Free Days of Infamy by Harry Turtledove Page A

could see better. With the olive-drab canvas cover over the back of the truck, he might as well have been inside a Spam can for all the visibility he had. Then a fragment of bomb casing ripped through the canvas about six inches above his head. He decided he didn’t want a view all that badly.
    The driver let out a frightened howl: “Fighters! Jap fighters!”
    They were coming in low, plenty low enough for Fletch to hear their motors over the noise the trucks were making. He heard their machine guns and cannon going off, too. And, half a heartbeat later, he heard the driver scream.
    He had other things to worry about, though. Machine-gun bullets finished the job of shredding the canvas. They did a pretty good job of shreddingmen, too, and metal as well. Four or five soldiers in the rear compartment started screaming and shouting and cursing, all at the same time. Something hot and wet splashed Fletch’s ear and the side of his face. The iron stink of blood filled the compartment.
    More screams followed when the truck ran into the one in front of it. Next to getting strafed by a Zero, though, a collision was a small thing. The diesel engine didn’t go up in flames the way a gasoline-powered motor would have. Even so, Fletch said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
    Nobody argued with him. In fact, soldiers scrambled over him to escape. Some of them were wounded, others just panicked. By the time he got out, blood splashed the front of his uniform, even if he wasn’t hurt himself.
    Japanese planes still buzzed overhead. Here came a fighter, low, flames winking on and off as its machine guns shot up the U.S. column. “Get down!” people were shouting. “Hit the dirt!”
    Fletch was damned if he would, even after a bullet slammed into a man less than ten feet away with a noise like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon. The luckless soldier clutched at himself and crumpled. Fletch yanked the .45 from his belt and banged away at the Jap. He had about as much chance of hitting the speeding fighter as he did of taking wing himself, but he gave it his best shot.
    Infantrymen started firing at the enemy, too. That actually gave him a little hope. Put enough lead in the air and it was liable to do some good. Meanwhile, though, the handful of enemy planes were cutting the column to ribbons. Bombers pounded it from on high, while the fighters swooped low to strafe again and again. At every pass, men died and vehicles caught fire.
    Somebody not far away moaned, “Where the hell are our airplanes?”
    â€œYou stupid asshole!” Fletch pointed south, toward the funeral pyre of Wheeler Field. “Where the fuck do you think they are? This has got to be the worst sucker punch in the history of the world.”
    A bomb screamed down, louder and louder. With artillery fire, it meant the shells were headed right for you when the sound behaved like that. Armitage didn’t know if bombs worked the same way, but he didn’t want to find out by experiment, either. Now he did throw himself flat, a split second before the bomb burst.
    Blast picked him up and slammed him down again like a professional wrestler. It tried to tear his lungs out through his mouth and nose. Dazed, hetasted blood. Concussion could kill without leaving visible injury. As he staggered upright again, he realized that had almost happened to him.
    Closer to the crater the bomb had dug, men hadn’t been so lucky. Some of what he saw might have come straight from a butcher’s shop. Butcher’s meat, though, didn’t scrabble frantically, trying to put itself back together. Butcher’s meat didn’t scream for its mother, either.
    Fletch bent over and was noisily sick. Then he yelled, “Corpsmen! We need some corpsmen over here!” That shout was rising everywhere.
    He bent again, this time by an injured man. With clumsy fingers, he put on a wound bandage to slow the soldier’s