Camouflage

the morning, the Japanese opened the door and the prisoners staggered or crawled out into the sudden light, leaving twenty-five dead behind. They were beaten into line and fed a small rice ball and a little tepid tea beforegetting back on the road, which was already shimmering with heat.
    E ven with its superhuman metabolism, the changeling had lost five kilograms by the end of the march, on the morning of 15 April, at the San Fernando railway station.
    The Japanese kicked and shouted the men awake and herded them into narrow-gauge boxcars, more than a hundred men per car. It was like a reprise of Balanga, packed shoulder to shoulder, with the added factor of the train’s queasy rocking motion. A few people near the doors had actual air to breathe; the others had to make do with a hot stale atmosphere combining shit, piss, and vomit with carbon dioxide and dust.
    One hundred and fifteen had been packed into the changeling’s car. When they stumbled out five hours later, they left behind four corpses.
    They were made to sit motionless in the hot sun at Capiz Tarlac for three hours, and then were marched across town to their final destination, Camp O’Donnell. There they confronted a nightmare several orders of magnitude larger than the march itself: twelve thousand prisoners were confined to a square of baking concrete one hundred yards on a side.
    Most of the thousands of Americans and Filipinos were standing in a slow line waiting for the one water spigot. The old hands told them that it usually took about six hours—sometimes ten or twelve—to get to the spigot and fill your canteen. So after you filled it, you might as well just go back to the end of the line.
    They were supposedly going to get food tomorrow. But the Japanese had been saying that for three days.
    The changeling got into line, even though if it wanted water it could assimilate it directly from the air, or even break down carbohydrates for it. As the line inched along, the prisoners walking back toward the end would scrutinizefaces, trying to identify old comrades through the masks of filth and exhaustion.
    The inevitable happened. “Jimmy? My God—Jimmy?”
    The changeling looked up. “Hugh.”
    “You’re alive,” he said.
    “Just barely,” the changeling said. “You, too.”
    “No! I mean . . . I mean . . . I saw you get your head chopped off! After you pulled the Jap off the truck.”
    “Must have been someone who looked like me.”
    One of the Japanese guards stepped over and seized Hugh by the shoulder. “Repeat what you just said,” he said in almost perfect English.
    Hugh cringed. “Thought he looked like somebody.”
    “Repeat!” The soldier shook him. “The truck!”
    “He—he looked like someone who pulled a guard off a truck. But he’s someone else.”
    The guard shoved Hugh away and clamped on to the changeling’s shoulder and stared. “I buried you. I saw your face in the hole, looking up.”
    The changeling thought back and realized that he indeed was one of the guards on that detail. “Then how am I alive now?”
    The man continued staring, the blood draining out of his face. Then he jerked the changeling out of the line and shoved him through the crowd toward a line of white buildings.
    “Sit!” He pushed the changeling down on a step and shouted something in Japanese. Two young soldiers in clean uniforms scurried over to point their rifles at the changeling’s head. It considered doing something to make them shoot, and simplify the situation by apparently dying. But it was curious.
    The guard returned with another familiar face: the officer who had performed the execution.
    He studied the changeling and laughed. “Do you have a twin?”
    “They say everyone does, somewhere.”
    He stepped forward and fingered what was left of the insignia on Jimmy’s uniform. “Not in the same Marine detachment, I think.”
    He said something in Japanese and the two soldiers prodded the changeling to its feet. “We’ll see about you,” the officer said. “What is your name?”
    “Private First Class William Harrison, sir,” it said, and made up a random serial number. The officer wrote it down painstakingly and barked an order at the privates. “Tomorrow,” he added. By tomorrow, the changeling decided, it would be someone and somewhere else.
    The privates pushed their prisoner through the door and down a dark corridor. A Filipino jailer, closely observed by a Japanese officer, unlocked a door of