Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

started south out of the village, happier with himself than he’d been in a while. He’d find somewhere to lie up during the day, and then he’d go on….
    Someone behind him coughed.
    He whirled, knowing it would do no good. The food fell in the snow. The jug of kimchi didn’t even break, not that it mattered. Three Koreans or Chinese, widely separated, had the drop on him. He was history, nothing else but.
    Understanding he was history, he didn’t make a useless grab for his PPSh. He crossed himself instead, and gabbled out a quick
“Ave Maria, gratia plena—”
If you were done in this world, might as well worry about the next.
    The Koreans stood as if carved from stone. Then they crossed themselves, too. One of them came out with his own Hail Mary. His Latin sounded odd to Cade, but Cicero wouldn’t have followed either one of them. The Koreans ran up and clasped his hands. Little bits of Latin were the only language they had in common with him. They managed to tell him Kim Il-sung persecuted Christians of all creeds even worse than Stalin did. Any Christian they found was a friend of theirs.
    Dizzily—but not too dizzily to pick up the victuals he’d dropped—he followed them out of the smashed village and off toward wherever they lived. Till that moment, he’d been fighting a rearguard action against death, slowing it down, holding it off. Now he began to think he really might live after all. Like an orchid pushing up through snow, hope flowered past despair.

GRUNTING AS HE SHIFTED the weight, Aaron Finch got the washing machine moving on the dolly. “Plenty of room,” Jim Summers said between puffs on a Camel. He’d earned the chance to play sidewalk superintendent—he’d just loaded the matching dryer into the back of the Blue Front truck.
    “Okay,” Aaron said. He grunted again when the washer started up the ramp. He wasn’t a big man—five-nine, maybe a hundred fifty pounds. But he had the kind of whipcord strength that came from working with your hands and your back your whole life long. He’d be fifty on his next birthday. He couldn’t believe it. His hair was still black, even if it had drawn back at the temples to give him a widow’s peak. But his craggy face had the lines and wrinkles you’d expect from anyone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun and the open air. At least he wasn’t shivering now, though he wore no jacket over his Blue Front shirt. It was in the mid-seventies in the middle of January. You couldn’t beat Southern California for weather, no way, nohow.
    The dolly with the washer bumped once more when it bounced down off the wooden ramp and into the bed of the truck. Aaron paused a moment to settle his glasses more firmly on his formidable nose. Without them, he couldn’t see more than a foot past its tip.
    To his disgust, that had kept him out of the Army. He’d tried to volunteer right after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t take him. He was too nearsighted and too old (he’d turned forty less than a week before the attack). So he’d joined the merchant marine instead. He’d been on the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific. He’d done more dangerous things than a lot of soldiers, but he wasn’t eligible for any of the postwar benefits. That disgusted him, too.
    He wrestled the washer into place by the dryer. It was one of the new, enclosed models. He and his wife still had a wringer machine. One of these days…He’d been married three years now. He’d got into middle age as a firm believer in why-buy-a-cow-when-milk-is-cheap. But after the war he’d come down to Glendale to stay with his brother, Marvin, for a while. He’d met Ruth there and fallen, hook, line, and sinker. They’d run off to Vegas to tie the knot. And now they rented a house in Glendale themselves. Leon was eighteen months old, and looked just like his old man.
    “You gone to sleep in there?” Jim called.
    “Keep your shirt on,” Aaron answered without heat.