Hanging on

entire bench on which he sat, his eyes squinted tightly shut, waiting for the crash.
        Coombs said, "Suppose your mother was in the truck with you?"
        "My mother?" His eyes snapped open.
        "Your mother."
        "What the fuck would my mother be doing with me, in a truck, driving along a sheer cliff on a narrow road at sixty miles an hour? Why the hell isn't she back there helping my grandmother who's being attacked by the man with the gun who doesn't want to rape her?"
        "I don't know anything about your family," Coombs said. "I only want to see how your chickenshit pacifism gets you out of this one?"
        Tooley leaned back, hugging the liquor bottle to his chest. His eyes were white, unblinking. He licked his lips. Tense, thinking furiously, he was still a huge man, but he resembled a child. A frightened child. He said, "I'd slam on the brakes!" He leaned forward, as if hit in the pit of the stomach. "I'd try to stop before I hit the kid!"
        "Hah!" Coombs roared.
        "Hah?"
        "You should hit the kid and save yourself and your mother. What the hell does a stranger mean to you, anyway?"
        "But if I braked in time…?"
        "Hah! You'd slam on the brakes, going at sixty on a narrow road, send your mother through the windshield and kill her instantly. Bam. Dead. You'd fishtail past the little girl, smash her to jelly, plummet over the damn cliff, and crash through your grandmother's house and kill the old woman and yourself and several innocent bystanders. That's what would happen, and all because of your chickenshit pacifism!"
        Tooley huddled into himself even more, stunned at the crisp, awful vision of ultimate catastrophe which he had been given.
        "No, Tooley," Coombs had assured him, "it won't work. Pacifism is a wonderful idea, but it just isn't applicable to the real world."
        Then he got up and walked out of the rec room, leaving Tooley glued to the bench.
        However, Sergeant Coombs didn't manage to make Tooley change his outlook. The private still refused to pack a gun and spent most of his time helping the wounded in the hospital-especially Kowalski, who was the second patient, a regular zombie.
        Fresh from talking with Nurse Pullit, Major Kelly walked to the end of the bunker and sat down next to Tooley on a gray cot which was drawn up close to Kowalski's cot. He pointed at the mute figure between the sheets, and he said, "How's your zombie doing today?"
        "Same as usual," Tooley said, though he was disturbed by the major's choice of words.
        Kowalski was lying quietly, his head heavily bandaged, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He had collected a piece of bridge support in the back of his head when the British bombed the gorge four weeks ago, and he had not moved or spoken to anyone in all the days since. He stared at the ceiling and dirtied his pants and took food from Tooley which, once he had digested it, he craftily employed to dirty his pants again.
        "There's a plane coming in tonight," Kelly told Tooley. He saw a fat centipede skitter along the floor, near the end of the bunker. It gained a shadowed wall and disappeared, probably on its way to the ceiling. He wondered if there were anything clinging to the ceiling just above his own head.
        The pacifist looked at the zombie and then at the major, and he said, "Do you think they would take him back where he can get good medical attention?"
        "You know what they'd do with him, even if they did agree to take him. They'd open the bay doors and dump him out at twenty thousand feet"
        Tooley winced.
        Kelly looked around at the patients, back at Nurse Pullit and Lily Kain who were engaged in an animated conversation about the nurse's new pumps. Pullit kept pointing to his combat boots and making odd gestures. "Tooley, I didn't come to the hospital bunker to look in on the patients. I came to see only one person."
        Tooley nodded, smiling. "Lily Kain, sir. Gorgeous jugs!"
        "Not Lily," Major Kelly said.
        Perplexed, Tooley scratched his head. "Nurse Pullit?"
        "Not Nurse Pullit. Why would I come to see Nurse Pullit?"
        "Nurse Pullit's got pretty good legs," Tooley said.
        "Not Nurse Pullit," Major Kelly said. He wiped the back of his neck, which was sweating, and he finally glanced up at the low ceiling. In the dim circle of light from the nearest bulb, there were no