The Disunited States of America ct-4 Read online

  Mr. Snodgrass was watching, too. "What a mess," he said. "What a crazy mess." But he didn't seem to see that if white Virginians treated black Virginians better they might not have this kind of mess. He wasn't a bad man, but he just didn't see it—couldn't see it. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

  Justin nodded to Beckie when she let him into the Snodgrasses' house. "How are you doing?" he asked.

  "Not so good," she answered, her voice hardly above a whisper. "Mrs. Snodgrass died yesterday—a doctor in Parkers-burg managed to get a call through to let Mr. Snodgrass know."

  "Oh. I'm sorry." Justin wasn't just sorry, though—he was jealous. "I still can't reach Charleston."

  "Charleston?" Then Beckie remembered. "Your mother's down there. I hope she's okay."

  "You ain't the only one!" Justin exclaimed. "Somehow or other, I've got to get down there and find out."

  "How?" Beckie asked reasonably. "Those aren't just roadblocks between here and there. Those are roadblocks with soldiers. Can you go sneaking through the woods?"

  Justin wanted to say yes. He told the truth instead: "No, I'm a city kid." He wanted to add some pungent comments to that. In the home timeline, he would have; people there took swearing for granted. They weren't so free-and-easy about it here.

  "Well, then, do what's smart," Beckie said. "Sit tight. Maybe your mom will be able to get through to you if you can't get through to her."

  "Maybe." Justin didn't believe it. He couldn't reach her with his cell phone. Mail was shut down. Telegrams here were as dead as they were in the home timeline. E-mail was wireless, again like home. That was great—convenient as anything— when the system was up. When it went down ... It was down now, in this part of Virginia, anyhow.

  "What could you do there that you can't do here?" Beckie had to be able to tell he meant no even if he didn't say it.

  "I could know she was all right. She could know I was all right, too." Schrb'dinger's mom, he thought. Schrodinger's kid. Just like the cat in the thought experiment, Justin and his mom weren't all right to each other till each one knew the other was all right... or wasn't. Uncertainty gnawed at him.

  One thing he didn't say, or even think, was, / could go back to the home timeline. He couldn't. He knew too well he couldn't. There were too many genetically engineered viruses in the home timeline already. No transposition chamber would come to the room deep under Mr. Brooks' shop till somebody found a cure for this one. The quarantine methods the home timeline used were a lot more effective than roadblocks, with or without soldiers. Stuck. The word resounded in his mind. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

  "She'll be the way she is. And you are all right—as long as you don't come down sick." Beckie knocked wood. Justin wondered how old that superstition was. Plenty old enough to be in both this alternate and the home timeline. Older than the breakpoint, then. Thinking about things like that hurt a lot less than thinking about the disease or the war or what a mess this assignment turned out to be.

  "I'm not the only one to worry about. You're in as much danger as I am," Justin said.

  "Everybody in Elizabeth's in danger," Beckie said, which was bound to be true. She laughed. "If I didn't come with Gran, I could be lying on the beach right now, you know?"

  "Sorry about that," Justin said.

  "You want a fizz?" she asked.

  "Sure," Justin said. They walked into the kitchen together. Before she opened the refrigerator, he put his arm around her. She gave him a surprised look—but not too surprised. "Thanks for listening to me," he told her. "Thank for putting up with me, you know?"

  "No problem," she said. "It works both ways, believe me." She squeezed him for a second. Then she slipped away. "Fizzes."

  He drank his in a hurry. It wasn't just like anything in the home timeline, but it was sweet and cold. It even had caffeine in it. What more could you want? He wondered if he should try something more with Beckie. Something about the set of her mouth told him it wouldn't be a good idea right this minute.

  Then her grandmother walked into the kitchen. "Oh," she said. "The boy." By the way she eyed him, he might have been something she'd just cleaned off the floor with a wet paper towel.

  "Gran!" Beckie said.

  "What?" her grandmother said. "It is him, isn't it?"

  Oh, yeah, Justin thought. You stick in the knife and then you try to pretend you didn't mean anything by it. And if he got mad—if he told her where to go and how to get there or even if he showed he was annoyed any way at all—she won. She was a sweet old lady, and he was just a punk kid. The very best he could do in the game was break even, and the only way he could do that was to make believe he didn't notice a thing. Kids had had to do stuff like that since Urk the australopithecine broke an antelope bone over Urk, Junior's, head for making a monkey out of himself when he shouldn't have. Nope, you couldn't win.

  Beckie's grandmother took a pear out of the fridge, looked at it, breathed all over it, and then put it back and got out another one. She went away, munching. You chew with your mouth open, too, Justin thought.

  Once her grandmother was gone, Beckie sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "She's like that."

  "What can you do?" Justin said. "My aunt's a world-class dingbat. People choose their friends. Your family? You're stuck with your family."

  "Stuck with." Beckie looked in the direction her grandmother had gone. "Boy, you can say that again. I feel like she's my ball and chain."

  "Yeah, well. . ." Justin kind of shrugged. "It's not like you're going anywhere much, not the way things are."

  "Tell me about it." Beckie cocked her head to one side, listening. "What's that? That rumble, I mean?"

  "Sounds like more trackforts and stuff," Justin answered. "But that's crazy. They pulled out to fight the uprising, and now they're coming back? Why would they do that?" Suddenly he flashed on Mr. Brooks, and he knew just what the older man would say, right down to his tone of voice. "I bet the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing." He sounded cynical enough to alarm himself.

  He made Beckie blink, too. But she said, "I bet you're right. Either that or"—she looked scared—"they're soldiers from Ohio instead."

  She probably didn't care about Virginia or Ohio. She didn't want to get stuck in the middle of fighting, that was all. Since Justin felt the same way, he couldn't very well argue with her. Even so, he said, "I don't think they're Ohioans. The noise is coming from that way, not that way." He pointed first east, then west.

  Beckie listened, then nodded. "It is, isn't it? That's a little better." No, she didn't care about either side. After a couple of seconds, she remembered he was supposed to. "I didn't mean—"

  "Don't worry about it," he said. "To somebody from a rich state on the other side of the continent, this whole thing probably looks pretty silly."

  "Nothing where you can die from a horrible disease or get blown to pieces looks silly when you're stuck in the middle of it." Beckie spoke with great conviction.

  "You hit that nail right on the thumb," Justin said gravely.

  Beckie started to nod, then gave him a peculiar look. "You come out with the weirdest stuff sometimes, you know?"

  "Thanks," he said. This time, he knew exactly what kind of face she made at him. Before he could say anything more, he heard rising screeches in the air.

  "What's that?" Beckie said again.

  He didn't answer. He knocked her flat, and threw himself flat, too, even while she was squawking. He was dragging both of them toward the kitchen table—get under something, he told himself—when the first shells went off. Something slammed into the kitchen wall, and all at once the house started leaking air-conditioned air through a hole the size of his head.

  "What was that?" Beckie's grandmother called. "Did anything break?"

  Justin lost it. There with artillery raining down on Elizabeth, he started laughing like a loon. Half a second later, Beckie was doing the same thing. They clung to each other. Either they were both crazy or they were an island of sanity
in a world gone mad. Part of it, probably, was simple fear of death. The rest was proof of just how far out of it Beckie's grandmother really was.

  The shelling lasted only a few minutes. It sure seemed like forever while it was going on, though. When it finally stopped, Justin sat up—and banged his head on the underside of the kitchen table. The bombardment hadn't touched him. Banging his head hurt a lot—but only for a little while.

  "Wow," he said in place of something stronger, "that was fun."

  "Now that you mention it," Beckie said, "no." She wiggled out from under the table without trying to fracture her skull on it. Then she looked at the hole in the kitchen wall and slowly shook her head. When she muttered, "Wow," too, she seemed amazed. "If that hit one of us, or maybe both of us . . ."

  "Yeah," Justin said. "I know."

  That hole was about a meter—they would say three feet here—off the ground. Beckie looked at it some more. "Thanks for knocking me down," she said. "I didn't know what you were doing for a second, but—thanks. How did you know to do that?"

  For that second, she likely thought he was attacking her. Well, he wasn't, not like that. "My uncle's a veteran," he answered. "He says you've got to get fiat if they start shelling. He says a hole in the ground is better, but we didn't have one handy."

  "I was trying to dig a hole in the linoleum for a while there." Beckie looked at her hands. So did Justin. She'd broken a couple of fingernails. She wasn't kidding. Justin had wanted to dig a hole and pull it in after himself, too. "Thanks," Beckie said again. She kissed him half on the cheek, half on the mouth.

  "It's okay." Justin put a hand on her shoulder. "I mean, it's not okay, but I was glad to do it. I mean—you know."

  "I think so." Beckie laughed—shakily this time, not the wild laughter that had kept them both from screaming. "You're all right, Justin. Better than all right."

  "Am I?" He was stuck in Elizabeth. He was stuck in this whole alternate. He was liable to get blasted to hamburger or murdered by a plague. All things considered ... He patted Beckie. "Could be worse, I guess."

  Nine

  Mr. Snodgrass stared at the hole in the wall. He'd been at the grocery when the Ohioans shelled Elizabeth. The store didn't get a scratch. "You were in the kitchen, you say?" he asked Beckie.

  "That's right," she said. "Justin was over. We were getting fizzes, and . . ." Once terror was past, it didn't seem real. She'd been in a car crash once, when a drunk rearended her mother. This was like that, only more so.

  He looked at the hole again. "You were lucky," he said.

  "Tell me about it!" she exclaimed. That startled a smile out of him. But fair was fair. She had to give Justin his due: "It wasn't just luck. Justin kind of, uh, tackled me and got us both under the table."

  "That was smart of him," Mr. Snodgrass said. Had he served in the army? Had he fought in one of Virginia's little wars? Beckie realized she didn't know. He nodded to himself. "That was right smart, matter of fact. Best he could've done with the two of you where you were, I reckon."

  "It scared me when he did it," Beckie said. "Then things started blowing up, and I got scared worse."

  "Yeah." Mr. Snodgrass' voice was dry. "Almost needed a new diaper myself." Beckie started to laugh, then cut it off when she realized he wasn't kidding. And she'd been about that scared, too, when shells crashed down all around. For a little while, she'd had nothing to do with whether she lived or died. If that wasn't enough to scare somebody, she couldn't think what would be.

  "What are we going to do?" she said, not so much because she thought Mr. Snodgrass had the answer as because she had to let it out or burst.

  "Well, I'll tell you one thing I aim to do pretty darn quick," he said. Beckie made a questioning noise. He went on, "I'm going to get the spade out of the garage and dig me a good trench in the back yard. Maybe another one in the front yard. Cover over part of it with some corrugated sheet iron I've got and it'll make a tolerable shelter. Better'n ducking under the kitchen table, that's for sure."

  "Sounds like a good idea," Beckie said, and then, "Can I help?"

  He started to say no. She could tell. But she also watched him change his mind. "Well, maybe you can," he said. "I'm not as spry as I used to be. You don't mind getting dirty and sweaty, you don't mind blisters on your hands, I expect you'll do all right."

  Beckie looked down at her palms. They were soft and smooth. Why not? What had she ever done that would toughen them up? She hadn't thought she would get stuck in the middle of—or even on the edges of—a war, though. "I don't care," she said firmly. "Better my hands than my neck."

  "Now that's a sensible thing to say." Mr. Snodgrass looked around to make sure Gran was out of earshot. He didn't see her, but lowered his voice anyway: "You've come out with a good many sensible things lately, you have. Makes it hard for me to believe you're really Myrtle's granddaughter, no offense."

  "I'm not mad—I know what you mean," Beckie said. They traded conspirator's grins. She went on, "Maybe I got it from my dad's side of the family—I don't know. But I'll tell you something: my mom doesn't get along with Gran, either."

  "Can't say I'm surprised." Mr. Snodgrass looked around again. "Back when Myrtle lived here, nobody got along with her."

  "Some things don't change, do they?" Beckie said.

  "I reckon not," he answered. "Come on, then. Let's get to work."

  It was just as hard as he said it would be. Digging a long, deep slit in the ground was no fun at all, not when the temperature and the humidity were both in the nineties. That was how Mr. Snodgrass put it, anyway. To Beckie, who was used to Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, it seemed about thirty-five. It was hot and sticky either way. One of them would dig for a while, then stop and pass the shovel to the other. Beckie didn't let Mr. Snodgrass be a hero—she didn't want him keeling over.

  And she didn't feel much like a hero, either. Sweat made her clothes stick to her like glue. She figured she would have to wring out her blouse after she finally took it off. Antiperspirant or no antiperspirant, before long she could smell herself. She did get blisters. They stung. She could go on working in spite of them. She could, and she did.

  Mr. Snodgrass got blisters, too. "Haven't tried anything like this in a while," he said while Beckie took a turn with the spade.

  "It's tearing your lawn to pieces," she said.

  "Well, I can set it to rights one of these days," he answered. "That'll give me something to do. And you notice we aren't the only folks digging in."

  Beckie let fly with another shovelful of dirt. She had noticed. Several other people up and down Prunty Street were making shelters. One house had taken a direct hit. That made as good an argument for digging in as any she could think of.

  Then Mr. Snodgrass said, "Don't know what we'll do if they start throwing poison gas at us. I couldn't begin to tell you where the gas masks're at. Have to dig 'em out, wherever they are."

  "Why do you have gas masks?" Beckie asked.

  He paused to wipe sweat off his forehead before answering, "Well, you never can tell." He seemed to think that was reason enough. In a place like this, not far from the border between two states that didn't like each other, maybe it was.

  Travel was supposed to broaden you. It sure was teaching Beckie things she'd never known before. The main thing it was teaching her was how lucky she was to live in Los Angeles, a city far from any border, and in California, a state too strong for any of its neighbors to bother much. Before she left for this trip with Gran, she took all that for granted. As she started to dig again, she knew she never would again.

  Most of the time, Justin and Mr. Brooks had been the only guests in Elizabeth's only motel. They weren't any more. Virginian soldiers filled the other rooms. They played the TVs in the rooms loud. They played what sounded to Justin like bluegrass music even louder. Being soldiers, they got up too early in the morning and made all kinds of ungodly noise right outside the window.

  When Justin grumbled, Mr. Brooks gave him a crooked s
mile. "Go ahead," he said. "Bang on the walls. Go to their captain and complain."

  Justin thought about that for a good microsecond, maybe even a microsecond and a half. "Yeah, right," he said sweetly.

  Mr. Brooks laughed. "When I was your age, we said, 'And then you wake up.' Same thing either way."

  "We say that, too, but it's not quite the same," Justin answered. The coin and stamp dealer raised an eyebrow. "We are waking up—that's the problem," Justin explained.

  "Oh. Well, you're not wrong. But I don't know what we can do about it," Mr. Brooks said. "Besides complain, I mean."

  The last four words took away what Justin was about to say. Instead of giving the automatic answer, he had to think about what came out next. "The real problem isn't the soldiers," he said after a few seconds. "The real problem is that we're stuck in this miserable little place when we really need to be down in Charleston."

  "That's a problem, all right," Mr. Brooks agreed. "I don't know what we can do about it right this minute, though. Sometimes you've got to sit tight and wait."

  "I'm sick of doing that!" Justin said. "It's driving me up the wall."

  "Have you got any better ideas?" the older man asked pointedly.

  "If I did, I'd be using them, believe me," Justin said.

  "Okay. That's fair enough. Just don't do anything dumb, that's all," Mr. Brooks said.

  Big, growling trucks carried more soldiers west. Maybe the Negro revolt wasn't going as well as the white Virginians feared it would at first. Or maybe the powers that be in Richmond remembered they had a war on their hands, too. Justin thought leaving the first garrison west of Elizabeth would have been smarter, but he wasn't running things, which was bound to be just as well.