Small-arms fire rattled only a few hundred yards away, some M-Is and Springfields, some from the automatic rifles the Lizards carried. Before Mutt could say a word, everybody in the latest hand grabbed his money from the pot, stuffed it into a pocket, and reached for his weapon. Someone blew out the lantern. Someone else pushed the barn door open. One by one, the men emerged.
“You want to be careful,” Mutt said quietly. “The Lizards have those damn night sights, let ’em see like cats in the dark.”
Dracula Szabo laughed, also softly. “That’s why I got me this here Browning Automatic Rifle, Sarge. Put out enough lead and some of it’ll hit somebody.” He wasn’t much older than Donlan, young enough to be gut-sure no bullet could possibly find him. Mutt knew better. France had convinced him he wasn’t immortal, and several months fighting the Lizards drove the lesson home again.
“Spread out, spread out,” Daniels called in an urgent whisper. To his ear, the men sounded like a herd of drunken rhinos. Several were new recruits; by virtue of having lived through several encounters with the Lizards, Mutt was reckoned suitable for showing others how to do likewise.
“How many Lizards you think there are, Sarge?” Kevin Donlan asked. Donlan wasn’t eager any more; he’d been through enough of the tough defensive fighting outside Chicago to be sure his number could come up. The question came in a tone of intelligent professional concern.
Daniels cocked his head, listened to the firing. “Damfino,” he said at last. “Not a whole bunch, but I wouldn’t peg it tighter’n that. Those rifles o’ theirs shoot so fast, just a couple can sound like a platoon.”
Off to one side lay the concrete ribbon of US 51. A couple of soldiers charged straight down it. Daniels yelled at them, but they kept going. He wondered why they didn’t paint big red-and-white bull’s-eyes on their chests, too. He dodged from bush to upended tractor to hedgerow, making himself as tough a target as he could.
That wasn’t the only reason he fell behind most of the squad. He had fifty-odd years and a pot belly under his belt, though he was in better shape now than he had been before the Lizards came. Even in his long-gone playing days, he’d been a catcher, so he’d never moved what anybody would call fast.
He was panting and his heart thudded in his chest by the time he half jumped, half fell into a shell hole at the edge of the American firing line. Somebody not far away was screaming for a medic and for his mother; his voice was ebbing fast.
Cautiously, Mutt raised his head and peered into the night to see if he could pick up muzzle flashes from the Lizards’ rifles. Over there, a yellow-white flicker… He raised his Springfield to his shoulder, squeezed off a round, worked the bolt, fired again. Then he threw himself flat again.
Sure enough, bullets cracked by, just above the hole where he hid. If he could pick up the Lizards’ muzzle flashes, they could find his as well. And if he fired again from here, he was willing to bet some turret-eyed little scaly sharpshooter would punch his ticket for him. The Lizards weren’t human, but they were pretty fair soldiers.
He scrambled out of the hole and crawled across cold ground over to something made of bricks-a well, he realized when he got behind it. Szabo was making a hell of a racket with that BAR; if he wasn’t hitting the Lizards, he was sure making them keep their heads down. Even more warily than before, Daniels looked south again.
He saw a flash, fired at it. In the night, it was the next closest thing to shooting blind. No more flickers of light came from that spot, but he never found out whether it was because he’d scored a hit or the Lizard moved to a new firing spot, as he’d done himself.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the firing faded. The Americans slowly moved forward to discover the Lizards had pulled out. “Just a recon patrol,” said another sergeant who, like Mutt, was trying to round up his squad and not having much luck.
“Don’t rightly recall the Lizards doin’ a whole lot o’ that, not at night and not on foot,” Daniels said with a thoughtful frown. “Ain’t been their style.”
“Maybe they’re learning,” the other noncom answered. “You don’t really know what the other fellow’s doing till you sneak around and see it with your own eyes.”
“Yeah, sure, but the Lizards, they mostly fight one way,” Mutt said. “Don’t know as how I like ’em learnin’ how to do their job better. That’ll mean they got more chance of shootin’ my personal, private ass off.”
The other sergeant laughed. “Somethin’ to that, pal. I don’t know what we can do about it, though, short of giving their patrols enough lumps to make ’em try something else instead.”
“Yeah,” Mutt said again. He blew air out through his lips to make a whuffling noise. This hadn’t been too bad-just a little skirmish. As far as he could tell, he didn’t have anybody dead or even hurt. But if the Lizards were skirmishing outside of Clinton, it was liable to be a good long while yet before he saw Decatur.
III
Clip-clop, clip-clop. Colonel Leslie Groves hated slowness, hated delay, with the restless passion of an engineer who’d spent a busy lifetime fighting inefficiency wherever it reared its head. And here he was, coming into Oswego, New York, in a horse-drawn wagon because the cargo he had in his charge was too important to risk putting it on an airplane and having the Lizards shoot it down. Clip-cop, Clip-clop.
Rationally, he knew this slow, safe trip didn’t stall anything. The Met Lab team, traveling by the same archaic means he was using himself, wasn’t close to Denver yet and couldn’t work with the uranium or whatever it was that the British had fetched over to the United States from eastern Europe.
Clip-clop, clip-cop. Riding alongside the wagon was a squadron of horse cavalry, an antique arm Groves had long wished would vanish from the Army forever. The horsemen were useless against the Lizards, as they had been for years against any Earthly mechanized force. But they did a first-class job of overawing the brigands, bandits, and robbers who infested the roads in these chaotic times.
“Captain, will we reach the Coast Guard station by sunset?” Groves called to the commander of the cavalry unit.
Captain Rance Auerbach glanced westward, gauged the sun through curdled clouds. “Yes, sir, I believe so. Only a couple more miles to the Jake shore.” His Texas drawl drew looks here in upstate New York. Groves thought he should be wearing Confederate gray and maybe a plume in his hat, too; he was too flamboyant for olive drab. That he called his horse Jeb Stuart did nothing to weaken that freewheeling image.
The wagon rolled past a wooden ballpark with a sign that read, OTIS FIELD, HOME OF THE OSWEGO NETHERLANDS, CANADIAN-AMERICAN LEAGUE. “Netherlands,” Groves said with a snort. “Hell of a name for a baseball team.”
Captain Auerbach pointed to a billboard across the street. In faded, tattered letters it proclaimed the virtues of the Netherland Ice Cream and Milk Company. “Bet you anything you care to stake they ran the team, sir,” he said.
“No thank you, Captain,” Groves said. “I won’t touch that one.”
Otis Field didn’t look as if it had seen much use lately. Planks were missing from the outer fence; they’d no doubt helped Oswegians stay warm during the long, miserable winter. The gaps showed the rickety grandstand and the dugouts where in happier-and warmer-times the opposing teams had sheltered. Stands and dugout roofs also had the missing-tooth effect from vanished lumber. If the Netherlands ever returned to life, they’d need somewhere new to play.
From long experience, Groves reckoned Oswego a town, of twenty or twenty-five thousand. The few people out on the streets looked poor and cold and hungry. Most people looked that way these days. The town didn’t seem to have suffered directly in the war, though the Lizards were in Buffalo and on the outskirts of Rochester. Groves guessed Oswego wasn’t big enough for them to have bothered pulverizing it. He hoped they’d pay for the omission.