "and pretend it's only leaves rustling."
None of the men replied. They just hung up there, wide-eyed, looking down at him and stealing quick glances at Lily Kain.
"And we have agreed to imagine that the breathing is the sigh of the wind." He spread his arms imploringly. "But I can't deal with that sound. Is someone up there eating peanuts?"
Lieutenant Beame was eating peanuts. He grinned sheepishly.
Half a dozen of the other men, without saying a word, picked him up, took him to the end of the bridge, and beat the shit out of him. When they came back and stretched out again, the major returned to Lily Kain.
"Idiots," she said.
"It was only the leaves," he said.
"Morons."
"Gentle breezes."
"I suppose," she said.
Lily had been sitting up, waiting for him to come back. Now, she lay down again, parted her thighs which were another pair of engineering miracles.
That was all Kelly needed to put him back in the mood. He walked forward on his knees, slipped his hands under her, lifted her, and got into her again as smoothly as a greased piston into a firing chamber. He thrust several times as she moved up against him, and when they were firmly joined, he rolled her over, holding her against him, until he was lying on his back and she had the dominant position.
Above them, many breezes worked across the bridge floor.
Lily began to bounce up and down on him. It was the most miraculous thing Kelly had ever seen. Her two big jugs worked round and round, slapped together, rose and fell, jiggled, quivered, swung, bounced. In the wash of yellow moonlight, those gyrating globes became more than twin miracles. They transcended the mere miraculous. They were a divine experience, a fundamental spiritual vision that stunned him and left him gasping.
"Oh, God! Oh, God!" one of the breezes said, above.
Kelly ignored it. He raised his head and nipped at her jugs, took part of one of them between his lips and nearly suffocated himself in flesh.
Lily was climbing toward her brink, sliding up and down on him, h
er head thrown back, mouth open. She made little sounds in her throat. Little obscene sounds.
As he felt her reaching her crest, Kelly thrust up, jamming hard into her, trying to finish with her. He knew that he would never again endure such incredible pleasure. He was sure of it. Of course, he was sure of it every time that he had her, was convinced in every instance that this was the ultimate and final joy; but now, his certainty was nonetheless complete for its familiarity. He could not conceive of anything to match this. He could not imagine another bout of this wet, hot, soft, nibbling, licking, jiggling, sucking, bouncing, sliding, slipping, thrusting, exploding excitement. Wide-eyed and breathless at the sight of her, he rushed both of them toward completion. "Soon, soon, soon, soon," he mumbled ardently into her right breast.
But it was just not their night. As Major Kelly felt himself swept toward the brink, as he redoubled his efforts so that he might reach his end with hers, the Stukas bombed the bridge.
* * *
4
The hospital bunker was full of wounded men. Nurse Pullit was holding cold compresses against the back of Private Angelli's neck, while Angelli bent forward and let his nose drip blood into a rag. Tooley was treating a man for minor burns of the right arm, and a dozen men waited for treatment. All ten cots were occupied, and four men sat on the damp floor with their backs against the wall, cradling their arms or legs or whatever was hit.
Fortunately, the attack had first been directed against the farside pier. The men lying on the bridge floor staring over the edge at Major Kelly and Lily Kain on the grass below had time to jump up and run before, on a second pass, the Stukas placed two hundred-pounders exactly where they had been. Their wounds, for the most part, were minor: scrapes, cuts, weeping lesions, nosebleeds from the concussion, second-degree burns from being too near the outward-roiling flash of an explosion, twisted ankles, pulled muscles.
"You should all be thankful you're alive!" Major Kelly told them as he paced back and forth in the crowded bunker. He was trying to keep up company morale. He recognized that company morale was constantly hitting new lows, and he felt he had to do something to check this dangerous slide into utter dejection, depression, and apathy. The only problem was that his own heart wasn't in it. His morale kept hitting new lows, too, and he just could not think of any way to improve things. Except to harangue the men. "You should be thankful you're alive!" he repeated, grinning fiercely to show them how thankful he was.
The wounded men stared at him. Soot-smeared, blood-dappled, eyes white and wide, hair greasy and twisted in knots, clothes filthy and tattered, they did not seem cheered at all. One of them, when Kelly's back was turned, muttered, "Shallow philosophy." But that was the only response.
"What's a nosebleed?" Kelly asked them. "What's a little cut on the arm or a burn?" He waited for an answer. When no one said anything, he answered himself: "It's nothing! Nothing at all. The important thing is to be alive!"
One of the men started crying.
Kelly tried to talk some more, but the crying drowned him out. He walked down the row to the fifth cot on the left. "Liverwright? What is the matter, Liverwright?"
Liverwright was sitting on the edge of the cot, leaning to one side to take the weight off his swollen hip. Tears streamed down his face, and his mouth quivered unprettily.
"Liverwright? What is it?"
"The important thing is to be alive, just like you told us," the wounded man said.
Kelly smiled uncertainly. "Yes. That's right."
"But I'm dying," Liverwright said. He was crying harder than ever, sobbing, his voice distorted as he tried to cry and breathe and talk at the same time.
"You aren't dying," Kelly said. He didn't sound convincing.
"Yes, I am," Liverwright said. "I'm dying, and I can't even die in peace. Now, all these men are moved in here. Everyone's rushing around. There's too much noise. And you're standing there shouting at us like-like General Blade."
Liverwright had been the radio operator on alternate nights, before he took the piece of steel in the hip. He knew Blade. Even so, Major Kelly thought Liverwright must be delirious. "Me? Like Blade?"
Liverwright sniffed and wiped halfheartedly at his running nose. "Here we are in the worst trouble of our lives- and you're telling us we never had it so good. Half of us are wounded-and you're telling us it's nothing. Most of us will never get home again-and you're telling us we should take it easy, relax, count our blessings." Liverwright blew his nose without benefit of handkerchief, wiped his sticky fingers on his shirt. "I always thought you were different. I thought you weren't like other officers. But down deep, you have the potential."
Kelly was stunned by the accusations. All he could say was, "What potential?"
"To be another Blade," Liverwright said. "You could be another General Blade." He began to bawl again. His whole body shook, and he rocked back and forth on the edge of the cot, nearly tipping it over.
"Me?" Kelly asked, incredulous.
"I'm dying, and you're talking at me like General Blade. I can't take it. I can't."
Suddenly, not really aware of what he was doing, Kelly reached down and took hold of Liverwright's shirt. He lifted the wounded man clear off his cot, held him up as if he were an airy ball of rags. He pulled Liverwright against him, until only an inch or two separated their faces. "Don't you ever say anything like that." His voice was tight, issued through clenched teeth. His face was red, and he was sweating more than the heat could account for. "Don't you ever call me anything like that. Blade, the rest of them like Blade, on both sides of this fucking war, aren't a whole hell of a lot different. They're the throw-backs, the brutes, the cavemen. Don't you goddamned ever call me something like that!" He dropped Liverwright back on his cot, without regard for the man's hip.
Liverwright blew his nose again, wiped at his eyes. "Am I dying?" he asked.
"Probably," Kelly said. "We all are, bit by bit."
Liverwright smiled slightly. "Okay," he said. "Okay."
Nauseous, ashamed of himself, Major Kelly went up front where Lily and Nurse Pullit were treating the last of the wounded.
Amazingly enough, the major and Lily Kain had escaped injury, though they had been directly under the bridge when the Stukas glided in. Lily told Nurse Pullit all about their escape as the two of them treated the wounded. "He was lying there, flat on his back, shoved right up in me. You know?"
Nurse Pullit giggled.
"Even if the Stukas hadn't glided in, we probably wouldn't have heard them any sooner. Anyway, when the first bombs hit the far side of the bridge, he got his hands and feet under him and started off."
"With you on top?" Nurse Pullit asked.
Lily explained how it was. Kelly, his back still parallel to the earth, Lily still screwed on tight, had pushed up and scuttled along the riverbank like a crab. Two minutes later, when they were a quarter of a mile downriver from the bridge, he was still lodged firmly inside of her, and she had climaxed at least half a dozen times. It had been like riding a horse with a dildo strapped to the saddle. She wanted to try it again, Lily told Nurse Pullit, but she thought it might be best to wait until the bridge was likely to be bombed again. After all, the fear of death was what had given the major the energy to perform these acrobatics.
When Kelly came up front, after the confrontation with Liverwright, Nurse Pullit said, "I heard all about it!"
"It wasn't like she said," Kelly told the nurse.
"He doesn't remember," Lily said.
She and Nurse Pullit giggled.
So far as Kelly was concerned, Lily's story was fantasy. One moment, he was under the bridge watching it come apart over him; the next moment, he was a quarter of a mile downriver, by the water's edge. He couldn't figure out how he got there, and he refused to believe the grotesque picture Lily painted. He chose, instead, to believe that he had pretended to be out from under the bridge- and therefore was out from under it, just as Danny Dew had pretended to be white.
"Just li
ke riding a horse with a dildo," Lily Kain said, shaking her head and laughing.
Major Kelly couldn't take any more of that. He turned away from them and walked to the far end of the bunker. As he passed Liverwright, he said, "You're dying." Liverwright seemed pleased by his honesty.
Private Tooley, who was stationed at that end of the bunker, washing out scrapes and cuts which his new batch of patients had sustained, said, "If you'd heeded Kowalski's warning, you wouldn't have been under the bridge in the first place."
"Who in the hell would ever think Kowalski knew what he was talking about?" Major Kelly asked, turning to look at the mad Pole who lay quietly in his cot, staring at nothing. "Kowalski is a zombie, a bag of shit. He can't even feed himself any more. How in the hell was I to know that this dumb bag of shit would be right?"
Private Tooley daubed some grit out of a sliced forearm, then sent the man to the front of the bunker where Lily and Nurse Pullit were dispensing antiseptics and applying bandages. He said, "I wish you wouldn't call him names like that."
"What should I call him, then?"
"Private Kowalski," Private Tooley said. "That's his name."
Major Kelly shook his head. "No. That isn't the Private Kowalski that I knew. The Private Kowalski that I knew always laughed a lot. Has this bag of shit laughed recently?"
"No, but-"
"The Private Kowalski I knew liked to play cards and used to bitch a blue streak when he lost. Has this man tried to get up a poker game since he was brought here, or has he cursed you out?"
"Of course not, but-"
"Then this isn't Private Kowalski," Major Kelly said. "This is nothing more than a bag of shit. The sooner you accept that, the better you're going to feel. A bag of shit doesn't die. You don't have to be sorry for it."
"Next time," Tooley said, trying to change the subject, "you better listen to him."
"Next time, let's hope there's more to his ravings-like dates and times. What good is an oracle who can't give dates and times?"
Private Kowalski belched.