The Lost Bradbury by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online

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