“He spilled it. It belongs to him.”
She took a deep breath. “There’s gonna be hell to pay.”
“Can’t help it. It worked out that way.” He was trying to remember the exact positions the grenadiers had been in.
They came to where the two machinegun pits covered the trail into the valley, and one of the men there heard them walking. “Who’s that?”
“Me. Jody.”
The man chuckled. “Hey, Jody! You bringin’ me my supper?” The other man laughed out of the darkness.
“Not right now, Sam,” Jody answered. “I got somebody with me.”
There was more laughter in the shadows among the rocks, and then they were past. They made their way down the mountainside, walking as quietly as they could on the loose rock, and then Custis heard a man’s shoes scrape as he settled himself more comfortably in his position.
“We’re there,” Jody whispered.
“Okay.” Custis oriented himself. After a minute, he was pretty sure where he was in relation to the car, and where everyone else would be.
“What now, Joe?”
“You walk on down. Let ’em hear you. Talk to ’em.”
“You sure, Joe?”
“Yeah. It’ll be okay.”
“You’re not gonna leave me?”
“I told you I’d take you, didn’t I?”
“All right, Joe.” Her fingers trailed over his forearm. “Be seeing you.”
“Give me twenty minutes,” he said, and slipped off among the rocks.
He moved as noiselessly as he knew how, the knife ready in his hand. Once he stumbled over a man. “Scuse me, Buddy,” he mumbled.
“Okay, pal,” he man answered. “Take one for me.”
Farther down the mountains, he heard somebody say loudly: “Hey, it’s Jody! C’mere, Jody, gal.” He could feel the ripple of attention run through the men among the rocks. Equipment rattled as men leaned forward, sick of this duty and glad of something to watch, and maybe join in on.
Now he was behind one of the grenade teams. He inched forward, found them, and after a minute he was moving on.
The men where Jody was were laughing and tossing remarks back and forth. He heard her giggle.
He found the next team craning forward to look down into a cup behind some rocks where a small fire had been built on the side away from the car. When he was through, he looked over the edge and saw Jody standing in the middle of a bunch of men. Her head was thrown back, and she was laughing.
When he’d left the third emplacement, and was working toward the fourth, he heard the sound of a slap. A man yelled: “Hey, girl, don’t you treat me like that!” The rest of the men were laughing harshly.
The fourth team was easy to handle.
Working on the fifth, he missed the last man. It was a tricky business, getting the first with one sure swing and then going for the other before he could yell. This time the man rolled sideways, and there was nothing for Custis to do but kick at his head. He hit the man, but didn’t even knock him out. The man slid off the rock, yelling, and Custis scrambled as fast as he could to throw the box of grenades one way, the rifle another, and jumped for the car.
“Lew! Open up! I’m coming in!” he bellowed as the night broke apart.
Rifle fire yammered toward him as he ran, ricochets screaming off the rocks. The car’s motors began to wind up. It was still as dark as the bottom of a bucket, and then Hutchinson fired the car’s flare gun. The world turned green.
Custis slammed into the starboard track cover, threw himself on top of it, and clawed his way over the turtledeck. He rapped his knuckles quickly on the turret hatch, and Robb flung it back. Custis teetered on the edge of the coaming. The car’s machineguns opened up, hammering at the rocks. Custis heard a man screaming: “Where’s the damned grenades?”
Then he heard the girl shouting: “Joe.”
He stopped. He looked back toward the sound of her voice. “Oh, Christ!” he muttered. Then he sighed. “What the hell.” and shouted down into the turret: “Cover me!”
He jumped down off the battlewagon, his boots resounding on the foreplates before he hit the ground. He pitched forward, smashing into the gravel, then threw himself erect and ran toward the spot.
Rifle fire chucked into the ground around him. He weaved and jumped from side to side, floundering over the rocks. Hutchinson fired the next flare in the rack, and now the world was red, laced by the bright glow of the car’s tracers as the machineguns searched back and forth in their demiturrets. He heard the tracks slide and bite on the gravel, and the whole car groaned as the bogeys lurched it forward.
The girl was running toward him, and there were men back in the rocks who were sighting deliberately now, taking good aim.
“Joe!”
“All right, damn you!” He scooped her up and flung her toward the car ahead of him, feeling a crack of fire lace across his back. And then the car was practically on top of them. Lew had his driver’s hatch open, and Custis pushed the girl through. Then he was clambering up the side of the turret and into the command seat. “All right,” he panted into the command microphone. “Let’s go home.”
The hatch dropped shut on top of him. He fell into the car, landing very hard on his side. Lew locked a track and spun them around. The inside of the car sounded like a wash boiler being pelted with stones.
Robb looked at him, patting the breeches of his .75s. “Open fire, Joe?”
“No! No—leave the poor bastards alone.”
He looked over toward the girl. “Hey, Jody,” he grinned.
The halfback lumbered down the last slope, spraying stones out from under its tracks as it took a bite of the prairie grass. Custis jammed his hands against the sides of the hatch and scowled out at the plains ahead, where Chicago lay beyond the edge of the green horizon. He didn’t turn his head back. He was through with the mountains.
He was going to Chicago. He thought about the jagged holes in State Street’s asphalt. He shivered a little.
