Fallout

by Harry Turtledove

  But when the knock on Luisa’s door came, a few minutes after those tanks clattered by, she didn’t panic. She just went to the door and opened it. Two Soviet officers stood out there. She still didn’t panic. She didn’t know what their blue Waffenfarb meant. Had it been a German arm-of-service color, she would have, but the Ivans used a different system. She didn’t know blue meant MGB.

  “You are Frau Luisa Hozzel?” one of them asked in palatal German.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Luisa admitted it. Why not?

  “Your husband is Gustav Hozzel?” the Russian persisted.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Why?” Fear seized her—was he going to tell her Gustav was dead?

  He didn’t. He asked, “Where is Gustav Hozzel now, please?”

  “I don’t know,” Luisa said truthfully. “I haven’t seen him since the war started.” A Russian bomb or bullet might have killed him right outside of Fulda half an hour after he left the flat then. But if none had, he probably had a rifle in his hands right now. He’d left intending to fight the Reds again, in the German auxiliary force that rapidly turned into a German army.

  Luisa didn’t say that. She still owned a working sense of caution. She thought the Russians were asking questions about her husband, though, not about her.

  They talked to each other in their own language for a moment. Luisa didn’t know any Russian, though Gustav had. They both drew their pistols at the same instant and pointed them at her. The one who spoke German said, “You are under arrest. Come with us. Immediately!”

  “What?” she blurted. She understood him, all right. She just didn’t, or didn’t want to, believe him. “I haven’t done anything!” That was true, too.

  True or not, it did her no good. The Russian slapped her in the face. “Immediately, I said!” he snapped. “Come now, or you will be even sorrier later on.”

  Numbly, she preceded him and his silent chum down the stairs. The slap didn’t hurt her so much as it left her stunned. Whatever Gustav did in the war, he’d never laid a hand on her like that. No one had, not so callously, as if she were nothing but an animal that needed a smack to get it going. She was going, all right, straight into a nightmare.

  A captured American jeep sat waiting, half on the street, half on the sidewalk. No German would have parked it in such a disorderly way. The Russians had painted red stars on it in place of the white ones the Amis used. The two officers waved for her to get into the passenger seat. The one who’d been quiet slid behind the wheel. The other fellow, pistol still ready, took the back seat.

  As they jounced away, he said, “The charge is counterrevolutionary activity.”

  “That’s insane!” Luisa said. “All I’ve done is stayed here and tried to keep out of trouble.”

  “We have reason to believe your husband is fighting against the progressive vanguard of the workers and peasants,” he said implacably. “This also shows your own political unreliability.”

  “But I haven’t done anything!” Luisa said again. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “You will go into the authority of the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,” the Russian officer replied. In German, it sounded impressive and bureaucratic, even pompous. The Russian acronym was gulag. He didn’t mention it to Luisa, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to her if he had.

  Whether she knew now what it meant or not, she’d find out.

  The jeep bounced along. All those tank tracks had torn up Fulda’s streets, and no one had bothered fixing potholes. The Russians didn’t care what happened to German towns.

  They didn’t bother with jail. They took her straight to the train station. As things turned out, they had what amounted to a jail there, in what had been a storeroom. A bored-looking soldier with a machine pistol guarded the door. But for him, you could walk past it without having any idea it was there.

  Half a dozen other dejected women stood in there or sat on the floor, that being the only place to sit. A slops bucket in the corner made do for a toilet. Luisa vowed to hold everything as long as she could. She didn’t want to have to use it.

  She wasn’t altogether astonished to discover she knew one of the other women the Russians had grabbed. Trudl Bachman’s husband ran the print shop where Gustav had worked. Like Gustav, Max was an old Frontschwein who’d fought the Red Army as long as he could before.

  “I bet they went off together to play soldiers again,” Trudl said bitterly.

  “I bet you’re right,” Luisa said. Max had vanished from Fulda at about the same time as Gustav.

  “And then they left us behind to catch the devil for whatever they’re up to.” Yes, if Trudl had got her hands on her husband just then, she would have made him sorrier than the Ivans ever could. Or so she imagined, anyhow.

  Luisa had a better grip on things. “They aren’t just playing at soldiers, remember. For them, it’s real, especially if…if things go wrong.”

  Before Trudl could answer, the door opened again. The Russian sentry gestured with his weapon. Come out. Warily, the women did. He and a couple of other soldiers herded them to a waiting train. The windows on the cars had bars and shutters on them. The Red Army men stuffed Luisa and her fellow victims into a car that was already full of of miserable women. The door slammed behind them with a horribly final sound. A bar thudded down to make sure they couldn’t force it.

  A few minutes later, the train pulled out of the station. All Luisa knew was that it was heading east.

  —

  Gustav Hozzel lit a Lucky from a K-ration pack. The cigarette and the rations were both American. So were the pot-shaped helmet on his head and the olive-drab uniform he wore.

  The rest of the Germans spooning food out of tins and smoking looked like Yanks, too. The USA had plenty of weapons and equipment for all its own men and for anybody who fought alongside them. When you saw just how much the Americans had, and how they took it all for granted, you couldn’t very well not be daunted.

  Some of his own countrymen—most of them retreads, a few kids who’d been too young to fight in 1945—carried Springfields. The U.S. rifle worked so much like the Mauser; the biggest difference was the caliber of the ammo they fired. Some had what the Amis called grease guns. The American machine pistol fired .45 cartridges. If you got in the way of one, it would do for you, all right. Others, Gustav among them, used PPDs or PPShs, as many Soldaten had last time. There was nothing wrong with the Ivans’ submachine guns. They might be ugly, but they sure worked.

  After blowing a smoke ring, Gustav said, “I want to get my hands on one of those Red assault rifles—that’s what I want. You can spray like a machine pistol with ’em, but they’ve got almost as much range as a rifle.” He pointed toward somebody’s Springfield.

  Max Bachman paused halfway down a tin of ham and eggs. He liked that one better than Gustav did. “I wouldn’t mind getting one, either, but keeping it in cartridges would be a bitch.” The new Russian weapon fired a round halfway between those for ordinary rifles and submachine guns.

  “It’s nothing but a goddamn copy of the Sturmgewehr we rolled out in ’44,” Rolf said. Gustav had fought beside him for weeks, but still didn’t know his last name. He did know Rolf had served in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, one of the crack SS panzer divisions. Rolf still had the headlong bravery—and the taste for blood—that had marked the Waffen-SS.

  Gustav remembered the Sturmgewehr, too. He’d craved one, but he hadn’t got one. The Germans never had enough of them. More and more Russians were using their version, though.

  “Whatever it is, it uses funny cartridges. That’s the drawback,” Gustav said. He didn’t feel like arguing with Rolf right now. He was too goddamn tired. He hadn’t been pulled out of the line since he started fighting. He’d gone west with it.

  Now he was in the town of Wesel, a few kilometers north of Duisburg and only a few kilometers east of the Dutch border. If the Russians forced the Americans, English, and French—and the Germans like him who fou
ght on their side—out of West Germany, they won a big chunk of the war.

  Not far enough away, artillery thundered. Gustav cocked his head to one side, gauging the guns. They were Russian, all right: 105s and 155s. Since the shells weren’t screaming in on his buddies and him, he relaxed again. He fished another Lucky out of the five-pack that came with the rations and lit it. Some other sorry bastards would catch hell from those Russian presents, but he wouldn’t.

  He wouldn’t this time.

  American guns answered the Ivans. As long as the gunners murdered one another, that was fine by Gustav. He only hated them when they came after the guys who couldn’t shoot back at them.

  Sometimes, in fast-moving battles, foot soldiers overran the other side’s artillery. Somehow, the assholes who served the guns hardly ever got taken prisoner. They wound up dead instead, stretched out beside the weapons that had dished out so much murder. Artillery was the big killer. Everybody knew it.

  The Russians sure did. They used cannons as if they feared somebody would outlaw them tomorrow morning. Man for man, the Germans had always been better than their Red Army foes. But the Russians not only had more men, they had way more guns, sometimes ten or fifteen times as many as the Wehrmacht on the same stretch of front. When that hammer dropped, it dropped hard.

  And they were fighting the ground war the same way this time. Their panzers were bigger and nastier than they had been during the last round. More of their guns were self-propelled. That just let them have an easier time putting all their firepower right where they wanted it.

  But they didn’t have everything their own way. American jet fighters screamed by, no more than a couple of hundred meters above the ground. They had rockets under their swept-back wings. They looked like Me-262s, but the Amis used far more of them than the Luftwaffe ever had. For that matter, so did the Russians.

  Max Bachman dug his right index finger deep into his ear. “Between the guns and the jets, I’ll be deaf as a post by this time next week,” he said.

  “What?” Gustav asked, deadpan.

  Bachman started to answer him, then stopped and gave him a dirty look instead. “Funny, Gustav. Funny like a truss.”

  Gustav blew him a kiss. “I love you, too.”

  Then a heavy machine gun coughed into angry life. It was a Russian gun; the rhythm and the reports differed from those of the American equivalent. Almost before he knew how it had got there, Gustav’s PPSh was in his hands, not at his feet. The others had grabbed their weapons just as quickly.

  “Back in business at the same old stand!” Rolf sang out. He sounded positively gay about it. Gustav was plenty good at what he did in the field, but he didn’t take that kind of delight in it.

  Something went whoosh-crash! That was an American bazooka, not a Russian rocket-propelled grenade. The bazooka had inspired the German Panzerschreck; the German Panzerfaust seemed to be the model for the Red Army’s RPG. Both kinds of weapons could wreck a tank with a square hit. Both were also good for flattening anything else that needed knocking down.

  This one knocked down a shop a block from where the Germans had been eating and smoking and were taking cover. Somebody inside the shop started screaming and wouldn’t shut up. Gustav couldn’t tell whether the wounded man was an Ivan or a German civilian who’d been too stupid to refugee out of Wesel before it turned into a battleground. One nationality’s mortal anguish sounded pretty much like another’s.

  Ten meters away from Gustav, Max grimaced behind a beat-up stone wall. “I wish he’d be quiet,” Bachman said, and then, after a little while, “I wish somebody’d make him be quiet.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gustav said with feeling. “You keep listening to that, you start thinking about making those noises yourself. It’s the goddamn goose walking over your grave—with jackboots on.”

  “You got that right,” Max said. “Why don’t the Russians finish him off, the sorry son of a bitch? That kind of horrible racket has to drive them around the bend, same as it does with us.”

  Both Germans bitched about the suffering man in the smashed shop. Neither broke cover to go over to finish him off. The Russians wouldn’t be sure that was what they were doing. It would look as if they were trying to advance and take control of the shop’s ruins. The Ivans would shoot them before they got there.

  And the Red Army men couldn’t have had a clear path that way, either. They had to figure Germans or Americans would plug them if they put the wounded fellow to sleep. After all, one bazooka round had already hit that building. Another could follow.

  So the screaming man in there went right on screaming for the next two hours. As far as Gustav could tell, he fell silent of his own accord, not because anyone killed him. Even after he did, though, the noises he made echoed and reechoed inside the German’s head. That could be me, they said. That could be me.

  —

  A Red Army man with a sergeant’s shoulder boards said something in Russian to Istvan Szolovits. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, pal,” the Hungarian Jew replied in Magyar.

  That was as much gibberish to the Ivan as Russian was to Szolovits. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” the noncom snarled.

  Istvan did understand that particular unendearment. Not letting on that he did, though, seemed the better part of valor. The Russian looked very ready to use the PPSh clamped in his hairy paws. Since it had a seventy-one-round snail drum attached, if he started shooting he wouldn’t stop till he’d puréed whatever had pissed him off.

  Taking a calculated risk, Istvan asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” If a Hungarian and a Russian had any language in common, German was the top candidate. Of course, if the sergeant did speak German, he was liable to order Istvan to do something that would get him killed. That was where the risk came in.

  But the Russian just looked disgusted. “Nyet!” he answered proudly, and spat at Szolovits’ feet. Istvan stood there with his best stupid expression plastered across his face. The Russian spun on his heel and stomped off. Every line of his body radiated rage.

  “He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?” Sergeant Gergely said from behind Istvan. Istvan jumped. He hadn’t heard his own superior coming up. Gergely could be cat-quiet when he chose.

  “Sure is, Sergeant,” Szolovits said.

  Gergely’s chuckle had a nasty edge to it. It often did. Coming from that ferret face, the wonder was that sometimes it didn’t. “You’re thinking the asshole was just like me,” he said, daring Istvan to deny it.

  Deny it Istvan did: “No, Sergeant, honest to God, I wasn’t thinking that at all. That Russian, he was only a bruiser.”

  “And I’m not…only a bruiser?” Gergely could be most dangerous when he seemed smoothest—which went a long way toward proving he wasn’t only a bruiser.

  “You know damn well you’re not,” Szolovits blurted.

  For a split second, Sergeant Gergely preened. He had his share of vanity: maybe more than his share. But he came by it almost honestly. He’d worn a Stahlhelm and fought in Admiral Horthy’s Honved when Hungary joined Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Not only that, he’d survived the horrible Russian siege and conquest of Budapest near the end of the war.

  And he was still a soldier, now for the Hungarian People’s Army. A Soviet-style helmet covered his dome. Instead of the old Honved’s tobacco-brown khaki cut almost in Austro-Hungarian style, his uniform, like Istvan’s, looked Russian except for being made from greener cloth. No mere bruiser could have performed that handspring of allegiances so acrobatically. He might be ugly and nasty, but his brains worked fine.

  He carried a PPSh like the Russian’s, though he fed his with thirty-five-round boxes rather than snail drum—he said he could change and charge them faster. He gestured with the muzzle. “C’mon, kid. Let’s see what’s going on up there. What we don’t know can kill us.”

  “So can what we do know,” Istvan said in hollow tones, but he followed Gergely through the ruins of Raesfeld. The village lay east of Wesel, in the middle of th
e forest called the Dämmerwald. The forest had also been pretty comprehensively ruined; eye-stinging woodsmoke hung in the air, partly masking the wartime stink of death.

  He knew he wouldn’t move with such smoothness and silence as the sergeant showed if he stayed in the Hungarian People’s Army for the next fifty years. He was tall and loosely put together—shambling, if you wanted to get right down to it. With light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a nose-shaped nose, he didn’t look especially Jewish. Only his mouth really gave him away.

  Out in the forest, an American rifle cracked. Whether an American or a German fired it, Istvan didn’t know. The Red Army and its fraternal socialist allies seined the areas they occupied with a coarse net. Little fish could slip through the mesh and make trouble later on.

  Most of the soldiers in Raesfeld were Russians. They either ignored the Hungarians or sneered at them, depending on whether they took them for countrymen or recognized that they belonged to a satellite army. There was that sergeant who’d growled at Istvan. He’d liberated a bottle of wine from somewhere and was guzzling it down. Of course, he’d be more used to vodka. If that was what you drank most of the time, you could pour down a lot of wine before you felt it.

  That American rifle barked again. A Russian major not ten meters from Istvan threw his hands in the air and let out a high-pitched, bubbling screech as he fell over. Blood puddled on the paving under him. A Red Army private ran up to drag him to safety, and the sniper shot him, too. He went down without a sound and lay motionless. Istvan had seen enough horror to be sure he wouldn’t get up again.

  A machine gun started hosing down the edge of the Dämmerwald. Maybe it would punch the rifleman’s ticket for him, maybe not. The bastard had already earned his day’s pay any which way.

  And, as soon as the machine gun quieted, a defiant rifle round spanged off brickwork too close to Istvan for comfort. A furious Soviet officer ordered men into the forest to hunt the sniper down.

  “Those fuckers are like cockroaches,” Sergeant Gergely said. “You can never step on all of them, no matter how hard you try.” An A-bomb would do it, Istvan thought. How could you have people hiding in the woods if you eliminated both woods and people?