The Lost Bradbury (6 page)

Choir’s infantry moved up at long last for their first engagement. Their first look at the way the enemy ran, fell down, got up or stayed down for a longer interval, flew, shot, yelled or just plain vanished in a cumulus of dust.

A certain laughing tenseness went through the members of his unit. Johnny felt it and couldn’t figure it out. But he pretended to be tense, too, once in a while. It was fun. He didn’t smoke the cigarettes offered him.

“They make me choke,” he explained.

Now the orders were given. American units, coming down onto Tunisian plain, would drive toward Gafsa. Johnny Choir was going with them in his role as buck private.

Instructions were barked out, maps were supplied to company commanders, tank groups, anti-tank half-tracks, artillery, infantry.

The air arm swung, shining hard, overhead. Johnny thought they looked mighty pretty.

Things started exploding. The hot plainland was running over with a lethal tide of snipers’ shots, machine-gun fire, artillery blasts. And Johnny Choir ran along behind a screen of advancing tanks with Eddie Smith about ten yards ahead of him.

“Keep your head down, Johnny. Don’t stand so straight!”

“I’ll be all right,” Johnny panted. “You get on. I’m fine.”

“Just keep that big head of yours low, that’s all!”

They ran. Johnny sucked breath out and in. It felt like a fire-eater must feel when he takes a mouth of flame. The African air was burning like alcohol gas fumes. It seared your throat and your lungs.

They ran. Stumbling over lakes of pebbles and up sudden hillocks. They hadn’t caught up with the contact fighting in full yet. Men were running everywhere, khaki ants scuttling over hot burned grass. Running everywhere. Johnny saw a couple of them fall down and stay down.

“Oh, they don’t know how,” was his comment to himself.

The stones, skittering underfoot, were just like that scatter of bright pebbles in the old dry creek at Fox River, Illinois. That sky was the Illinois sky, burned blue-back and shimmering. He thrust his wet body forward with big leaps. Green, high, broad, strangely verdant in the midst of this swelter, a hill came into his vision. Any minute now the “kids” would come yelling down the side of that hill….

Gun fire broke out from that hill like the rash of some flaming disease. Artillery cut loose, from behind the hill. Shells curved down in an arced wail. Where they struck they lifted the earth and gave it the bumps, the bumps, the bumps! Johnny laughed.

The thrill of it got inside Johnny Choir. His feet pounding, his ear-drums pressured by the gonging of his blood in his head, his long arms swinging easy, holding his automatic rifle—

A shell came down out of the hot sky, buried its nose thirty feet from Johnny Choir and blew outward with fire, rock, shrapnel, force.

Johnny leaped wide.

“Missed me! Missed me!”

He jumped forward, one foot pounding right after the other.

“Keep your head down, Johnny! Drop, Johnny!” Smith yelled.

Another shell. Another explosion. More shrapnel.

Only twenty-five feet away this time. Johnny felt the mighty force, wind, thrust and power of it. He shouted, “Missed again! I fooled ya! Missed again!” and ran on.

Thirty seconds later he realized he was alone. The other men had flopped on their faces to dig in, because the tanks that had protected them had to swerve and go around the hill. It was too steep for climbing with a tank. And without tank protection the men dug in. The shells were singing all around.

* * * *

Johnny Choir was alone and he liked it. By Gosh, he’d capture that whole darned hill himself. If the others wanted to tag behind, then he’d have all the fun himself.

Two hundred yards ahead of him a machine-gun was nested and chattering. Noise and fire came out like the stream from a powerful garden hose. It whipped and sprayed. Ricochets filled the warm, shivering air of the slope.

Choir ran. He ran, laughing. Opening his big mouth, showing his teeth, he jerked to a stop, aimed, fired, laughed, and ran on again.

Machine-guns talked. A bullet line knitted the earth together in an idiot’s crochet all around Johnny.

He danced and zigzagged and ran and danced and zigzagged again. Every few seconds he’d yell, “You missed me!” or “I ducked that one!” and then he’d pound like some special kind of new tank up the slope, swinging his gun.

He stopped. He aimed. He fired.

“Bang! I gotcha!” he cried.

A German fell down in the gun nest.

He ran again. Bullets swept down in a solid, withering wall. Johnny slipped through it, like an actor slipping through grey curtains, quiet, easy, calm.

“Missed me! Missed me, missed me! I ducked, I ducked!”

He was so far ahead of the others now that he could barely see them. Stumbling further, he fired three shots. “Gotcha! And you, and you! All three of you!”

Three Germans fell. Johnny cried out delightedly. Sweat glossed his cheeks, his blue eyes were bright, hot as the sky.

Bullets cascaded. Bullets flowed, slithered, ripped the stones over, around, about, under, behind him. He danced. He zigzagged. He laughed.

He ducked.

The first German gun nest was silent. Johnny started for the second one. Way off somewhere he heard a hoarse voice shouting, “Come back, Johnny, you damn fool! Come back!” Eddie Smith’s voice.

But there was so much noise he couldn’t be sure.

He saw the expression on the faces of the four Germans who operated the machine-gun farther up the hill. Their faces were pale under their desert tan, drawn tight and wild, their mouths open, their eyes wide.

They pointed their gun straight at him and cut loose.

“Missed me!”

An artillery shell from over the hill whistled down and landed thirty feet away.

Johnny catapulted himself. “Close! But not close enough!”

Two of the Germans broke, ran from the nest, yelling crazy words. The other two clung to the gun, white faced, pouring lead at Johnny.

Johnny shot them.

He let the other two go. He didn’t want to shoot them in the back. He sat down and rested in the machine-gun nest and waited for the rest of his unit to catch up to him.

He watched the Americans pop up like jack-in-the-boxes all along the base of the hill and come running.

* * * *

In about three minutes Eddie Smith came stumbling into the nest. His face was full of the same look that the Germans had had on their faces. He yelled at Johnny. He grabbed him and pawed him and looked him over.

“Johnny!” he cried. “Johnny, you’re all right, you’re not hit!”

Johnny thought that was a funny thing to say. “Heck no,” replied, Johnny, “I told you I’d be all right.”

Smith’s jaw dropped. “But I saw artillery shells drop near you, and that machine-gun fire—”

Johnny scowled. “Hey, Private Smith, look at your hand.”

Ed’s hand was red. Shrapnel, lodged in the wrist, had drawn a quick flow of blood.

“You should have ducked, Private Smith. Darn, I keep telling you, but you never believe me.”

Eddie Smith gave him one of those looks. “You can’t duck bullets, Johnny.”

Johnny laughed. It was the sound of a kid laughing. The sound of a kid who knows very well the routine of war, and how it comes and goes. Johnny laughed.

“They didn’t argue with me, Private Smith,” he said, quietly. “None of them argued. That was funny. All the other kids used to argue about it.”

“What other kids, Johnny?”

“Oh, you know. The other kids. At the creek, back home. We’d always argue as to who was shot and as to who was dead. But just now, when I said Bang, you’re dead, these guys played the game right along. Not one of them argued. They didn’t any of them say, “Bang, I got you first.
You’re
dead!” No. They let me be the winner all the time. In the old days they used to argue so much—”

“Did they?”

“Sure.”

“What was it, now, that you said to them, Johnny. Did you actually say, ‘BANG, you’re dead’?”

“Sure.”

“And they didn’t argue?”

“No. Isn’t that swell of them. Next time I think it’s only fair I play dead.”

“No,” snapped Smith. He swallowed and wiped sweat off his face. “No, don’t do that, Johnny. You—you just go on like you been going.” He swallowed again. “Now, about this business of your ducking those bullets, about them missing you….”

“Sure they did. Sure I did.”

* * * *

Smith’s hands trembled.

Johnny Choir looked at him. “What’s wrong, Private?”

“Nothing. Just—excitement. And I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“Just wondering how old you are, Johnny.”

“Me. I’m ten, going on eleven.” Johnny stopped and flushed guiltily. “No. What’s wrong with me? I’m eighteen, going on nineteen.”

Johnny looked at the bodies of the German soldiers.

“Tell them to get up now, Private Smith.”

“Huh?”

“Tell them to get up. They can get up now if they want to.”

“Yeah, well—you see, Johnny. That is. Uh. Look, Johnny, they’ll get up after we leave. Yeah, that’s it. After we leave. It’s against the—rules—for them to get up now. They want to rest awhile. Yeah—rest.”

“Oh.”

“See here, Johnny. I wanna tell you something right now!”

“What?”

Smith licked his lips and moved his feet and swallowed and cursed softly. “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. Damn. Except that I’m envious of you. I—I wish I hadn’t grown up so hard and so fast. See, Johnny,
you’re
going to come out of this war. Don’t ask me how, I just feel you are. That’s the way the Book reads. Maybe
I
won’t come out. Maybe I’m not a kid. And not being a kid maybe I won’t have the protection that God gives a kid just because he is a kid. Maybe I grew up believing in the wrong things—believing in reality and things like death and bullets. Maybe I’m nuts for imagining things about you. Sure I am. Just my imagination for thinking that you’re—aw. Whatever happens, Johnny remember this, I’m going to stick by you.”

“Sure you are. That’s the only way I’ll play,” said Johnny.

“And if anybody so much as tries to tell you you can’t duck bullets, you know what I’m going to do?”

“What?”

“I’m going to kick them square in the teeth!”

Eddie got, jerking nervous, a funny smile on his lips.

“Now, come on, Johnny, let’s move and move fast. There’s another-game—playing over this hill.”

Johnny got excited. “Is there?”

“Yeah,” said Smith. “Come on.”

They went over the hill together. Johnny Choir dancing and zigzagging and laughing, and Eddie Smith following close behind, watching him with a white face and wide, envious eyes….

 
LAZARUS COME FORTH

This was published in
Planet Stories
in the winter issue of 1944 and has not been previously included in any story collection.

* * * *

Logan’s way of laughing was bad. “There’s a new body up in the airlock, Brandon. Climb the rungs and have a look.”

Logan’s eyes had a green shine to them, eager and intent. They were ugly, obscene.

Brandon swore under his breath. This room of the Morgue Ship was crowded with their two personalities. Besides that, there were scores of cold shelves of bodies freezing quietly, and the insistent vibration of the coroner tables, machinery spinning under them. And Logan was like a little machine that never stopped talking.

“Leave me alone.” Brandon rose up, tall and thinned by the years, looking as old as a pocked meteor. “Just keep quiet.”

Logan sucked his cigarette. “Scared to go upstairs? Scared it might be your son we just picked up?”

Brandon reached Logan in about one stride, and while the Morgue Ship slipped on through space, he clenched the coroner’s blue uniform with the small bones inside it and hung it up against the wall, pressing inward until Logan couldn’t breathe. Logan blew air, his eyes looked helpless. He tried to speak and could only grunt like a stuck pig. He waved his short arms, flapping.

Brandon kept him there, crucified on a fist.

“I told you. Let me search for my own son’s body in my own way. I don’t need your tongue.”

Logan’s eyes were losing their shine, were getting blind and glazed. Brandon stepped back, releasing the little assistant. Logan bumped softly against metal flooring, his mouth hungry for air, his nostrils flaring for breath. Brandon watched the little face of Logan over the crouched, gasping body, with red color and anger shooting up into it with every passing second.

“Coward!” he threw it out of himself, Logan did. “Got yellow—neon-tubing—for your spine. Coward. Never went to war. Never did anything for Earth against Mars.”