Fallout

2

Russian tanks rumbled past Luisa Hozzel’s flat in Fulda. She was close to a window, so she looked out. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen tanks before.

During the days when Hitler ruled the Reich, there’d been military parades through town. Goose-stepping soldiers in Stahlhelms and panzer crewmen in black coveralls and black berets ornamented with the Totenkopf were plenty to set a girl’s heart aflutter.

She’d married one of those soldiers. Gustav had gone off with millions of others to knock the Soviet Union over the head. Unlike so many of those millions, he’d come home again after the Russians-with American and English help-knocked Germany over the head instead. Fulda became part of the American occupation zone, though the border with what the Russians still held didn’t lie far to the east.

She’d seen plenty of American tanks over the next few years. The Amis said they were protecting this part of Germany from the Red Russians. They even seemed to mean it. The Marshall Plan helped western Germany get up off its knees after the war, the same way it helped the rest of shattered Western Europe.

Then this horrible new war started. If Russian tanks were going to make any progress in western Germany, they had to break out through the flat country of what people called the Fulda Gap. The Americans fought hard to hold them back, but couldn’t do it.

So now the red flag with the gold hammer and sickle flew here, not the black, red, and gold of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany and of the old Weimar Republic. The black, red, and white of Hitler and, back in the day, of the Kaiser didn’t mean Germany any more.

Like everybody else, she’d heard stories about the Russians’ rapes and murders when they swarmed into the Reich at the end of the last war. She was one of the lucky ones. She couldn’t judge those stories from personal experience. She’d never seen a Russian in her whole life till this past winter.

The Ivans in Fulda didn’t drag women off the streets or shoot people for the fun of it. That was about as much good as any of the locals could find to say about them.

But when the knock on Luisa’s door came, a few minutes after those tanks clattered by, she didn’t panic. She just went to the door and opened it. Two Soviet officers stood out there. She still didn’t panic. She didn’t know what their blue Waffenfarb meant. Had it been a German arm-of-service color, she would have, but the Ivans used a different system. She didn’t know blue meant MGB.

“You are Frau Luisa Hozzel?” one of them asked in palatal German.

“Yes, that’s right.” Luisa admitted it. Why not?

“Your husband is Gustav Hozzel?” the Russian persisted.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Why?” Fear seized her-was he going to tell her Gustav was dead?

He didn’t. He asked, “Where is Gustav Hozzel now, please?”

“I don’t know,” Luisa said truthfully. “I haven’t seen him since the war started.” A Russian bomb or bullet might have killed him right outside of Fulda half an hour after he left the flat then. But if none had, he probably had a rifle in his hands right now. He’d left intending to fight the Reds again, in the German auxiliary force that rapidly turned into a German army.

Luisa didn’t say that. She still owned a working sense of caution. She thought the Russians were asking questions about her husband, though, not about her.

They talked to each other in their own language for a moment. Luisa didn’t know any Russian, though Gustav had. They both drew their pistols at the same instant and pointed them at her. The one who spoke German said, “You are under arrest. Come with us. Immediately!”

“What?” she blurted. She understood him, all right. She just didn’t, or didn’t want to, believe him. “I haven’t done anything!” That was true, too.

True or not, it did her no good. The Russian slapped her in the face. “Immediately, I said!” he snapped. “Come now, or you will be even sorrier later on.”

Numbly, she preceded him and his silent chum down the stairs. The slap didn’t hurt her so much as it left her stunned. Whatever Gustav did in the war, he’d never laid a hand on her like that. No one had, not so callously, as if she were nothing but an animal that needed a smack to get it going. She was going, all right, straight into a nightmare.

A captured American jeep sat waiting, half on the street, half on the sidewalk. No German would have parked it in such a disorderly way. The Russians had painted red stars on it in place of the white ones the Amis used. The two officers waved for her to get into the passenger seat. The one who’d been quiet slid behind the wheel. The other fellow, pistol still ready, took the back seat.

As they jounced away, he said, “The charge is counterrevolutionary activity.”

“That’s insane!” Luisa said. “All I’ve done is stayed here and tried to keep out of trouble.”

“We have reason to believe your husband is fighting against the progressive vanguard of the workers and peasants,” he said implacably. “This also shows your own political unreliability.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” Luisa said again. “What are you going to do to me?”

“You will go into the authority of the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps,” the Russian officer replied. In German, it sounded impressive and bureaucratic, even pompous. The Russian acronym was gulag. He didn’t mention it to Luisa, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to her if he had.

Whether she knew now what it meant or not, she’d find out.

The jeep bounced along. All those tank tracks had torn up Fulda’s streets, and no one had bothered fixing potholes. The Russians didn’t care what happened to German towns.

They didn’t bother with jail. They took her straight to the train station. As things turned out, they had what amounted to a jail there, in what had been a storeroom. A bored-looking soldier with a machine pistol guarded the door. But for him, you could walk past it without having any idea it was there.

Half a dozen other dejected women stood in there or sat on the floor, that being the only place to sit. A slops bucket in the corner made do for a toilet. Luisa vowed to hold everything as long as she could. She didn’t want to have to use it.

She wasn’t altogether astonished to discover she knew one of the other women the Russians had grabbed. Trudl Bachman’s husband ran the print shop where Gustav had worked. Like Gustav, Max was an old Frontschwein who’d fought the Red Army as long as he could before.

“I bet they went off together to play soldiers again,” Trudl said bitterly.

“I bet you’re right,” Luisa said. Max had vanished from Fulda at about the same time as Gustav.

“And then they left us behind to catch the devil for whatever they’re up to.” Yes, if Trudl had got her hands on her husband just then, she would have made him sorrier than the Ivans ever could. Or so she imagined, anyhow.

Luisa had a better grip on things. “They aren’t just playing at soldiers, remember. For them, it’s real, especially if…if things go wrong.”

Before Trudl could answer, the door opened again. The Russian sentry gestured with his weapon. Come out. Warily, the women did. He and a couple of other soldiers herded them to a waiting train. The windows on the cars had bars and shutters on them. The Red Army men stuffed Luisa and her fellow victims into a car that was already full of of miserable women. The door slammed behind them with a horribly final sound. A bar thudded down to make sure they couldn’t force it.

A few minutes later, the train pulled out of the station. All Luisa knew was that it was heading east.

–

Gustav Hozzel lit a Lucky from a K-ration pack. The cigarette and the rations were both American. So were the pot-shaped helmet on his head and the olive-drab uniform he wore.

The rest of the Germans spooning food out of tins and smoking looked like Yanks, too. The USA had plenty of weapons and equipment for all its own men and for anybody who fought alongside them. When you saw just how much the Americans had, and how they took it all for granted, you couldn’t very well not be daunted.

Some of his own countrymen-most of them retreads, a few kids who’d been too young to fight in 1945-carried Springfields. The U.S. rifle worked so much like the Mauser; the biggest difference was the caliber of the ammo they fired. Some had what the Amis called grease guns. The American machine pistol fired .45 cartridges. If you got in the way of one, it would do for you, all right. Others, Gustav among them, used PPDs or PPShs, as many Soldaten had last time. There was nothing wrong with the Ivans’ submachine guns. They might be ugly, but they sure worked.

After blowing a smoke ring, Gustav said, “I want to get my hands on one of those Red assault rifles-that’s what I want. You can spray like a machine pistol with ’em, but they’ve got almost as much range as a rifle.” He pointed toward somebody’s Springfield.

Max Bachman paused halfway down a tin of ham and eggs. He liked that one better than Gustav did. “I wouldn’t mind getting one, either, but keeping it in cartridges would be a bitch.” The new Russian weapon fired a round halfway between those for ordinary rifles and submachine guns.

“It’s nothing but a goddamn copy of the Sturmgewehr we rolled out in ’44,” Rolf said. Gustav had fought beside him for weeks, but still didn’t know his last name. He did know Rolf had served in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, one of the crack SS panzer divisions. Rolf still had the headlong bravery-and the taste for blood-that had marked the Waffen-SS.

Gustav remembered the Sturmgewehr, too. He’d craved one, but he hadn’t got one. The Germans never had enough of them. More and more Russians were using their version, though.

“Whatever it is, it uses funny cartridges. That’s the drawback,” Gustav said. He didn’t feel like arguing with Rolf right now. He was too goddamn tired. He hadn’t been pulled out of the line since he started fighting. He’d gone west with it.

Now he was in the town of Wesel, a few kilometers north of Duisburg and only a few kilometers east of the Dutch border. If the Russians forced the Americans, English, and French-and the Germans like him who fought on their side-out of West Germany, they won a big chunk of the war.

Not far enough away, artillery thundered. Gustav cocked his head to one side, gauging the guns. They were Russian, all right: 105s and 155s. Since the shells weren’t screaming in on his buddies and him, he relaxed again. He fished another Lucky out of the five-pack that came with the rations and lit it. Some other sorry bastards would catch hell from those Russian presents, but he wouldn’t.

He wouldn’t this time.

American guns answered the Ivans. As long as the gunners murdered one another, that was fine by Gustav. He only hated them when they came after the guys who couldn’t shoot back at them.

Sometimes, in fast-moving battles, foot soldiers overran the other side’s artillery. Somehow, the assholes who served the guns hardly ever got taken prisoner. They wound up dead instead, stretched out beside the weapons that had dished out so much murder. Artillery was the big killer. Everybody knew it.

The Russians sure did. They used cannons as if they feared somebody would outlaw them tomorrow morning. Man for man, the Germans had always been better than their Red Army foes. But the Russians not only had more men, they had way more guns, sometimes ten or fifteen times as many as the Wehrmacht on the same stretch of front. When that hammer dropped, it dropped hard.

And they were fighting the ground war the same way this time. Their panzers were bigger and nastier than they had been during the last round. More of their guns were self-propelled. That just let them have an easier time putting all their firepower right where they wanted it.

But they didn’t have everything their own way. American jet fighters screamed by, no more than a couple of hundred meters above the ground. They had rockets under their swept-back wings. They looked like Me-262s, but the Amis used far more of them than the Luftwaffe ever had. For that matter, so did the Russians.

Max Bachman dug his right index finger deep into his ear. “Between the guns and the jets, I’ll be deaf as a post by this time next week,” he said.

“What?” Gustav asked, deadpan.

Bachman started to answer him, then stopped and gave him a dirty look instead. “Funny, Gustav. Funny like a truss.”

Gustav blew him a kiss. “I love you, too.”

Then a heavy machine gun coughed into angry life. It was a Russian gun; the rhythm and the reports differed from those of the American equivalent. Almost before he knew how it had got there, Gustav’s PPSh was in his hands, not at his feet. The others had grabbed their weapons just as quickly.

“Back in business at the same old stand!” Rolf sang out. He sounded positively gay about it. Gustav was plenty good at what he did in the field, but he didn’t take that kind of delight in it.

Something went whoosh-crash! That was an American bazooka, not a Russian rocket-propelled grenade. The bazooka had inspired the German Panzerschreck; the German Panzerfaust seemed to be the model for the Red Army’s RPG. Both kinds of weapons could wreck a tank with a square hit. Both were also good for flattening anything else that needed knocking down.

This one knocked down a shop a block from where the Germans had been eating and smoking and were taking cover. Somebody inside the shop started screaming and wouldn’t shut up. Gustav couldn’t tell whether the wounded man was an Ivan or a German civilian who’d been too stupid to refugee out of Wesel before it turned into a battleground. One nationality’s mortal anguish sounded pretty much like another’s.

Ten meters away from Gustav, Max grimaced behind a beat-up stone wall. “I wish he’d be quiet,” Bachman said, and then, after a little while, “I wish somebody’d make him be quiet.”

“Tell me about it,” Gustav said with feeling. “You keep listening to that, you start thinking about making those noises yourself. It’s the goddamn goose walking over your grave-with jackboots on.”

“You got that right,” Max said. “Why don’t the Russians finish him off, the sorry son of a bitch? That kind of horrible racket has to drive them around the bend, same as it does with us.”

Both Germans bitched about the suffering man in the smashed shop. Neither broke cover to go over to finish him off. The Russians wouldn’t be sure that was what they were doing. It would look as if they were trying to advance and take control of the shop’s ruins. The Ivans would shoot them before they got there.

And the Red Army men couldn’t have had a clear path that way, either. They had to figure Germans or Americans would plug them if they put the wounded fellow to sleep. After all, one bazooka round had already hit that building. Another could follow.

So the screaming man in there went right on screaming for the next two hours. As far as Gustav could tell, he fell silent of his own accord, not because anyone killed him. Even after he did, though, the noises he made echoed and reechoed inside the German’s head. That could be me, they said. That could be me.

–

A Red Army man with a sergeant’s shoulder boards said something in Russian to Istvan Szolovits. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, pal,” the Hungarian Jew replied in Magyar.

That was as much gibberish to the Ivan as Russian was to Szolovits. “Yob tvoyu mat’!” the noncom snarled.

Istvan did understand that particular unendearment. Not letting on that he did, though, seemed the better part of valor. The Russian looked very ready to use the PPSh clamped in his hairy paws. Since it had a seventy-one-round snail drum attached, if he started shooting he wouldn’t stop till he’d pureed whatever had pissed him off.

Taking a calculated risk, Istvan asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” If a Hungarian and a Russian had any language in common, German was the top candidate. Of course, if the sergeant did speak German, he was liable to order Istvan to do something that would get him killed. That was where the risk came in.

But the Russian just looked disgusted. “Nyet!” he answered proudly, and spat at Szolovits’ feet. Istvan stood there with his best stupid expression plastered across his face. The Russian spun on his heel and stomped off. Every line of his body radiated rage.

“He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he?” Sergeant Gergely said from behind Istvan. Istvan jumped. He hadn’t heard his own superior coming up. Gergely could be cat-quiet when he chose.

“Sure is, Sergeant,” Szolovits said.

Gergely’s chuckle had a nasty edge to it. It often did. Coming from that ferret face, the wonder was that sometimes it didn’t. “You’re thinking the asshole was just like me,” he said, daring Istvan to deny it.

Deny it Istvan did: “No, Sergeant, honest to God, I wasn’t thinking that at all. That Russian, he was only a bruiser.”

“And I’m not…only a bruiser?” Gergely could be most dangerous when he seemed smoothest-which went a long way toward proving he wasn’t only a bruiser.

“You know damn well you’re not,” Szolovits blurted.

For a split second, Sergeant Gergely preened. He had his share of vanity: maybe more than his share. But he came by it almost honestly. He’d worn a Stahlhelm and fought in Admiral Horthy’s Honved when Hungary joined Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Not only that, he’d survived the horrible Russian siege and conquest of Budapest near the end of the war.

And he was still a soldier, now for the Hungarian People’s Army. A Soviet-style helmet covered his dome. Instead of the old Honved’s tobacco-brown khaki cut almost in Austro-Hungarian style, his uniform, like Istvan’s, looked Russian except for being made from greener cloth. No mere bruiser could have performed that handspring of allegiances so acrobatically. He might be ugly and nasty, but his brains worked fine.

He carried a PPSh like the Russian’s, though he fed his with thirty-five-round boxes rather than snail drum-he said he could change and charge them faster. He gestured with the muzzle. “C’mon, kid. Let’s see what’s going on up there. What we don’t know can kill us.”

“So can what we do know,” Istvan said in hollow tones, but he followed Gergely through the ruins of Raesfeld. The village lay east of Wesel, in the middle of the forest called the Dammerwald. The forest had also been pretty comprehensively ruined; eye-stinging woodsmoke hung in the air, partly masking the wartime stink of death.

He knew he wouldn’t move with such smoothness and silence as the sergeant showed if he stayed in the Hungarian People’s Army for the next fifty years. He was tall and loosely put together-shambling, if you wanted to get right down to it. With light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a nose-shaped nose, he didn’t look especially Jewish. Only his mouth really gave him away.

Out in the forest, an American rifle cracked. Whether an American or a German fired it, Istvan didn’t know. The Red Army and its fraternal socialist allies seined the areas they occupied with a coarse net. Little fish could slip through the mesh and make trouble later on.

Most of the soldiers in Raesfeld were Russians. They either ignored the Hungarians or sneered at them, depending on whether they took them for countrymen or recognized that they belonged to a satellite army. There was that sergeant who’d growled at Istvan. He’d liberated a bottle of wine from somewhere and was guzzling it down. Of course, he’d be more used to vodka. If that was what you drank most of the time, you could pour down a lot of wine before you felt it.

That American rifle barked again. A Russian major not ten meters from Istvan threw his hands in the air and let out a high-pitched, bubbling screech as he fell over. Blood puddled on the paving under him. A Red Army private ran up to drag him to safety, and the sniper shot him, too. He went down without a sound and lay motionless. Istvan had seen enough horror to be sure he wouldn’t get up again.

A machine gun started hosing down the edge of the Dammerwald. Maybe it would punch the rifleman’s ticket for him, maybe not. The bastard had already earned his day’s pay any which way.

And, as soon as the machine gun quieted, a defiant rifle round spanged off brickwork too close to Istvan for comfort. A furious Soviet officer ordered men into the forest to hunt the sniper down.

“Those fuckers are like cockroaches,” Sergeant Gergely said. “You can never step on all of them, no matter how hard you try.” An A-bomb would do it, Istvan thought. How could you have people hiding in the woods if you eliminated both woods and people?

The machine gun banged away to help the hunters advance. As soon as it eased back for a bit, the sniper out there squeezed off a couple of rounds to remind the Russians they hadn’t killed him. A Red Army soldier near the edge of the woods bellowed in pain and let out a horrible stream of profanity. Istvan understood only bits of it, but admired the incandescent flow of the rest.

“That Yank or Fritz out there will be disappointed,” he remarked as aid men brought the wounded soldier back to Raesfeld. “He didn’t kill that guy-he just put him out of action for a while.”

“Half the time-more than half-that’s all a sniper wants,” Sergeant Gergely said. “Look. Two guys are taking him back to a hospital tent. A doctor will have to work on him there. He’ll lie on his ass in a bed for a while, and more people’ll need to feed him and wash him and change his bandages. A wounded man makes more trouble than a dead one. If somebody catches a round in the ear and just drops, you plug in a replacement and go on. This way, a whole bunch of people have to waste days dealing with the fucker.”

“Huh.” Istvan wasn’t a dope, or he didn’t think he was, but he’d never looked at war’s economics from that angle before. The Russian machine gun started up once more, and Ivans with machine pistols wasted ammo on whatever their imaginations fed them. When they stopped, the sniper took another shot at somebody. That made Istvan say, “They ought to drop an A-bomb on the woods. That would settle the son of a bitch, sure as hell.”

To his surprise, Gergely cuffed him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. “You wanna watch what you say, sonny, to make sure it doesn’t come true.”

“How do you mean?”

“Say the Russians throw the Americans out of West Germany. Only thing I can see stopping Truman from using A-bombs here is, the West Germans are on his side. But if they’re all in Russian hands, how much does he care any more?”

“Gak,” Istvan said when he’d worked that through. “You make me want to cross myself, and I don’t even think it does any good.”

Sergeant Gergely cuffed him again, this time with a chuckle. “Cute, kike-cute,” he said. From his lips, the insult sounded almost affectionate. Szolovits had heard plenty worse from his alleged countrymen, anyhow.

–

Marian Staley dreamt about her large, comfortable house in Everett, Washington. She wandered from room to room to room-so many rooms, and all of them hers! The only thing wrong in the dream was that she couldn’t find Bill in any of those rooms. She kept wandering. Her husband couldn’t have gone very far…could he?

Her eyes opened. The house disappeared, swallowed up by wakefulness rather than the atomic fire that had really wrecked it. She lay curled up on the front seat of her Studebaker, where she’d slept every night since the A-bomb fell. Linda, her five-year-old, lay on the back seat. She was still small enough not to need to curl up to fit. She was also getting over a cold. Her snore would have done credit to somebody three times her age.

As for Bill, the waking Marian knew she could hunt from room to room forever without finding him. He’d been the copilot in a B-29 that went down over Russia. Marian didn’t know his plane was carrying an A-bomb, but she figured it must have been.

So here she and Linda were, living in the refugee camp outside of shattered Everett. Camp Nowhere, the inhabitants called it. Nobody used the official name, Seattle-Everett Refugee Encampment Number Three. Who would, when Camp Nowhere fit like such a glove?

There were other camps like this outside of Everett and Seattle. There were more on the outskirts of Portland, and around the San Francisco Bay, and in Los Angeles, and next door to Denver, and in Maine. Marian had no idea how many people they held, not to the nearest hundred thousand. She wondered whether anyone did.

She supposed there would be refugee camps in Russia, too, and in Red China, and in the European countries one side or the other had bombed. Those places wouldn’t be just like Camp Nowhere, though…or would they? The people in them might speak different languages and live under a different flag, but wouldn’t they be disgusted and bored and irritated, too? They were people, weren’t they? How could they be anything else?

It was getting light outside. Now that summer was arriving, sunup came early and sundown came late. Daylight here, almost as far north as you could go and stay in the USA, stretched like taffy in spring and summer. Marian liked that…when she had her house with all those rooms, and with curtains and windowshades on the windows. When you were sleeping in a Studebaker, all of a sudden these long days didn’t seem so wonderful any more.

The outlines of tents of every size and shape made dark silhouettes against the brightening eastern sky. Most people lived in one of those. Most people here had no car. Plenty of autos-the dark-painted ones-on Marian’s block had gone up in flames when the bomb fell. The Studebaker was bright yellow. It survived.

She wondered if it would start now. She had her doubts. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d turned the key. What was the point? She wasn’t going anywhere. She had nowhere to go. People with anywhere else to go didn’t wind up in places like Camp Nowhere.

When her stomach told her it was getting on toward breakfast time, she woke Linda. Her daughter was no more happy about getting up than any other little kid. “You’ve got to do it,” Marian said. “Potty and then food and then kindergarten.”

“Yuk!” Linda said. Marian didn’t know which of those she was condemning, or whether she meant all of them. Any which way, she sounded very sincere.

Sincerity, though, cut no ice with Marian. She made herself sound like a drill sergeant: “You heard me, kiddo. Get moving!”

Every once in a while, Linda would mutiny and need a smack on the behind to get her in gear. Marian didn’t like to do it. No doubt her folks hadn’t liked to spank her, either. But they had when she earned it, and now she did, too. She was glad it didn’t come to that this morning. Linda looked sullen, but she got out of the car with her mother.

Marian didn’t like the latrine tent any better than Linda did. The seats were just holes in plywood set above metal troughs with running water. Even those were an improvement on the slit trenches that had been here at first. Still no stalls. No privacy, not even when you had your period. And in spite of the running water, it smelled horrible.

Breakfast wasn’t wonderful, either. The choices were sludgy oatmeal or cornflakes and reconstituted powdered milk. The milk that went with the oatmeal was reconstituted, too. The milk Marian poured into her instant coffee (which reminded her of hot mud) was condensed. To her, it tasted like a tin can; before the bomb fell, she’d used half-and-half or real cream. The sugar, at least, was the McCoy. Linda slathered it on her cornflakes. Marian couldn’t cluck. Without it, they had all the flavor of soggy newspaper.

Fayvl Tabakman came into the refectory tent a few minutes after Marian and Linda sat down. The cobbler gravely touched a forefinger to the front of his old-style tweed cap. Marian nodded back. He was a familiar face; she’d gone to his little shop before the bomb hit. And he was a nice man.

He and his friends-also middle-aged Jews from Eastern Europe-never groused about the food or the latrines or the sleeping arrangements here. Tabakman had a number tattooed on his upper arm. After Auschwitz, Camp Nowhere had to seem like the Ritz by comparison.

“You are good, Marian?” he asked. Considering that he’d been in the country only a few years, he spoke excellent English.

“Yes, thanks,” she answered. He’d lost his whole family to the Nazis. Of all the people she knew, he best understood what she was going through now that Bill was dead. “How are you?”

He shrugged. “Still here.” She nodded; she knew what that meant, all right. But then Tabakman smiled. “How are you, Linda?”

“These are blucky cornflakes,” she said.

“Blucky.” He tasted the word-if that was what it was. Then he nodded. “Well, I would not be surprised. Now you will excuse me, I hope.” He lined up to get his own breakfast. Odds were it would be blucky, too, but not next to what the Master Race had fed him in Poland, when it bothered to feed him at all. From what he’d said, he’d been down to about ninety pounds when the last war ended. He wasn’t big, and he remained weedy, but at ninety pounds he would have been a walking skeleton.

The Germans, of course, had done their best to kill off the Jews and queers and Gypsies and other undesirables they shipped to Auschwitz and the other concentration camps they set up. The Americans were trying to keep the people in Camp Nowhere and the other refugee camps as comfortable and healthy as they could. Somebody like Fayvl Tabakman, with standards of comparison, had no trouble telling the difference.

To someone like Marian, who was used to a comfortable, middle-class life, this seemed much too much like a concentration camp.

It had started to drizzle while they were eating breakfast. Linda made theatrical noises of despair. Marian had lived in Washington long enough to take the rain in stride. She didn’t suppose real concentration camps had kindergartens. This one reminded her that people here were doing their best, not their worst.

Then four National Guardsmen in fatigues came by carrying a stretcher with a body on it. Definitely a body, not someone hurt-a towel covered the face. She’d seen that a lot in her earliest days here, as people died of radiation sickness and injuries from the bomb. She’d got a dose of radiation sickness herself, as had Linda, but luckily they were both mild cases. This might have been someone who’d lingered till now and then at last given up the ghost.

More likely, though, it was somebody who couldn’t stand it here and killed himself: the corpse had been a man. Plenty of people got sick to death or bored to death of living like this, and chose to end things on their own terms. Without Linda to worry about, she might have thought of it herself, especially after she learned Bill was dead. If hanging on seemed a living death, it was better than the other kind.

She supposed.