Fallout Read online

  The machine gun banged away to help the hunters advance. As soon as it eased back for a bit, the sniper out there squeezed off a couple of rounds to remind the Russians they hadn’t killed him. A Red Army soldier near the edge of the woods bellowed in pain and let out a horrible stream of profanity. Istvan understood only bits of it, but admired the incandescent flow of the rest.

  “That Yank or Fritz out there will be disappointed,” he remarked as aid men brought the wounded soldier back to Raesfeld. “He didn’t kill that guy—he just put him out of action for a while.”

  “Half the time—more than half—that’s all a sniper wants,” Sergeant Gergely said. “Look. Two guys are taking him back to a hospital tent. A doctor will have to work on him there. He’ll lie on his ass in a bed for a while, and more people’ll need to feed him and wash him and change his bandages. A wounded man makes more trouble than a dead one. If somebody catches a round in the ear and just drops, you plug in a replacement and go on. This way, a whole bunch of people have to waste days dealing with the fucker.”

  “Huh.” Istvan wasn’t a dope, or he didn’t think he was, but he’d never looked at war’s economics from that angle before. The Russian machine gun started up once more, and Ivans with machine pistols wasted ammo on whatever their imaginations fed them. When they stopped, the sniper took another shot at somebody. That made Istvan say, “They ought to drop an A-bomb on the woods. That would settle the son of a bitch, sure as hell.”

  To his surprise, Gergely cuffed him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. “You wanna watch what you say, sonny, to make sure it doesn’t come true.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Say the Russians throw the Americans out of West Germany. Only thing I can see stopping Truman from using A-bombs here is, the West Germans are on his side. But if they’re all in Russian hands, how much does he care any more?”

  “Gak,” Istvan said when he’d worked that through. “You make me want to cross myself, and I don’t even think it does any good.”

  Sergeant Gergely cuffed him again, this time with a chuckle. “Cute, kike—cute,” he said. From his lips, the insult sounded almost affectionate. Szolovits had heard plenty worse from his alleged countrymen, anyhow.

  —

  Marian Staley dreamt about her large, comfortable house in Everett, Washington. She wandered from room to room to room—so many rooms, and all of them hers! The only thing wrong in the dream was that she couldn’t find Bill in any of those rooms. She kept wandering. Her husband couldn’t have gone very far…could he?

  Her eyes opened. The house disappeared, swallowed up by wakefulness rather than the atomic fire that had really wrecked it. She lay curled up on the front seat of her Studebaker, where she’d slept every night since the A-bomb fell. Linda, her five-year-old, lay on the back seat. She was still small enough not to need to curl up to fit. She was also getting over a cold. Her snore would have done credit to somebody three times her age.

  As for Bill, the waking Marian knew she could hunt from room to room forever without finding him. He’d been the copilot in a B-29 that went down over Russia. Marian didn’t know his plane was carrying an A-bomb, but she figured it must have been.

  So here she and Linda were, living in the refugee camp outside of shattered Everett. Camp Nowhere, the inhabitants called it. Nobody used the official name, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. Who would, when Camp Nowhere fit like such a glove?

  There were other camps like this outside of Everett and Seattle. There were more on the outskirts of Portland, and around the San Francisco Bay, and in Los Angeles, and next door to Denver, and in Maine. Marian had no idea how many people they held, not to the nearest hundred thousand. She wondered whether anyone did.

  She supposed there would be refugee camps in Russia, too, and in Red China, and in the European countries one side or the other had bombed. Those places wouldn’t be just like Camp Nowhere, though…or would they? The people in them might speak different languages and live under a different flag, but wouldn’t they be disgusted and bored and irritated, too? They were people, weren’t they? How could they be anything else?

  It was getting light outside. Now that summer was arriving, sunup came early and sundown came late. Daylight here, almost as far north as you could go and stay in the USA, stretched like taffy in spring and summer. Marian liked that…when she had her house with all those rooms, and with curtains and windowshades on the windows. When you were sleeping in a Studebaker, all of a sudden these long days didn’t seem so wonderful any more.

  The outlines of tents of every size and shape made dark silhouettes against the brightening eastern sky. Most people lived in one of those. Most people here had no car. Plenty of autos—the dark-painted ones—on Marian’s block had gone up in flames when the bomb fell. The Studebaker was bright yellow. It survived.

  She wondered if it would start now. She had her doubts. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d turned the key. What was the point? She wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. People with anywhere else to go didn’t wind up in places like Camp Nowhere.

  When her stomach told her it was getting on toward breakfast time, she woke Linda. Her daughter was no more happy about getting up than any other little kid. “You’ve got to do it,” Marian said. “Potty and then food and then kindergarten.”

  “Yuk!” Linda said. Marian didn’t know which of those she was condemning, or whether she meant all of them. Any which way, she sounded very sincere.

  Sincerity, though, cut no ice with Marian. She made herself sound like a drill sergeant: “You heard me, kiddo. Get moving!”

  Every once in a while, Linda would mutiny and need a smack on the behind to get her in gear. Marian didn’t like to do it. No doubt her folks hadn’t liked to spank her, either. But they had when she earned it, and now she did, too. She was glad it didn’t come to that this morning. Linda looked sullen, but she got out of the car with her mother.

  Marian didn’t like the latrine tent any better than Linda did. The seats were just holes in plywood set above metal troughs with running water. Even those were an improvement on the slit trenches that had been here at first. Still no stalls. No privacy, not even when you had your period. And in spite of the running water, it smelled horrible.

  Breakfast wasn’t wonderful, either. The choices were sludgy oatmeal or cornflakes and reconstituted powdered milk. The milk that went with the oatmeal was reconstituted, too. The milk Marian poured into her instant coffee (which reminded her of hot mud) was condensed. To her, it tasted like a tin can; before the bomb fell, she’d used half-and-half or real cream. The sugar, at least, was the McCoy. Linda slathered it on her cornflakes. Marian couldn’t cluck. Without it, they had all the flavor of soggy newspaper.

  Fayvl Tabakman came into the refectory tent a few minutes after Marian and Linda sat down. The cobbler gravely touched a forefinger to the front of his old-style tweed cap. Marian nodded back. He was a familiar face; she’d gone to his little shop before the bomb hit. And he was a nice man.

  He and his friends—also middle-aged Jews from Eastern Europe—never groused about the food or the latrines or the sleeping arrangements here. Tabakman had a number tattooed on his upper arm. After Auschwitz, Camp Nowhere had to seem like the Ritz by comparison.

  “You are good, Marian?” he asked. Considering that he’d been in the country only a few years, he spoke excellent English.

  “Yes, thanks,” she answered. He’d lost his whole family to the Nazis. Of all the people she knew, he best understood what she was going through now that Bill was dead. “How are you?”

  He shrugged. “Still here.” She nodded; she knew what that meant, all right. But then Tabakman smiled. “How are you, Linda?”

  “These are blucky cornflakes,” she said.

  “Blucky.” He tasted the word—if that was what it was. Then he nodded. “Well, I would not be surprised. Now you will excuse me, I hope.” He lined up to get his own breakfast.
Odds were it would be blucky, too, but not next to what the Master Race had fed him in Poland, when it bothered to feed him at all. From what he’d said, he’d been down to about ninety pounds when the last war ended. He wasn’t big, and he remained weedy, but at ninety pounds he would have been a walking skeleton.

  The Germans, of course, had done their best to kill off the Jews and queers and Gypsies and other undesirables they shipped to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps they set up. The Americans were trying to keep the people in Camp Nowhere and the other refugee camps as comfortable and healthy as they could. Somebody like Fayvl Tabakman, with standards of comparison, had no trouble telling the difference.

  To someone like Marian, who was used to a comfortable, middle-class life, this seemed much too much like a concentration camp.

  It had started to drizzle while they were eating breakfast. Linda made theatrical noises of despair. Marian had lived in Washington long enough to take the rain in stride. She didn’t suppose real concentration camps had kindergartens. This one reminded her that people here were doing their best, not their worst.

  Then four National Guardsmen in fatigues came by carrying a stretcher with a body on it. Definitely a body, not someone hurt—a towel covered the face. She’d seen that a lot in her earliest days here, as people died of radiation sickness and injuries from the bomb. She’d got a dose of radiation sickness herself, as had Linda, but luckily they were both mild cases. This might have been someone who’d lingered till now and then at last given up the ghost.

  More likely, though, it was somebody who couldn’t stand it here and killed himself: the corpse had been a man. Plenty of people got sick to death or bored to death of living like this, and chose to end things on their own terms. Without Linda to worry about, she might have thought of it herself, especially after she learned Bill was dead. If hanging on seemed a living death, it was better than the other kind.

  She supposed.

  SOME THINGS CAME BACK to you as if you never left them behind. When the Red Army dragged Ihor Shevchenko off his collective farm outside of (now radioactive) Kiev, he didn’t need long to get the hang of things again, in spite of the wounded leg that gave him a limp. He’d served the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1945. It was like riding a bicycle. You didn’t forget how.

  Take footcloths. Most countries’ soldiers wore socks under their boots. On the kolkhoz, Ihor had. Red Army men didn’t. They did things the way the Tsars’ troopers had before them—probably the way everybody had, till some smart cookie thought of socks. They wrapped a long strip of cloth around each foot to protect it from blisters.

  Learning how to wrap your feet was an art of sorts. It took practice. A corporal had beaten Ihor black-and-blue when he learned too slowly for the noncom’s taste.

  No corporal would get that kind of chance this time around. A bored sergeant gave Ihor a uniform. Most of the men getting theirs with him were retreads, too. A few were fresh conscripts. They looked shit-scared at what was about to happen to them. And well they might. A lance-corporal with a clipper hacked off everyone’s hair. Then it was time to don the clothes Ihor had been issued.

  His tunic and trousers were too big. Well, that was better than the other universal size, too small. He’d just tighten his belt. His helmet was too small. He traded with somebody who had a smaller noggin and a bigger metal pot.

  He got the footcloths wrapped without even noticing what he was doing. He hadn’t messed with the goddamn things since 1945, but his fingers still knew what to do, the same way they did when he lit a cigarette. Thinking consciously about either one would only make him mess it up.

  “How—how did you do that, uh, Comrade Veteran?” The kid next to him on the bench had no idea how to go about it. He also had no idea whether Ihor would whale the snot out of him for daring to speak at all.

  Some guys who’d been through the mill would have, just as a kind of warming-up exercise. Ihor wasn’t that kind, any more than he found enjoyment from kicking a kitten. “Here. I’ll show you,” he said. And he did, quickly and deftly.

  As quickly, he unwound the footcloth he’d done up. “But—” the kid started.

  “Shut up,” Ihor explained, not without sympathy. “I’m not your mama. You’ve got to be able to do it yourself.”

  After a wounded-puppy look, the youngster tried. It wasn’t a good job; his foot would blister and bleed in short order. So would the other one, which he did no better. Well, that was how you learned. Pain made the best teacher of all.

  Ihor pulled on his boots. They were too small; they’d tear up his tootsies no matter how well he wrapped them. As with his helmet, he swapped with somebody who’d got big ones but had small feet.

  A lieutenant with a hook where his right hand should have been carried a rifle in his left. “Listen up, you pussies!” he yelled. “How many of you know how to shoot and how to keep your piece clean?”

  Most of the men raised a hand. Only the few pimpled kids hung back. Yes, the Red Army was digging deep, for whatever the USSR could give it. Ihor didn’t think that mutilated lieutenant would head for the front with them, but he could serve back here in the Ukraine and give some able-bodied fellow the chance to catch the next bullet.

  “I’ll take you to the armory next,” he said. “Some of you will get a Mosin-Nagant”—he hefted the rifle to show the uninitiated what that meant—“and the rest will use the PPD or the PPSh.”

  Greatly daring, Ihor raised a hand. The lieutenant aimed the hook’s point at him as if it tipped a rapier. He knew what that meant; if the officer didn’t like his question, he’d catch it but good. “Comrade Lieutenant,” he said, “will any of us get Kalashnikov’s new automatic rifle?”

  The hook came down at the same time as the lieutenant shook his head. Ihor wouldn’t land an AK-47, but he wasn’t in trouble, or he didn’t think he was. “Not enough to go around,” the officer said. “Guards units have first call on them, then other top-of-the-line formations. If this regiment gets them, it will have to earn them.”

  How did you earn better weapons? If the last war was any guide, by using the ones you had till most of you were dead. People said that in the early days of the fighting against Hitler, some units went into action ordered to pick up fallen comrades’ rifles and use those.

  Ihor ended up with one of the older PPDs. He didn’t care. They both used the same ammo. They were both sturdy. And, at the close ranges he was likely to find in Western Europe, they were both handier and more dangerous than a rifle would have been.

  The pup who didn’t know how to wrap footcloths got a Mosin-Nagant. He held it as if he’d never touched a firearm before—and he probably hadn’t. He followed Ihor around like a real stray dog looking for a master. Ihor found out that his name was Misha Grinovsky and that he came from Podolsk, a no-account town not far south of Moscow. He didn’t much care about any of that, but it poured out of the kid like vodka from a cracked bottle.

  “Can you show me how to take care of the rifle and shoot it, Comrade, please?” he asked.

  “How come you don’t know? What were you doing before you got conscripted?” Ihor snapped.

  “I was going to start pipefitters’ school,” Misha said.

  “Terrific. Fucking wonderful.” Ihor rolled his eyes. Yes, it was like the early days of the last war all over again. They’d give somebody a uniform and shove him into battle in the hope that he lived. There it was, survival of the fittest…or the luckiest. If you did live through a couple of fights, you started to have some idea of what you needed to do to keep breathing. If you didn’t, well, they’d throw somebody else in after you. Maybe he’d pick things up fast enough to do the rodina some good.

  Trucks took the new regiment to the railroad station. They had Soviet nameplates, not the American ones that had adorned the trucks Ihor rode in during the last war. But they looked and sounded pretty much the same as those.

  By then, the unit had acquired officers and noncoms with a full complement of body parts
. The first lieutenant in charge of Ihor’s company said, “We’re going straight into action, boys. Most of you are veterans and don’t need to waste a lot of time with training. The rest of you will pick it up in a hurry.”

  Had he said The rest of you will get slaughtered in a hurry, he would have come closer to the truth. Ihor knew that. So did the rest of the old sweats. Misha Grinovsky’s eyes said he suspected as much, too. He opened his mouth to ask, then clamped it shut again. Ihor didn’t blame him. Sometimes getting your suspicions confirmed was the last thing you needed.

  Up chugged the train. Misha stared at it in dismay. “Those are all boxcars,” he squeaked. “Where are the ones with windows and compartments, the ones people go in?”

  “They’d cram us into those like you cram herrings into a tin,” Ihor answered. “We’ll likely have more room in a boxcar.”

  Misha didn’t believe it for a minute. “We’re not horses or cows!”

  As if they were, the boxcar into which their section got herded had a thick layer of straw over its bottom planks. The straw smelled of animal manure and piss, too, though the buckets the Red Army had provided for its new human passengers even came with lids. By the standards of these accommodations, that counted for luxury. Ihor already knew it. If Misha Grinovsky didn’t stop one right away, he’d find out for himself.

  Groaning and snorting, the locomotive pulled the train out of the station. Like many of the men it carried, it had seen better years. Yes, they were heading west, toward the fighting. Vodka came out to dull that grim fact. So did cards and dice, to redistribute whatever wealth the soldiers had. Ihor nodded to himself. No, not a goddamn thing had changed.

  —

  Herschel Weissman tapped the order form on the clipboard with a blunt, nicotine-stained forefinger. “The refrigerator and the washing machine go to this address,” he said. “It’s right near Manchester and Vermont.”