Hanging on

walked that way, though he didn't want to. He passed a smoking crater that smelled like rotten eggs, passed the charred wall of the rec room which was still smoldering a little, and he came to three men who were lying on the ground midst pieces of bomb casings, fragments of limestone, and clods of earth.
        He knelt beside the first. Private Hoskins. "You okay?"
        Hoskins's eyes fluttered, opened. He looked at Kelly, got it sorted out remarkably fast, reached out for support and sat up. He was twenty-eight years old, a small-town boy from upper New York State-but right now Hoskins looked a hundred, and as if he had seen everything bad there was to see. His nose was bleeding across his lips, wet ribbons of some gay disguise. Most of his clothes had been torn off by the blast. Otherwise, he seemed to be in good shape.
        "Can you walk?" Kelly asked.
        "I think so."
        Kelly helped him to his feet. "Go see Pullit and Kain."
        Hoskins, the gambler, nodded. He walked off toward the hospital bunker, weaving a bit, as if a pair of roulette wheels were strapped to his shoulders.
        The second man lying on the ground was Private Osgood from Nashville, Tennessee. Kelly did not know him well. He would never know him well. Osgood was dead, pierced by twenty or more pieces of shrapnel, bleeding from the face and neck and chest, from the stomach and the legs, a voodoo doll that had gotten into the hands of a witch with a real grudge to settle.
        Kelly walked closer to the ravine where the third man lay on his side, holding his stomach with both hands. It was Private Peter Danielson, Petey for short. He was the unit's foremost drinker and hell raiser. Kelly had reprimanded him on three separate occasions when Danielson had pissed in Sergeant Coombs's office window, all over Coombs's desk and papers.
        "Petey?" Kelly asked, kneeling beside the man.
        Danielson's scream died into a low sobbing, and he focused his watery eyes on the major.
        "Where are you hurt?" Kelly asked.
        Danielson tried to speak. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth and dribbled down his chin, thick as syrup.
        "Your stomach, Petey?"
        Danielson blinked and slowly nodded his head. He jerked as his bladder gave out and his trousers darkened with urine. Tears came to his eyes, fat and clear; they ran down his round cheeks and mixed with the blood on his chin.
        "Can I look?" Kelly asked.
        Danielson shuddered and managed to speak. "Nothing to see. Okay." His teeth and tongue were bright with blood.
        "If I could look, maybe I could keep it from hurting," Kelly said.
        Danielson started to scream again, that same monotonous ululation. His mouth was wide open, all red inside, and bloody foam bubbled at both nostrils.
        Slade had come up beside Kelly while the major was talking to Petey Danielson. "What's wrong with him?"
        Kelly didn't answer him. He took hold of the screaming man's hands, which were cold. He was prepared to pry Danielson's hands away from his stomach, but the wounded man surrendered with surprising weakness. Then, with nothing to hold in its place, his stomach fell away from him. It just bulged out through his shredded shirt in a shapeless, awful mass. Undigested food, blood, intestines, feces, and the walls of his stomach flopped onto the ground in a slithering, glistening mass.
        Danielson screamed and screamed.
        "Christ," Slade said.
        Major Kelly looked at Danielson's insides, trying to pretend them out of the way, trying to pretend Danielson back to health. He couldn't do it. He stood up, trying not to be sick. He turned to Slade in the jerky way of an automaton in a big department-store Christmas display, and he took the loaded revolver out of Slade's hand.
        Danielson was curled up on himself now, trying to stuff his ruined intestines back through the neat slit the shrapnel had made in him. He was screaming and crying and apologizing to someone.
        Major Kelly aimed the revolver at Danielson's chest but found that he was shaking too badly to make a good shot. He planted his feet farther apart and gripped the gun with both hands as he had seen Slade doing when the B-17 was over them. He shot Danielson four times in the chest, until the man was dead.
        He gave the gun back to Slade.
        He walked away, holding his hands over his ears, trying to block, out