Bombs Away: The Hot War (Hot War, The) by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780553390704
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

“LUNCHTIME, MOMMY!” Linda said.

Marian Staley wondered how her daughter knew. Tummy Standard Time, she supposed. She didn’t have a watch. The Studebaker’s clock had quit a couple of months after she and Bill bought the car. She’d never seen an auto clock that wasn’t a piece of junk.

Linda didn’t know how to tell time anyway. That didn’t mean Tummy Standard Time wasn’t pretty good. Here and there, people were heading for the refugee camp’s mess hall. Maybe that helped give Linda a hint, too.

“Well, we can go,” Marian said. She rolled up the windows and made sure the Studebaker’s doors were locked. She didn’t have much in there, but she wanted to keep the little she did have. Someone could still break one of the windows and help himself, but that would—or at least might—make someone else notice and raise a ruckus. It hadn’t happened yet, for which Marian was duly grateful.

It wasn’t raining right this minute, but it was muddy. The stuff pulled at Marian’s shoes. She hadn’t known a day since they came here when it wasn’t muddy. She wished she could go somewhere, anywhere, else. Right at the moment, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.

Three sets of stretcher-bearers carried bodies from the hospital tent toward the graveyard. One bunch came from the National Guard. The others were refugees working for their keep or because they were bored out of their skulls. The atom bomb’s poison kept on working even six weeks after the damn thing went off. Marian touched her face. She’d healed well enough, and so had Linda.

More and more people bombed out of their homes converged on the big tent that housed the mess hall, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Here and there, somebody would nod to her. If it was somebody she knew, like Fayvl Tabakman or one of his friends, she would nod back. If it was some man trying his luck with a woman he’d never seen before because he liked the way she looked, she pretended not to see him. She had enough troubles as things were. She needed more like she needed a hole in the head.

When she realized what she’d thought, she smiled. That sounded like something Fayvl would say—as a matter of fact, it was something he did say. The cobbler with the number on his arm had rubbed off on her in ways she hadn’t even noticed.

Tummy Standard Time must have run a little fast. The line curled around the mess-hall tent, which hadn’t opened yet. “Phooey!” Linda said. She enjoyed waiting no more than any other four-year-old.

“Phooey is right,” Marian agreed. “Phooey and pfui!” The two terms of annoyance sounded just about the same. She meant something different by each one, though. Her phooey carried the same message as Linda’s. She didn’t like waiting in line, either. That was one of the reasons she loved the camp so much.

Her pfui, now…Another reason she couldn’t stand the place was that the people stuck here didn’t bathe as often as they should.

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