Hanging On

by Dean Koontz

  Major Kelly had spent all morning running around the camp getting the men to sign various papers which he carried in a folder under his arm. He was not dirty or sweaty. Coombs knew that Kelly didn't have an aching back or aching arms or a stoved thumb. He regarded the proffered document scornfully and said, "What is it?"

  "Nothing much," Kelly said, evasively. "Just sign it, and I'll stop bothering you."

  Sergeant Coombs looked at the pile of materiel he had yet to transfer to the bridge, scratched the back of his sunburned neck, and was tempted to sign the damn thing, whatever it was, just to be rid of Kelly. He was still on the shuttler seat, with crates stacked on the forked platform before him. He could sign and be on his way again. But something in Kelly's manner, a sort of phony good humor, warned Coombs. "What is it?" he repeated.

  "Just sign it. Quick, now. I've got to get every man's signature if I'm going to keep Maurice's help. And I need Maurice's help. Every minute counts in this, Sergeant. So sign."

  "I won't sign anything that I don't know what it is," Coombs said.

  Kelly's smile faded. "Well, look, you know how much help Maurice has been, bringing in all these workers."

  "Frogs," Coombs said.

  "Yes, perhaps they are. But the fact remains that we need them. And in the days ahead, Maurice will be doing even more for us. And you can't expect him to do it all out of the goodness of his heart. Maurice wants to make a profit from it. That should be something every red-blooded American can understand. We Americans believe in the profit system, free enterprise. That's one of the things we're fighting for."

  "What about this paper?" Coombs asked. For such a stumpy man, he was damned difficult to fool.

  Major Kelly was distinctly uncomfortable now. He could not stop thinking about the Panzers. While he was standing here with Coombs, how much closer had the Germans come? Too much closer... Kelly looked nervously at the stack of crates beside the shuttler, at the sky, at the ground, everywhere but at Coombs. "Maurice wants to be paid for his help. Naturally, we're the only ones who can pay him. So what Maurice wants from us-he wants two hundred bucks from every man in camp."

  "I don't have it," Coombs said.

  Kelly shook his head in agreement and frustration. "Who does? But Maurice understands how things are with us. We're paid in scrip when the DC-3 comes in from

  Blade's HQ, but most of us lose it to Hoskins or Malzberg in a day or two, at best. Maurice understands, and he does not want to be at all unreasonable. He's willing to extend us credit, provided we sign these forms he's given me. You pay fifty dollars now, the other one-fifty over the next six months."

  Coombs was suspicious. "Six months?"

  "That's right."

  "We'll be gone in six months."

  Kelly shrugged. "Maybe he's banking on the war not being over that fast."

  Coombs would not swallow that. "There's something you're not telling me."

  Kelly sighed, thinking about the Panzers, about the minutes melting away. "You're right. You see, this paper you're to sign... well, it's an admission of collaboration with the Nazis."

  Coombs looked at Kelly as if the major were a stone that had come suddenly to life before his eyes. He could not believe what he was hearing. "Admit I collaborated with the krauts, even if I didn't?"

  Kelly smiled nervously. "Maurice has written a different confession for each of us." He looked down at the paper in his hand and quickly scanned the neat paragraphs of precise, handwritten English. "Yours states that you sabotaged the equipment which you were assigned to maintain, that you interfered with the building of the bridge."

  Coombs did not know what to say.

  "You can see where Maurice might feel he has to use such an extreme credit contract," Kelly said. He liked to call the paper a credit contract rather than a forged confession or something equally distasteful. "This kind of document would guarantee his money even if we were transferred out of here before we paid him in full. None of us would want his contract turned over to Allied military officials."

  "What did you confess?" Coombs asked.

  "Transmitting information to the Nazis via our wireless set." He forced the rumpled paper into Coombs's hand, gave him a stubby yellow pencil. "Just sign the damn thing, Sergeant. Time is our greatest enemy."

  "I won't sign." Coombs's jaw was set, and his pulse pounded visibly at neck and temples.

  "Sergeant, you must. I've got more than forty men to sign up yet. If one refuses, others will too. And the deal with Maurice will fall through... You'll die with the rest of us!" He was trying to scare the sergeant, and he scared himself in the process.

  "I'm not afraid to fight," Coombs said.

  Exasperated, Kelly watched Coombs try to hand back the confession. He refused to touch it. He swatted Coombs's hand as if trying to push back more than the paper-as if he were fighting off the inevitable death rushing down on them. Couldn't Coombs see that one man's pride or stubbornness could kill them all? After a full minute of this thrust and counterthrust, with the credit contract getting pretty badly mutilated, Kelly leaned toward Coombs. "What the fuck rank are you?" he screamed.

  Coombs looked at him as if he were witless. "Sergeant."

  "And I am a major, right?" Kelly drew himself up to his full height. "Sergeant, as your commanding officer, I order you to sign that paper and give me fifty dollars. Now."

  Coombs's face drained of color as he realized his dilemma. He was in a spot where he had to go against one of the two moral principles that made him tick. He either had to refuse an order from a legitimate superior-or cooperate with this coward and become, in effect, a coward himself. For a long moment he sat on the shuttler, swaying back and forth as if buffeted by two gale force winds. Then, leaning quickly forward and holding the confession against one of the packing crates on the forked cargo platform, he signed his name. His need for order, for a sense of rank, for rules and regulations, had won out over his loathing of cowardice.

  "Fifty dollars," Kelly said, taking the signed document.

  As the sergeant handed over the money, something else occurred to him. "This isn't all Maurice is getting, is it?"

  Kelly was uncomfortable again. He was anxious to be off, signing up the other men. Precious minutes were being wasted! Besides, he was a bit ashamed of this business. Sometimes, he was shocked at the immoral things life forced him to do... "Maurice gets a few other little things," Kelly admitted. "Like your cargo shuttler... the camp generator when we leave..."

  Coombs was distressed. "What else?"

  "Only one other thing," Kelly assured him. "A toll-booth."

  Coombs could not make any sense out of that. He scratched the back of his neck, spat in the dust, taking as long as possible to respond. He knew Kelly and some of the others thought he was stupid. He was not really stupid at all, just taciturn and grumpy. For the life of him, though, he could not see what the major was talking about, and he was forced to look stupid. "Tollbooth?"

  "After the Panzers pass through and we're safe," Kelly said, "we're going to build a tollbooth on the other side of the gorge, in the road just before the bridge. It'll have a pole across the road and everything. Maurice's people will work there, bring extra money into Eisenhower."

  "Oh." Compared to an operator like The Frog, Coombs supposed he was stupid.

  "As soon as you pay Maurice the rest, he gives back your contract. Thanks for your cooperation, Sergeant." Kelly turned and ran back toward the HQ building where several men were hurriedly reviewing the construction plans in the shade by the rec room door.

  Lieutenant Beame was one of them. However, he was standing pretty much by himself, thirty feet from the knot of men.

  Major Kelly went straight to him, because he liked to get each man alone when he was selling the idea of the credit contract. He knew it would be dangerous to let them group together when he delivered his spiel. It had to be a one-to-one relationship in which he could employ what little talent for discipline he possessed. He had to be able to co
ncentrate on one man in order to overwhelm his victim with his practiced patter and with dire predictions of what the Panzers would do to them if they did not get this damned village built in just six days.

  "Got something for you to sign," Kelly said, giving Beame the paper.

  "Oh?"

  All the while that Kelly explained the fine points of the credit contract to Lieutenant Beame, the lieutenant stared over Kelly's shoulder at nothing in particular, a silly smirk on his face. When Kelly asked him to sign the paper, Beame took the pencil and scrawled his name in sloppily looping letters. He was still grinning drunkenly. He gave Kelly the scrip without quibbling, and his expression remained eerily mongoloid.

  "What's the matter?" Kelly asked. "What are you grinning about?"

  Beame hesitated. Then: "I met a girl."

  "I don't understand," Kelly said.

  "The most beautiful girl I've ever seen." Beame almost drooled.

  "Who?"

  Beame told him. "I asked her to come back this evening for a romantic dinner. Maybe you can meet her then."

  "In the mess hall?" Kelly asked.

  The mess hall, which was the rec room, was anything but romantic. And the food Sergeant Tuttle served them was hardly the stuff of a lover's supper. Sergeant Tuttle was camp cook. He had not been a cook in civilian life, but a sanitation worker in Philadelphia.

  "Not the mess hall," Beanie said. "I've bought some groceries from Tuttle, and I'm going to cook the supper myself. We'll eat down under that stand of pines along the riverbank." Beame looked at Kelly, but Kelly was strangely unable to catch the lieutenant's eyes. It was as if Beame were looking through him at some vaguely perceived paradise.

  "Are you in love?" Kelly asked.

  Beame's grin became sloppy. "I guess maybe I am."

  "That's foolish," Kelly warned him. "Love is a form of hope, and hope is a terminal disease. You get in love with someone, you become careless. Your mind wanders. Next thing you know, you collect a two-hundred-pound bomb down the back of your shirt. Love is deadly. Just fuck her and forget the love part."

  "Whatever you say," Beame said. Unmistakably, though, the lieutenant had not heard a word the major said.

  Kelly was about to press the point, in hopes of saving Beame before it was too late, when Lieutenant Slade arrived with his form. "You get one of these?" he asked Kelly, shoving a yellow paper into the major's hand. He gave one to Beame, who did not even glance at it.

  "What's this?" Kelly asked, giving Slade a suspicious look.

  "It's a questionnaire," Slade said. He had an armful of them.

  Kelly read the headline across the top: WHO IS THE TRAITOR?

  "We all know there's a traitor in camp," Slade said. "Someone keeps telling the German air force when the bridge is rebuilt so they can bomb it again right away. Last night, when I called General Blade and after you gave him our supplies order, I asked him to have this questionnaire printed and delivered when the DC-3 came in. He thought it was a good idea." Slade pointed to the list of questions and blanks where the answers were to go. "Just fill these in. You don't have to sign your name or anything. There's a response box nailed to the wall outside the rec room, and it's unmonitored. When you have this ready, deposit it in the box."

  Kelly looked at the paper. The first question was: "Right off, are you the traitor, and would you like to confess if we guarantee you a light punishment?"

  "See how it works?" Slade asked. "Even if we don't obtain a confession, I will be able to analyze these forms and find out who our informer is." He smiled, immensely pleased with himself. "Statistical analysis. That's all it is, Major."

  Kelly opened his mouth to tell Slade that he was an idiot, then thought better of it. He read the second question from the sheet: "Have you noticed anyone in the unit behaving strangely lately?"

  "That one ought to get a response," Slade said, nodding his head emphatically. He belonged in an asylum.

  With this credit contract business, Major Kelly could not afford to make any new enemies or antagonize old ones. Therefore, he told Slade that the questionnaire was a marvelous idea. "Here, now you take one of my forms," he said, giving The Snot his credit contract.

  Slade looked at it with as much suspicion as Kelly had shown while studying the questionnaire. "What is this?"

  "A credit contract," Kelly said. Using the stature of his rank, the weight of his command, the force of his personality, and the mesmeric quality of his gaze, he tried to make Lieutenant Slade sign the paper and pass over the fifty dollars in scrip.

  "I won't sign this paper," Slade said, when Kelly was done. "And I am not going to give you or Maurice fifty dollars in scrip." He did not seem to be particularly angry. Indeed, he was grinning at the major. "This is craziness, you know. Opting for this cowardly plan in the first place-then asking your men to hock their reputations to pay for it. This is more than I ever hoped for. You have gone way too far this time."

  "Minute by minute, the eventual arrival of the Panzers becomes more of a reality, a nearer threat," Major Kelly said. He was beginning the argument which, in his own mind, was the most forceful one in favor of hocking their reputations and anything else on which Maurice wanted to take a lien. "If we tried to fight off a force as large as this Germany convoy-"

  "Are you ordering me to sign this?" Slade interrupted, rattling the credit contract in Kelly's face.

  The major considered it for a moment. He had successfully pulled that stunt with Coombs. However, though they were much alike on the surface, Coombs and Slade were utterly different underneath. What worked on one might only bring a stiffer resistance from the other. "I can't order you to do anything like that," Kelly said.

  "Damn right," Slade said. He dropped his credit contract, turned away from them, and hurried over to the men by the rec room door.

  "You're in for trouble now," Beame said.

  Kelly watched as Slade conferred with the men standing in the shadows. He was gesturing with one hand, clutching his questionnaires against his chest with the other. He kept pointing at Kelly.

  "Sowing dissension," Beame said.

  Most of the men laughed at Slade and walked away from him. But a few, a sizable minority, remained and listened. They might have thought that Slade was an ass, but they nonetheless shared his philosophy. The seed of rebellion was dormant in them, but susceptible to water and gentle cultivation.

  "He's telling them not to sign your paper," Beame said.

  "They have to sign."

  "I thought you couldn't make it an order?"

  "I can't," Kelly admitted. "But if too many of them refuse and we can't get up the money that Maurice wants, the whole deal will fall through. The people from Eisenhower won't help us. We won't be able to build the town by ourselves. We won't be able to hide from the Germans. We'll all die." . In the next hour, fifteen men refused to sign credit contracts.

  * * *

  4

  In the flickering campfire light under the copse of pines by the river, Nathalie was even more beautiful than she had been the first time Beame saw her. Her black hair, like that of an Egyptian princess, blended with the night. Her face was a mixture of sensuous shadows and warm brown tones where the firelight caught it. Images of flame flashed in her eyes. She smiled enigmatically as a sphinx as they sat side-by-side on the ground and watched their dinner cook.

  She was near enough to touch, but he did not touch her. Sitting with her legs drawn up beneath her, leaning against the trunk of a pine, wearing a simple sleeveless white dress that was cinched at the waist by a red ribbon, she looked too fragile to survive the lightest embrace.

  Beame leaned forward and looked into the pan suspended above the fire. "Done," he said. "I hope it's good." He put a thick slice of dark bread in the center of each mess tin, ladled the main course over the bread. Steam rose from it.

  "What is this called?" Nathalie asked.

  He handed her a mess tin. "Shit on a shingle," he said, without thinking.

  "Pardon
nez-moi?"

  "I mean... that's what it's called in the mess hall," Beame said. "Uh... out here it's creamed dried beef."

  "Ah," she said, cutting into the soggy bread with her fork. She tasted one morsel. "Mmmmm."

  "You like it?"

  "It is very good."

  He looked at his own serving, tasted it, found it was good. "That's funny. I must have had this a thousand times, and I always hated it."

  After they were finished, they had red wine, which was her contribution to the evening.

  "I've never had wine from a tin cup," Beame said.

  "It would taste the same from crystal."

  "I guess it would." He wanted to kiss her, but he knew that was improper this early in their friendship. Besides, if he kissed her he would probably faint and miss the rest of what promised to be a fine evening.

  They watched the fire slowly dying, and they sipped wine. As the fire darkened, Beame's head lightened. He was able to forget the bridge, the Nazis, everything. In the weeks the unit had been here, this was the only time he had felt at ease. "More wine?" he asked, when he came to the bottom of his cup.

  She swallowed the last of hers. "Yes, please."

  When they settled back again, cups replenished, he was conscious of the silence, of his inability to engage her in trivial conversation. "You may have noticed my-"

  "Mauvaise honte?" Her voice was husky and pleasant.

  "What's that?"

  "Bashfulness," she said. "But I like it."

  "You do?"

  She nodded, looked away from him. She sipped her wine; it glistened like a candy glaze on her lips.

  A few minutes later, he said, "Say something in French. Just anything. I like the sound of it."

  She thought a moment, one long finger held to the corner of her mouth as if she were hushing him. "Je ne connais pas la dame avec qui vous avez parlé."

  The words flowed over Beame, mellowing him. "What does that mean?"

  "It means-I do not know the lady with whom you spoke," she said.

  French was a fantastic language, Beame thought. That was such an ordinary sentence in English but so poetic in her tongue.