Keeping Watch by Laurie R. King Page A

over again, proved that the response had been to some degree effective. The attack slowed. After a few minutes, Allen eased over the top of the sandbags so the others could shovel out the dirt that had collapsed in. He heard ThreeG calling for a damage report, and he answered that his guys were okay. The hole closer to the misfires had not fared so well.
    â€œThey’re dead, Carmichael,” came a choked voice. “We’re all fucking dead, oh fuck, oh God, we’re dead.”
    Allen squirmed over the ground, dragging his gun after him. He couldn’t see a thing, not until another flare went up, and even then all he could make out was a black hole until a hand shot up and seized his, scaring him half to death. Its owner pulled himself up until the gleam of wire rims was inches from Allen’s face.
    Allen turned to hiss over his shoulder, “Mouse! I need a hand here, man.”
    Mouse was there in an instant, the whites of his eyes the only thing visible, but his strength hauled Chris up from the hole. The surfer’s hands came up automatically to straighten his glasses, his skin pouring out the musky aura of old marijuana.
    â€œWhere you hit, man?” Allen asked him.
    â€œEverywhere, shit, I can’t feel my legs. No, wait,” he said, and kicked first one boot, then the other. “Did I move them?”
    â€œDamn right you moved them, asshole, you kicked me in the face,” Mouse objected.
    Allen had been running a tentative hand over Chris’s body, feeling for breaks in the fabric of the uniform or for warm pools of blood, praying he didn’t encounter some really gross protruding organ or bone fragment. The cloth had soaked patches, but seemed to be whole.
    â€œSee if you can crawl,” he suggested. “We’ll take you down to the medic.”
    Instead, Chris braced himself on their shoulders and stood up, swaying but obviously intact. “Shit,” he said. “I thought I was cut in half.”
    For some reason, the statement struck Mouse as funny, and he began to emit a gurgling sound. “Really sorry to disappoint you, dude,” he finally choked out, and crawled back over to finish digging out the collapsed fighting hole.
    The other two men in Chris’s hole, however, made no effort to stand. One would never stand again, since most of his head was gone. The other man lay groaning quietly, one arm twisted and useless. He also seemed to be bleeding, although it was hard to tell what was his and what had belonged to the dead man. Allen patted the guy’s good shoulder and told him, “You hang in there, man. I’ll get you a medic, he’ll give you something that’ll make you feel better. Chris, you think you can go find us some kind of stretcher? Tell the medic to come when he has a chance?”
    â€œSure. Shit, man, I thought I’d get my ass medevacked outta here.”
    â€œWe just love you too much to let you go,” Allen told him, and dropped into the hole between the dead and the wounded. The limp corpse in the bottom of the hole was a bitch to move, and would have been impossible if Allen had had to think of it as a person, but treating it as a really awkward wet log with sprawling extremities meant that he could just shove away at the thing, propping his shoulder under it, cursing it all the way up the side of the hole until it flopped onto level ground. He scrubbed his hands on his shirt and left the body lying along the top of the hole; when shooting resumed, he didn’t think the guy would mind reinforcing the sandbags for his squad.
    It didn’t take long for the shooting to start again. He could still hear the rapid clink and scrape of the entrenching tools in Mouse’s hole when the rattle of an AK47 brought his M16 up to prop on the body of the dead man. Who the hell was it, anyway? He’d have to check the tags when it was light, he thought, and then he was too busy.
    If it hadn’t been