Striking The Balance

Apparently at some point, an atomic bomb destroyed Miami.

Along with Hisslef, a lot of his chief subordinates were dead, too, hunted down in the frenzy that had gripped the rest of the males after Ussmak had fired the first shot. Ginger had a lot to do with the frenzy that followed it.

Not ten seconds later, one of those panzers brewed up, flame and smoke spurting from every hatch and out the top of the cupola.

The Tiger's turret flew off, the shells inside exploding as it crashed to the ground five or six meters away from the stricken panzer. The chassis burned merrily, too. All five crewmen had to be dead.

Flame and smoke spurted from the Lizard panzer, too. "Hit!" everybody in Jager's panzer screamed together. Jager listened to the breech clang shut on another round. The long 75mm gun bellowed again -- another hit. Hatches popped open in the Lizard machine. The Panther's hull-mounted machine gun started barking in short, precise bursts. In moments, the three Lizards who'd bailed out lay motionless on the ground, their all too humanly red blood staining the snow. Their panzer kept on burning.

He couldn't tell if the moans she made while he was riding her were genuine or professional, which meant odds were good they were professional.

"Who's dead?" Mutt asked. "The President," Rita answered, at the same time as a corporal choked out, "FDR." Mutt felt as if he'd been kicked in the belly.

Cordell Hull was the new President of the United States.

The bazooka crew didn't miss. A Lizard tank's frontal armor laughed at the shaped-charge head of a bazooka round, but not an armored-personnel carrier. Flame spurted from the stricken vehicle, lighting it up. Troopers with small arms opened up on it, potting the Lizard crew as they popped out of the escape hatches.

Auerbach whooped like a red Indian when another Lizard armored personnel carrier brewed up.

But the helicopters could shoot back, too. He watched their tracers walk forward and over the machine-gun position. It fell silent.

He looked around for his radioman. There was the fellow, not far away -- dead, with the radio on his back blown to smithereens.

When the helicopters finished chewing up the land this time, the machine gun didn't start up.

The machine guns in the noses of both helicopters opened up. For a second or so, he thought they were beautiful. Then something hit him a sledgehammer blow. All at once, his legs didn't want to hold him up. He started to crumple, but he didn't know whether he hit the ground or not.

Gazzim hurled himself at the male from the NKVD, rending him with teeth and claws. Lidov let out a bubbling shriek and reeled away, blood spurting from several wounds. He threw up one arm to protect his face. With the other hand, he grabbed for the pistol he wore on his belt. Ussmak leaped at him, grabbing his right arm with both hands. The Big Ugly was hideously strong, but his soft, scaleless skin left him vulnerable. Ussmak felt his claws sink deep into Tosevite flesh.

He brought up his submachine gun and fired a quick burst just before Gazzim got to him. The male of the Race crashed to the ground, twitching. He was surely dead, but his body hadn't quite realized it yet.

He saw a hand sticking up between two blocks of stone. Grunting, he and Embry shoved one of those stones aside. Blood clung to the base of it and dripped. The German soldier who'd been crushed under there would never need help again.

A stone went over with a crash. The fellow groaning beneath it had a ruined leg, but might live. They found Aleksandr German. His left hand was crushed between two stones, but past that he hardly seemed hurt. A red smear beneath a nearby stone the size of a motorcar was all that was left of Kurt Chill and Nikolai Vasiliev. Flames started peeping out between stones. The little crackling noise they made was in and of itself a jolly sound, but one that brought horror with it. Soldiers trapped in the rubble shrieked as fire found them before rescuers could.

A shell landed in the street, only a few meters from the Arab woman with the veil and headcloth and robes covering her down to her toes. After that, she didn't run. She lay and writhed and screamed. "She's hurt bad," Reuven said in that alarmingly knowing way of his.

Halfway through, the woman stopped struggling. It wasn't because she acquiesced. Moishe grabbed for her wrist. He found no pulse.

Panzers in the regiment went from machinery to burnt and twisted scrap metal, a couple from the fire of Lizard panzer cannon, the rest because of the antipanzer rockets the Lizard infantry carried. The only Lizard panzer killed was taken out by a Wehrmacht private in a tree who dropped a Molotov cocktail down into the turret through the open cupola when the panzer clattered by below him. That happened toward sunset, and seemed to halt the Lizards' push all by itself. They didn't like losing panzers these days.

(it's well into the second year of the war)

For Rance Auerbach, the war was over. For a while there, he'd thought he was over. He'd wished he was, with a bullet in the chest and another in the leg.

He gasped when Penny's mouth came down on him. He didn't know whether he'd rise. He didn't know whether he wanted to rise. Suddenly he understood how a woman had to feel when the guy she was with decided he was going to screw her then and there and she was too drunk to do anything about it. Rise he did, in spite of everything. Penny's head bobbed up and down. He gasped again and then again. He wondered if he was going to have enough air in him to come, no matter how good it felt... and her lips and teasing tongue felt as good -- well, almost as good -- as getting shot up had felt bad. She closed her hand around his shaft, down below her busy mouth, and squeezed him, hard. Not more than two heartbeats later, he shuddered and exploded. For a moment, purple spots swam before his eyes. Then the inside of the tent filled with light, so clear and brilliant it seemed to be--- (bombed the Lizards outside Denver)

"No!" Teerts shouted. "Not twice!" He stabbed a thumb towards the ejector button. The killercraft smashed into a hillside just before he reached it.

The Lizard fighter plane burning not far away, normally cause for celebration, now wasn't worth noticing.

He pointed. "Here, between this town called Orlando and the smaller one named.. can it really be Apopka?" (selecting a town in Florida for a retaliatory nuclear strike)

"Against Sydney and Melbourne, I mean?"

As they turned around, gunfire opened up from two of the buildings that faced the street. Big Uglies started screaming. Caught by surprise, the guards crumpled in pools of blood. One of them squeezed off an answering burst, but then more bullets found him and he lay still. (Lizards)

Lizards started dropping. They weren't wearing masks.

Riding in a specially protected vehicle, Atvar had been through the ruins of El Iskandariya. He'd seen firsthand what the Big Uglies' bomb had done there. It wasn't beautiful, not even slightly.

"And so we retaliate with this Copenhagen place. Where does it end, Exalted Fleetlord?"

Pshing said, "Exalted Fleetlord, I regret the necessity of reporting a Tosevite nuclear explosion by a riverside city bearing the native name Saratov."

Then another rifle spoke, from behind him and to his right. One of the running men dropped his weapon and crashed to earth as if he'd been sapped. That unexpected rifle cracked again. The second runner went down, too, with a cry of pain that floated over the flat, grassy land. He tried to crawl to cover, but Bagnall fired twice at him. One of the bullets must have hit, for the fellow lay quiet and motionless after that. One of the Estonians behind the outbuilding popped up to shoot. Before he could, the rifleman behind the RAF men squeezed off another round. The Estonian crumpled.

At what seemed the same instant, the marksman behind Bagnall also fired. An arm dangled limply from the window till it was dragged back inside.

Ussmak died.