In at the Death Read online

  “Jesus God, it was only a nigger!” a woman shrilled.

  “Anybody who comes out with that kind of shit from now on, I figure you just volunteered for hostage duty,” Wallace said. “Far as I can see, the black folks around here are worth at least ten of you assholes apiece—I mean at least. They didn’t start murdering people for the fun of it. You ‘Freedom!’-yelling cocksuckers did.”

  “We didn’t know what happened to the colored folks who got shipped out,” an old man quavered.

  “Yeah—now tell me another one. You give me horseshit like that, you’re a volunteer hostage, too,” Captain Wallace said. “You didn’t know! Where’d you think they were going, you goddamn lying bucket of puke? To a fucking football game?”

  Cassius didn’t know what he’d thought Yankees would be like. This chilly ferocity wasn’t it, though—he was sure of that. A lot of U.S. soldiers hated the enemy with a clear and simple passion that shoved everything else to one side.

  “You know, I never had much use for smokes,” a skinny corporal who needed a shave told Cassius out of the blue one day. “But shit, man, if Featherston’s fuckers have it in for you, you gotta have somethin’ going for you.”

  Was that logical? Cassius wondered what his father would have thought of it. But there was a brutal logic that beat down the more formal sort. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That was working here.

  It had a flip side. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. As Cassius and Gracchus patrolled Madison, Cassius said, “Ain’t never gonna be safe for niggers around here without Yankees close by from now on.”

  “Reckon not,” Gracchus said, “but how safe was it for us ’fore the damnyankees done got here?”

  That question answered itself. His family hauled out of church and taken off to a camp. His own life on the run ever since. The precarious life black guerrillas led, knowing there would be no mercy if they got caught.

  “Well, you got me,” Cassius said.

  They tramped into the town square. A bronze plaque was affixed to a small stone pillar there. Somehow, the little monument had come through the fighting that leveled half the town without even a nick. Gracchus pointed to the plaque. “What’s it say?” he asked. Cassius had taught him his letters, but he still didn’t read well.

  “Says it’s the Braswell Monument,” Cassius said. “Says in 1817 Benjamin Braswell done sold thirteen slaves after he was dead so they could use the money to educate white chillun. Says they raised almos’ thirty-six hundred dollars. Ain’t that grand?”

  “Sold niggers to help ofays. That’s how it goes, sure as hell.” Gracchus strode up to the Braswell Monument, unbuttoned his fly, and took a long leak. “Show what I thinks o’ you, Mr. Benjamin fuckin’ Asswell.”

  A couple of white women with wheeled wire shopping carts were hurrying across the square. They took one look Gracchus’ way and walked even faster. “They don’t like your dark meat,” Cassius said.

  “My meat don’t like them, neither,” Gracchus replied. “I start fuckin’ white women, I ain’t gonna start fuckin’ no ugly white women, an’ they was dogs.”

  They hadn’t been beautiful. Some Negroes in U.S. service didn’t care. They took their revenge on Confederate women for everything Confederate men had done to them. A few U.S. officers reacted as badly to that as Confederate men might have. Not everyone in the USA loved Negroes, not by a long shot. But most men who wore green-gray uniforms hated the enemy worse than the blacks he’d oppressed.

  “Know what I feel like?” Gracchus said as he and Cassius resumed their patrol. “I feel like a dog that jus’ pissed somewhere to say, ‘This here place mine.’”

  “Dunno if it’s yours or not,” Cassius said. “Sure as shit don’t belong to the Confederate ofays no mo’.”

  As if to emphasize that, the U.S. troops had run up a barbed-wire stockade just outside of Madison to hold C.S. prisoners of war. Cassius wasn’t the only Negro drawn to that stockade as if by a magnet. Seeing soldiers in butternut—and, better still, seeing Freedom Party Guards in brown-splotched camouflage—on the wrong side of the wire, stuck inside a camp, disarmed and glum while he carried a weapon, was irresistibly sweet.

  “They gonna reduce your population!” a Negro from a different band jeered at the POWs. “They gonna put you on a train, an’ you ain’t never gettin’ off!”

  Some of the captured Confederates looked scared—who could know for sure what the soldiers on the other side would do? Some swore at the black guerrilla. One stubborn sergeant said, “Fuck you in the heart, Sambo. They already put your nappy-headed whore of a mama on the train, and she deserved it, too.”

  A few seconds later, he lay dead, a bullet through his chest. A U.S. corporal, hearing the shot, came running. “Jesus!” he said when he saw the corpse. “What the hell’d you go and do that for?”

  The Confederates in the stockade were screaming and pointing at the Negro who’d fired. The guerrilla was unrepentant. “He dogged my mother,” he said simply. “Ain’t nobody gonna dog my mother, ’specially not some goddamn ofay fuckhead.”

  “Christ, I’m gonna have to fill out papers on this shit,” the noncom groaned. “Tell me what the fuck happened.”

  Several POWs tried to. They did their best to outshout the guerrilla who’d killed the sergeant. Cassius weighed in to balance them if he could.

  “He said that to this guy?” the corporal said when he finished.

  “He sure did,” Cassius answered.

  “Shit on toast,” the noncom said. “He told me that, I bet I woulda blown his fuckin’ head off.” The POWs screamed at him, too. He flipped them off. “Listen up, assholes—something you better figure out. You lost. These guys”—he pointed at Cassius and the other Negro—“they won. Better get used to it, or a hell of a lot of you are gonna end up dead. And you know what else? Nobody’s gonna miss you, either.”

  “We won’t ever put up with bein’ under niggers!” a captive shouted.

  “That’s right!” Two or three more echoed him.

  “Then I figure you’ll be underground.” The corporal pointed to the corpse. “Take your carrion over to the gate. We’ll put him where he belongs.”

  He got more curses and jeers, and ignored all of them. After he went away, the other Negro stuck out his hand to Cassius. “Thanks for backin’ me. I’m Sertorius.”

  “My name’s Cassius.” Cassius took the proffered hand. As he had with Gracchus, he asked, “Reckon we ever be able to do anything down here without the Yankees backin’ our play?”

  “No,” Sertorius said calmly. “But so what? Yankees don’t come down here, fuckin’ Confederate ofays kill us anyways. They really did take my mama, God damn them to hell an’ gone.”

  “Mine, too, an’ my pa, an’ my sister,” Cassius answered.

  “How come they miss you?”

  “On account of I didn’t go to church. That’s where they got everybody else.”

  “I heard stories like that before,” Sertorius said. “If there’s a God, He got Hisself a nasty sense o’ humor.”

  “Reckon so.” Cassius had wondered about God even before the ofays got his family. He’d always kept quiet, because he knew his mother didn’t want him saying—or thinking—things like that. He had the feeling his father was sitting on the same kind of doubts. The older man never talked about them, either. One of these days, the two of them might have had some interesting things to say to each other. They never would now.

  The black guerrillas had a camp alongside that of the U.S. soldiers who guarded the POWs and made sure the lid stayed on in Madison. They slept in U.S. Army tents, and used U.S. Army sleeping bags. Those gave them better, softer nights than they’d had most of the time on their own.

  They got U.S. Army mess kits, too, and ate U.S. Army chow with the men from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They didn’t have to wait till the soldiers in green-gray were served before they got fed. They just took their places in line, and the cooks slapped down whatever they happen
ed to have. Sometimes it was good, sometimes not. But there was always plenty. For Cassius, whose ribs had been a ladder, that was plenty to keep him from complaining.

  When he went into Madison, kids would ask, “Got any rations? Got any candy?”

  No. Starve, you little ofay bastards. That was always the first thought that went through his head. But hating children didn’t come easy. They hadn’t done anything to him. And some of them looked hungry. He knew what being hungry was all about.

  Then one of them called, “Hey, nigger! Got any candy?”

  He didn’t shoot the boy, who must have been about eight. That would have got him talked about. He did say, “You call me a nigger, brat, you can damn well starve for all I care.”

  The kid looked at him as if he were crazy. “Well, what are you if you ain’t a nigger?”

  “A colored fellow, or a Negro, or even a black man,” Cassius answered. “Call somebody a nigger, it’s an insult, like.”

  “You’re a nigger, all right, an’ you suck the damnyankees’ cocks,” the brat squeaked. He didn’t get a handout from Cassius, or a lesson. He also still didn’t get shot, but he came much closer to that than to either of the other two.

  He’d likely feel the way he did till the day he died. So would countless others just like him. In the face of hate like that, what were the surviving Negroes in the CSA supposed to do? After the war ended, how could they settle down and make a living? If U.S. soldiers didn’t back them, how long would they last? Not long—that seemed only too obvious.

  And if U.S. soldiers did back them, the white majority—much larger now than before the murders started—would hate Negroes more than ever…assuming such a thing was possible.

  “We is fucked,” Cassius said sorrowfully. “We is so fucked.”

  “What? On account o’ that ofay kid?” Gracchus said. “Little shithead run his mouth like that, he get hisself killed goddamn quick, an’ nobody be sorry, neither.”

  “No, not on account o’ him,” Cassius said, which wasn’t exactly true. “On account of everything.” He started to explain, then gave up. What was the use? Once upon a time, he would have found a place in Augusta—not the place he would have had if he were white, but a place. He would have fit in. Now?

  Now he carried a Tredegar, and he was ready to kill any white who got in his way. That too was a place…of sorts.

  Chester Martin smoked a cigarette outside of Monroe, Georgia, and waited for the next raiding party to head east. The company-strength expedition had proved what the brass thought before—the Confederates hadn’t had anything worth mentioning to oppose a U.S. thrust. Why not try it again, in greater strength?

  To Chester, the answer seemed obvious enough. If you hit them there once, wouldn’t they get ready to make sure you couldn’t do it again?

  Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin looked at him—looked through him—with those cold, pale Slavic eyes. “You’re welcome to stay behind when we go, Sergeant,” he said.

  “You know I don’t want to do that, sir,” Chester said. “But I don’t want to get my tit in a wringer, either, not when I don’t have to.”

  “No guarantees in this business,” Lavochkin said.

  He wouldn’t listen. Everything had come his way for a long time now. He thought it would keep right on happening. And he wasn’t the only one. The brass never would have signed off on a raid if they didn’t think it would fly. Maybe they were right. Chester could hope so, anyhow.

  He did talk to Captain Rhodes, who, he was sure, knew his ass from his end zone. “If they’re laying for us, sir, we’ll be all dressed up with no place to go,” he said.

  “What do you think the odds are?” the company commander asked.

  “Well, sir, we sure as hell won’t take ’em by surprise twice,” Martin answered.

  “No, but how much can they do about it?” Rhodes said.

  “Don’t know, sir,” Chester said. “I bet we find out, though. If I wanted to be a goddamn guinea pig, I would’ve bought myself a cage.”

  That made Captain Rhodes grin, but he didn’t change his mind. “We’ve got our orders,” he said. “We’re going to go through with them. If we run into trouble, I expect we’ll have backup. But I think we have a decent chance to bang on through, same as we did the last time around.”

  “Hope you’re right, sir.” Chester didn’t believe it. Nobody above him cared what he believed. To the men in his platoon, he was God the Father to Lavochkin’s Son and Rhodes’ Holy Ghost. To the officers above him, he was just a retread with a big mouth. And the fellows with shoulder straps were the ones whose opinions mattered.

  Two mornings later, the long, muscular armored column rolled down the road from Monroe to Good Hope, the same road the smaller raiding band had traveled not long before. Chester thought that might surprise whoever was in charge of the Confederate defenders. They wouldn’t believe anybody could be dumb enough to hit them the same way twice running. Chester had trouble believing it himself.

  They didn’t run into any traffic on the way to Good Hope. They also didn’t run into any ambushes, for which Chester was duly grateful. Maybe the C.S. brass really couldn’t believe their foes would try the same ploy twice.

  Good Hope looked like holy hell. Only a couple of people were on the street when the U.S. command cars and armored vehicles rolled in. The Confederate civilians didn’t think the green-gray machines were on their side this time. They took one horrified look, screamed, and ran for their lives.

  Maybe that did them some good; maybe it didn’t. Machine guns and cannon cut loose as soon as the U.S. column came into the little town, and didn’t let up till it rolled through. Martin looked back over his shoulder after he was outside of Good Hope. Clouds of smoke announced that raiders were on the loose. If the enemy had telephone and telegraph lines back up from the last assault, people were already letting C.S. military authorities know about the new one.

  If there were any C.S. military authorities in this part of Georgia…Perhaps there weren’t. Perhaps the Confederate States really were falling into ruin. Chester could hope so, anyhow.

  Trouble came between Good Hope and Apalachee. The road went through some pine woods. The column stopped because a barricade of logs and rocks and overturned wrecked vehicles blocked it. Getting barrels up to knock the obstruction aside wasn’t quick or easy, not with trees of formidable size alongside the narrow, badly paved road.

  And as soon as the column bogged down, C.S. troops in the woods opened up with automatic weapons, mortars, and stovepipe rockets. Chester didn’t think there were a whole lot of them, which didn’t mean they didn’t do damage. Several soft-skinned vehicles and a halftrack caught fire. Wounded men howled.

  U.S. soldiers hit back with all the firepower they’d brought along: heavy machine guns and cannon on their vehicles, along with the rifles and automatic rifles and submachine guns the men carried. Nobody could come close to the column and live, which didn’t help all that much when it wasn’t going anywhere.

  After half an hour or so, U.S. barrels did shoulder the roadblock out of the way. The column went on, minus the vehicles put out of action. When the soldiers got to Apalachee, they tore into it even more savagely than they had at Good Hope. Not much was left of the hamlet when they came out the other side.

  Chester hoped they wouldn’t duplicate the whole route from the last raid. That would give the Confederates more chances to bushwhack them, and would also mean they were tearing up more stuff they’d already wrecked once. He nodded in approval when they left the road and started cross-country, heading as close to due east as made no difference.

  Whenever they came to a farmhouse, they shot it up. If the people who lived there made it very plain they were giving up—if they came out with hands high—the soldiers let them flee with the clothes on their backs. If they showed fight or even if they just stayed inside, they got no second chances.

  A startling number of rural Georgians seemed to think a few rounds from a squirrel rifl
e or a shotgun would set the U.S. Army running. They paid for their education. None of them would ever make that mistake, or any mistake, again. Often, their families died with them.

  “That’s kind of a shame, sir,” Chester said as a woman trapped in a burning farmhouse and likely wounded shrieked her life away.

  “Think of it as survival of the fittest,” Captain Rhodes replied. “If they’re dumb enough to fire on us, they’re too dumb to deserve to live.”

  “She probably didn’t have a gun,” Martin said.

  The company commander shrugged. “She was dumb enough to marry somebody who did. We aren’t here to talk to these people, Sergeant. We’re here to teach ’em that fucking with the United States is as dumb as it gets.”

  Inside the farmhouse, cartridges started cooking off. The woman’s shrieks mercifully faded. “I’d say she’s got the point, sir,” Chester said. “Fat lot of good it’ll do her from here on out.”

  Before Rhodes could answer, Chester and he both heard airplane motors overhead. They expected U.S. fighter-bombers to pound whatever lay ahead of them. Then a fearsome scream rose with the rumble. Chester had heard that noise too many times, though not so often lately.

  “Asskickers!” he yelled, and threw himself flat.

  Anybody who could get to an automatic weapon opened up on the vulture-winged C.S. dive bombers. The Mules ignored the ground fire and planted their bombs in the middle of the thickest concentrations of vehicles they could find. One landed right on a halftrack. The fireball caught a couple of nearby soldiers and turned them into torches. The Asskickers came back again to strafe the U.S. soldiers. Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground much too close to Chester. He scraped away with his entrenching tool, not that it would do a hell of a lot of good.

  And then the dive bombers were gone. Captain Rhodes looked around at the damage they’d done. “Fuck,” he said softly. “You all right, Chester?”

  “Yeah.” Martin scrabbled in his pockets for a cigarette. “Boy, I forgot how much fun that was.”