Bombs Away

Bombs Away Read Free Page B

Book: Bombs Away Read Free
Author: Harry Turtledove
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idea of fun.
    She got everything into the house. Linda didn’t feel the urge to play explorer—maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she’d done the things she had to do.
    A cup of Lipton’s would be nice now,
she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn’t worry—so much—about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.
    Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of
Tootle
and said, “Read to me.”
    Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he’d stop and read when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who’d do the same thing. Marian wasn’t quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good—not least because she didn’t want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.
    “Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”
    “Okay!” Linda said.
    —
    The Ivans were giving the
Wehrmacht
hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn’t save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them—and glanced off the monster’s cleverly sloped armor.
    Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the
Katyushas
rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there’d be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.
    Screams…
    Gustav Hozzel’s eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.
    Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again,
Liebchen,
” his wife said sadly.
    “I…I guess I did.” Gustav’s voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I’m sorry,” he managed.
    “Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.
    “It’s always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He’d never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her—and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn’t come as often as it used to. I haven’t had it for a couple of months now.”
    Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That’s good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”
    “Please God,” Gustav agreed. He’d fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he’d fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army’d grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin’s prison camps—unless they’d decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.
    Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman’s badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn’t taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn’t as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn’t have their own little collections of medals.
    “Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa

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