by Joe Haldeman
Except for the flashlight.
Someone screamed and ran away. The changeling was at first impeded by the loose dirt, but then it sprang out, and in three long steps caught up with the fleeing intruder and pushed him lightly to the ground.
He was a Filipino child, cowering in terror, still clutching a canvas bag. Six or seven years old.
The changeling sorted through the few Japanese phrases it had accumulated, and decided none was appropriate. It used English: “Don’t be afraid. I was just resting. We do it that way. It’s cool in the dirt.”
The boy probably didn’t understand a word, but the tone of the changeling’s voice calmed him. It helped him to his feet and handed him flashlight and bag, and made a shooing motion. “Now go! Get out of here!” The boy ran wildly away.
Perhaps it should have killed him. With a finger punch it could have simulated a bullet wound to the head. But what could he really do? He would run home and tell his parents, and they would interpret the event in terms of what they knew of reality, and be glad the boy had survived waking up a Japanese soldier. He would tell the other children, and they might believe him, but other adults would dismiss it as imagination.
(In fact, the changeling was wrong. The boy’s parents did believe he had awakened a dead man, and told him to be quiet about it except to God, and pray thankfulness for the rest of his life, that God had chosen to spare him.)
The changeling widened its irises temporarily, so the starlit desolation was as bright as day, and started moving quietly but swiftly north. It took only a half hour to catch up with a group that had been allowed a few hours of rest. It had passed four Americans lying dead in the road.
It saw only one guard awake, leaning against the fender of a truck. It went behind the truck and forced itself to produce urine, and then casually walked forward, adjusting its clothes. “Hai,” it whispered to the guard, ready to kill him instantly if his reaction was wrong. He just grunted and spit.
It walked among the Americans, planning. The masquerade as a Japanese probably wouldn’t pass muster during the day, among Japanese. So it would be best to change back into an American before dawn.
By starlight it examined every sleeping face. None of them was familiar, either from the Marine detachment or from the Mariveles camp. So it could become Jimmy again, and not have to fake a new history.
The people at the end of the group would be the ones nearest death, and probably least likely to be keeping track of who was around them. In fact, it found two that were dead, and quietly lay down between them in the pitch darkness.
It made as little noise as possible, changing the bones of its face back into Jimmy’s starveling countenance. The uniform was trivially easy, and only made a normal rustling sound. It stretched the Japanese skeleton as much as was practical, with an occasional popped-knuckle noise, and got to within three inches of Jimmy’s height.
What it wound up with was an even more famished version of Jimmy, which was fine. The weaker-looking, the better.
With the first light of dawn, the Japanese guards were working through their ranks, shouting and kicking. A sudden blue flash and rifle shot got them moving faster.
They left five behind, dead or so close as to make no difference. The sun sped up over the horizon, and in less than an hour, the morning cool had dissipated.
It had rained torrentially two days before, and although the road was dry and dusty, there were sometimes mud puddles at the edges of the fields. People would fall out of ranks to go to them with their canteens, but the guards would chase them off.
Finally there was a huge puddle, a wallow where two water buffalo were cooling off. The water was green and odoriferous, but there was lots of it, and a guard who was a private made an ironic gesture inviting them over.
A man next to the changeling put his hand on its shoulder. “Wait,” he croaked. “That’s the asshole got us fucked with yesterday.”
Dozens of men staggered to the wallow and pushed the scum aside to drink and fill canteens or cups. Some splashed water over their heads and chests, cooling off like the buffalo, which would prove a mistake.
An officer with a saber came running down the line screaming at the ones in the water. They hustled back to rejoin the ranks.
The officer huddled the guards and then watched smiling while they moved through the crowd and pulled out everyone with damp clothing.
They lined them up along the side of the road. The officer said one word and in a ragged volley they shot them all.
In the ringing silence after the shots, the man next to the changeling said, “Shitty water woulda killed ’em anyhow.”
The changeling nodded and, with the others, began shuffling away from the execution scene. It was having difficulty trying to generalize about human nature.
Would Americans have done that, with the roles reversed? It seemed inconsistent with what it had observed, except occasionally at the insane asylum, where there were patients unable to see others as human beings.
After the war, it would have to look into this. That wouldn’t be very hard, since apparently the Japanese were going to win, and everyone would have to learn their language, and be assimilated into their culture.
Unless they slaughtered all the Americans like animals, as it had just witnessed. Well, it could become a Japanese who’d lost the power of speech. That had worked before.
They finally got to Balanga, the first town on their route of march. Filipinos lined the road, staring at the Americans, and began throwing food to them—sticks of sugar cane, rice balls, sugar cakes—until suddenly the Japanese started shooting.
The civilians scattered, running for cover. Two young men took off across a field, which apparently caught someone’s attention. Three of the guards, clustered together, started firing at them, laughing. They kept missing them, either on purpose or from poor marksmanship, but they finally fell.
The three went out to inspect their handiwork, and evidently the two boys were still alive. They kicked them around and yelled at them, and finally shot them several times point-blank.
Most of the men watched this tableau in shocked silence. Someone behind the changeling growled “fucking Jap bastards,” and someone else shushed him.
The changeling tried to interpret what was happening in terms of animal and human behavior, and the little it knew about Japanese culture. If they were trying to scare the Americans with a show of brutality, it wasn’t working well; the ones susceptible to that were already nearly paralyzed with terror. Most of the prisoners by now assumed they were going to die, and were just concentrating on not being next. Each fresh horror seemed to increase the men’s contempt for the Japanese “animals” (as if nonhuman animals ever behaved in such elaborate ways), and also increased their dissatisfaction with their own command, who had surrendered them. Though their defense of Bataan would have been unimpressive, without food, water, gasoline, or ammunition.
The Japanese behavior revealed vicious contempt, as if the individual Americans had decided to throw down their arms rather than fight. That was an understandable simplification, for young men so unsophisticated they evidently still thought, after all these days, that the Americans would understand Japanese if they spoke it loudly enough.
The gulf between the two sides was so large it was as if they were two different species. The changeling wished it had had an opportunity to observe other cultures than American without the complication of war. It resolved to do that when the war was over.
The Japanese marched them into the middle of town, into a dark hot warehouse building. It was already crowded with prisoners, but the guards pushed them in tighter and tighter, until it was literally impossible to sit or lie down; the men were packed like sardines in a can.
They smelled worse than sardines, though, with no toilet other than their own clothing. The guards evidently couldn’t stand it after a half hour. They padlocked the door and stood guard outside, while their charges steeped in their own excrement. Many
or most of them had some degree of dysentery, and had lost control of their bowel function. Urine baked on skin and the rags of uniforms, and if someone fainted from the stench, or died, he remained standing, just another sardine.
The changeling was near the padlocked door, and knew it could break it down with little effort. That would probably earn a few people a minute of fresh air before they were shot. If the men had been in a position to vote, they probably would have said “go for it.”
But it was content to wait and watch, the miasma no more or less pleasant than the sea breeze outside. People stopped talking and concentrated on living another minute, hour, day.
In the morning, the Japanese opened the door and the prisoners staggered or crawled out into the sudden light, leaving twenty-five dead behind. They were beaten into line and fed a small rice ball and a little tepid tea before getting back on the road, which was already shimmering with heat.
Even with its superhuman metabolism, the changeling had lost five kilograms by the end of the march, on the morning of 15 April, at the San Fernando railway station.
The Japanese kicked and shouted the men awake and herded them into narrow-gauge boxcars, more than a hundred men per car. It was like a reprise of Balanga, packed shoulder to shoulder, with the added factor of the train’s queasy rocking motion. A few people near the doors had actual air to breathe; the others had to make do with a hot stale atmosphere combining shit, piss, and vomit with carbon dioxide and dust.
One hundred and fifteen had been packed into the changeling’s car. When they stumbled out five hours later, they left behind four corpses.
They were made to sit motionless in the hot sun at Capiz Tarlac for three hours, and then were marched across town to their final destination, Camp O’Donnell. There they confronted a nightmare several orders of magnitude larger than the march itself: twelve thousand prisoners were confined to a square of baking concrete one hundred yards on a side.
Most of the thousands of Americans and Filipinos were standing in a slow line waiting for the one water spigot. The old hands told them that it usually took about six hours—sometimes ten or twelve—to get to the spigot and fill your canteen. So after you filled it, you might as well just go back to the end of the line.
They were supposedly going to get food tomorrow. But the Japanese had been saying that for three days.
The changeling got into line, even though if it wanted water it could assimilate it directly from the air, or even break down carbohydrates for it. As the line inched along, the prisoners walking back toward the end would scrutinize faces, trying to identify old comrades through the masks of filth and exhaustion.
The inevitable happened. “Jimmy? My God—Jimmy?”
The changeling looked up. “Hugh.”
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Just barely,” the changeling said. “You, too.”
“No! I mean … I mean … I saw you get your head chopped off! After you pulled the Jap off the truck.”
“Must have been someone who looked like me.”
One of the Japanese guards stepped over and seized Hugh by the shoulder. “Repeat what you just said,” he said in almost perfect English.
Hugh cringed. “Thought he looked like somebody.”
“Repeat!” The soldier shook him. “The truck!”
“He—he looked like someone who pulled a guard off a truck. But he’s someone else.”
The guard shoved Hugh away and clamped on to the changeling’s shoulder and stared. “I buried you. I saw your face in the hole, looking up.”
The changeling thought back and realized that he indeed was one of the guards on that detail. “Then how am I alive now?”
The man continued staring, the blood draining out of his face. Then he jerked the changeling out of the line and shoved him through the crowd toward a line of white buildings.
“Sit!” He pushed the channeling down on a step and shouted something in Japanese. Two young soldiers in clean uniforms scurried over to point their rifles at the changeling’s head. It considered doing something to make them shoot, and simplify the situation by apparently dying. But it was curious.
The guard returned with another familiar face: the officer who had performed the execution.
He studied the changeling and laughed. “Do you have a twin?”
“They say everyone does, somewhere.”
He stepped forward and fingered what was left of the insignia on Jimmy’s uniform. “Not in the same Marine detachment, I think.”
He said something in Japanese and the two soldiers prodded the changeling to its feet. “We’ll see about you,” the officer said. “What is your name?”
“Private First Class William Harrison, sir,” it said, and made up a random serial number. The officer wrote it down painstakingly and barked an order at the privates. “Tomorrow,” he added. By tomorrow, the changeling decided, it would be someone and somewhere else.
The privates pushed their prisoner through the door and down a dark corridor. A Filipino jailer, closely observed by a Japanese officer, unlocked a door of heavy iron bars. The changeling quickly memorized both of their faces. A basic plan would be to break out physically and kill one or both of them, and walk out as the officer’s doppelganger.
The Filipino took the changeling to the last of six cells and locked the old cast-iron barred door. The changeling widened its irises in the darkness and memorized the shape of the key.
As the guard walked away, a hoarse voice in the adjacent cell asked, “What they get you for?”
“They haven’t said. You?”
“Stole a can of sardines. Say they’re going to let me starve.”
“We’re starving outside anyhow,” the changeling said. “At least this is out of the sun.”
The key rattled in the door and the Filipino let the Japanese officer in. He had a riding crop, and whipped the changeling’s face and shoulders. “You quiet!” The changeling heard him do the same next door.
The cell had a board for a bed and a bucket for a toilet. The bucket was foul and buzzing with flies; maggots quietly rustled inside. There was a small open window about six inches square, up near the ceiling. Only a little light came through. It faced north and was evidently in the shadow of an eave.
The man who was sobbing next door was the only other prisoner who was conscious. The changeling could hear one near the jailer’s station whose breath was so shallow and ragged he must be near death.
It could easily make itself slender enough to slip between the bars. It was also strong enough to bend the bars and widen that space, but that would make noise, and leave behind evidence of a prisoner who was not human. There was already too much curiosity about “William Harrison.” Best to find a way to simply vanish. That could be explained away as bribery or carelessness.
There was a drain in the floor that would probably lead to a river. But it was only an inch in diameter. To form a shape that could slip through that would take hours; to keep enough mass to re-form into human shape would require a worm about a hundred feet long, and while it was turning into that grotesque creature, it would be conspicuous and vulnerable.
That gave it an idea, though. It heard the Japanese guard leave, and within an hour the Filipino was snoring.
It removed its right leg, with a sound like someone softly cracking his knuckles, then tearing clothes quietly. That drew no attention. The leg re-formed itself into a defensive creature that looked like a pile of rags but had teeth and claws like a saber- toothed tiger’s.
The changeling began to re-form, not into a worm, but into a snake about the size and shape of a young reticulated python. It had a square cross-section slightly smaller than the high small window.
That took about an hour of vulnerability. It was the work of a minute, then, to merge with the saber-toothed section, which was also six inches in thickness.
It had hundreds of gecko-like legs, so scrabbling up the wall was easy. It extended an eye through the openin
g and saw no one, though there were bright lights to the east. To the west there was a drainage ditch.
It slithered through the opening and down the wall, changing its color to match the dusty pink of the building. It stretched out along the length of the wall, as it had seen snakes do, and peered around the corner.
So far so good. To its right was the large square where the prisoners sleepily stepped along the undulating line to the water tap. There were plenty of guards, but they were standing or sitting with their backs to the drainage ditch.
Decisions. It would take too long to change back into a human form, and besides, the snake would probably be more efficient once in the water, assuming the ditch wasn’t dry. If it were intercepted on the way … that would be awkward. It was a cross between a boa constrictor and a chainsaw, so there would be no question about the outcome of an encounter between it and one or several humans. But it would have more than ten thousand witnesses.
It looked around and thought. Electricity.
The power line that served the jail building went on to the prisoners’ square. Seeing no potential witnesses, it slid up the wall and took one huge bite. Delicious taste of copper, dusty glass, and high voltage, and everything near went dark.
There were shouts and firing into the air, and then flashlight beams lancing, but all of the attention was directed inward, toward the prisoners. The changeling dropped to the ground and scurried on a thousand lizard legs to the ditch. Slid in and found a few inches of sewage, and slithered south.
It remembered from ordnance maps at the Bataan base that Manila Bay was about forty kilometers south, and there were plenty of rivers through the Panga and Bulacan Provinces. Once in Manila Bay, it was about sixty kilometers around the Bataan Peninsula to the South China Sea.
In the six hours that it took to get to the bay, there was only one witness, to its knowledge: a drunken man on a narrow wooden bridge. He screamed and fled. If anyone came out into the night to check his preposterous story, the changeling would be long gone.
Dawn was still hours away when the final ditch widened into a mud flat and the changeling wormed its way into the bay. It dove down to the bottom and began the process of changing into a fish.