The Disunited States of America Read online

  “Smitty,” the sergeant said.

  “Yeah, Sarge?” said Justin’s newfound friend—comrade, anyway.

  “Take the new guy here and go on over to that sandbag revetment on the corner for first watch. Cal and Sam will relieve you in three hours.”

  “Right, Sarge,” Smitty said, which was the kind of thing you said when a sergeant told you to do something. He nudged Justin. “C’mon, man. If they couldn’t shoot us out in the open, they won’t shoot us when we got sandbags in front of us, right?”

  “I guess,” Justin said. “I hope.” Smitty laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. He’d proved himself, so Smitty must have thought he was. Oh, joy.

  “Safer here than back there,” Smitty said when they got to the revetment. He kicked a sandbag. “Bulletproof as anything.”

  He was bound to be right about that. The sandbags were two and three deep, and piled up to shoulder height—a little less on Justin, because he was tall. “Yeah, it’d take a rocket to punch through this stuff,” he said, and then, “Have they got rockets?” He wondered if Beckie’s uncle had smuggled in some along with the rifles she’d had her feet on.

  “I reckon they do,” Smitty answered, and then said something rude about Ohioans’ personal habits. “But they’ve got a lot more small arms. We came up against everything from the stuff we carry down to .22s and shotguns. Must give them nightmares about keeping everybody in cartridges.”

  “Yeah.” Justin hadn’t worried about such things. If you had an empty gun, though, what could you do with it? Hit somebody over the head—that was about all. He looked west through the smoke. “Sun’s finally going down. I don’t think I’ve ever been through a longer day.”

  “Not over yet. Some of those people”—again, not the exact word Smitty used—“will be sneaking around at night. IR goggles are good, but they aren’t as good as the real eyeball.”

  “Uh-huh.” Justin hoped his voice didn’t sound too hollow. He didn’t know how to use his goggles. Adrian had been trained with them. Justin hadn’t. I’ll turn them on and hope for the best, he thought. That should be better than nothing, anyhow.

  With all the smoke in the air, it got dark fast. Justin flipped down the goggles, then fumbled till he found a switch. Now he watched the world in shades of black and green. Night-vision goggles in the home timeline gave much better images. A fire a couple of hundred meters away seemed bright as the sun. Justin didn’t know how to turn down the gain.

  He wished Smitty would fall asleep. Then he could put on his own clothes and find the coin shop … find his mother.

  Smitty seemed much too wide awake. What did they do to sentries who fell asleep at their posts here? Shoot them, the way they had in lots of places (including the U.S.A.) in the home timeline? Justin wouldn’t have been surprised. One thing he’d already found out about war: both sides played for keeps.

  When Justin yawned enormously, Smitty reached into a pocket and pulled out a little plastic bottle. “Want a pill? You won’t worry about sleeping for the next two days.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Improvising, Justin went on, “I don’t like to use ’em unless I really have to. I’m liable to run down just when I ought to keep going.”

  “Then you take another one.” But Smitty didn’t push it. “You’ve got a point, I guess. Take too many and they’ll mess you up. Every once in a while, though, you gotta.”

  “Sure,” Justin said, and then, “What was that?” Was it an imaginary noise, a noise that came from nerves stretched too tight? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Still, better to think you heard a noise that wasn’t really there than to miss one that was.

  “Where?” Smitty’s voice was the tiniest thread of whisper.

  “Over that way,” Justin whispered back, pointing in the general direction of the fire. “Can’t see anything much.”

  To his surprise, Smitty slipped off his goggles. When he did, he started to laugh. “Those sneaky so-and-so’s,” he said. “They know we’ll be using the IR gear, and the fire masks them. But when you just look that way …”

  Justin raised his goggles, too. The fire lit up three men crawling toward the revetment. They were almost close enough to chuck a grenade. That would have been no laughing matter. Smitty started shooting: neat bursts of three or four rounds, so his assault rifle’s muzzle didn’t climb too high. The advancing Negroes never had a chance. Justin fired a few rounds, too, not aiming at them, so he’d seem to be doing something. It hardly mattered—inside of a few seconds, the blacks were all dead or dying.

  “Good thing you had your ears open,” Smitty said. Killing people didn’t bother him much. Yes, they would have blown him up if they got the chance. Even so …

  “Don’t know how I can hear anything after all the gunfire.” Justin’s ears were ringing.

  “Gun bunnies have it worse than we do,” Smitty said. “Artilleryman’s ear is no fun at all. It makes you deaf to people talking and lets you hear the stuff that doesn’t matter half as much.”

  “Wonderful,” Justin said, and Smitty nodded. Justin wished he had ear plugs. Maybe he did—he didn’t know what all was in the pack or in the pouches on his belt. He couldn’t very well start fumbling around to find out now. One thing did occur to him: “Why don’t you leave your goggles on, and I’ll take mine off? That way, one of us will be sure to spot any kind of trouble.” And I won’t have to mess with what I don’t understand.

  “Good thinking,” Smitty said. “We’ll do it.”

  Every time anything made any kind of noise, close or near, Justin flinched. Adrenaline rivered through him. “I don’t need your little pills after all,” he told Smitty. “Nothing like fear to wire you.”

  “Wire you?” Smitty frowned. Justin realized that wasn’t slang in this alternate. After a second, though, Smitty got it. “Oh, I know what you mean. Yeah, being scared cranks me, too—you betcha.” That made sense here and in the home timeline.

  Nobody else came close to them while they were on watch. Justin supposed three corpses lying not far away discouraged visitors. He knew they would have discouraged him. After what seemed like forever, their reliefs came up. “Had company, did you?” one of the soldiers said, pointing to the bodies.

  “Yeah. They got cute.” Smitty explained the trick the Negroes had used. “Don’t let ’em catch you the same way, or you’ll be sorry.” He also mentioned Justin’s idea for having one soldier use goggles while the other went without. “He’s pretty smart,” he finished, and thumped Justin on the back. “Glad we brought him along.”

  “He got Eddie to cover when they shot him, too, didn’t he?” one of the new men said. Eddie nodded. The other soldier turned to Justin. “You’re good in my book, buddy.”

  “Thanks.” How much that meant to Justin himself surprised him.

  He and Smitty made it back to their company’s encampment without any trouble. As he unrolled his sleeping bag, he thought about waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking away. He thought about it … . Then he lay down. Sleep clubbed him over the head. Whatever happened after that, he didn’t know a thing about it.

  One of the amusement parks in Southern California had something called Mr. Frog’s Crazy Ride. It was—loosely—based on a famous children’s book. Beckie had always liked The Breeze in the Birches. All she could think now, though, was that the fabulous Mr. Frog was only a polliwog when it came to crazy rides. Getting from Elizabeth to Charleston beat the pants off anything at Mortimer’s World.

  Mr. Brooks started going by the route he’d used to come up to Elizabeth: over side roads west to the main highway south. That probably would have worked it he were able to get to the main highway. But he wasn’t. A couple of kilometers west of Elizabeth, the road stopped being a road. There was an enormous crater that stretched all the way across it, and something—a bulldozer?—had piled the rubble into a neat barricade.

  “Well … fudge,” Mr. Brooks said. “I guess they didn’t want anybody from Ohio coming down
this road. They know how to get what they want, don’t they?”

  “Can you go around?” Gran asked. As far as Beckie knew, that was her second dumbest question of all time, right behind Did anything break? when the shell put a hole in Mr. Snodgrass’ kitchen wall. That topped the list, but this one gave it a run for its money.

  “If I had an armored personnel carrier, I might try it,” Mr. Brooks answered with what Beckie thought was commendable calm. “In a Hupmobile that’s seen better days—thanks, but no thanks.”

  “What will you do, then?” Gran asked.

  “Go back and try the long way around. What else can I do?” Mr. Brooks said. Even going back wasn’t easy. He did some fancy driving to turn around on the narrow road, then started east towards Elizabeth again. “I hope we don’t get there at the same time as the Ohio troops do.”

  They beat the Ohioans, but not by much. Somebody yelled at them through a bullhorn. Somebody else fired a couple of shots at them. Beckie thought the shots were aimed their way, anyhow. Mr. Brooks took two corners on two wheels and got away. Beckie would have been more impressed than she was if she hadn’t been scared to death, too.

  “Are you trying to kill all of us?” Gran squawked.

  “No, ma’am,” Mr. Brooks answered, polite as a preacher. “I’m trying not to.” The Hupmobile’s brakes squealed as he jerked the car around another corner.

  “Well, now I know why we wear seat belts,” Beckie said. Gran hadn’t wanted to put hers on. Mr. Brooks had been polite then, too: he’d politely told her she could walk in that case. He wasn’t kidding. Even Gran, who was stubborner than most cats, could figure that out for herself. She had the belt on. So did Beckie, without argument.

  As they sped east, away from Elizabeth, Mr. Brooks said, “I hope the Virginians didn’t mine this stretch of road after they went down it.”

  Gran found another smart question to ask: “What happens if they did?”

  “We blow up.” Mr. Brooks sounded remarkably lighthearted about it. Would that make Gran stop asking questions? Beckie would have quit a lot sooner herself, but her grandmother never had known how to take a hint.

  “Do you think we can get there without blowing up?” No, Gran had no clue that she might be irritating.

  “Not a chance. I came this way on purpose, just so I could go sky-high,” Mr. Brooks answered, deadpan. “And when you and Beckie wanted to come along, I really looked forward to blasting a couple of innocent bystanders, too.”

  Beckie giggled. She couldn’t help herself. Gran was not amused. “Young man, are you playing games with me?” she demanded. Her tones suggested she would take Mr. Brooks to the woodshed if he dared do such a thing.

  He stopped wasting time being polite: “Mrs. Bentley, get out of my hair and let me drive. I didn’t want to bring you. You wanted to come. Now pipe down.”

  Gran opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Chances were nobody’d talked to her like that since Beckie’s grandfather was alive. It didn’t do him much good, not from what Beckie’d heard, but Mr. Brooks took Gran by surprise. The silence was chilly, but he didn’t seem to care.

  Then they came to a checkpoint. A soldier strode out from a sandbagged machine-gun nest and held up his right hand. “Where y’all think you’re going?” he demanded. “There’s not supposed to be any civilian traffic on the road.”

  “I know that, but we’ve got a medical emergency.” Mr. Brooks pointed to Gran.

  The soldier took a step back. He brought up his assault rifle. “If she’s got the plague, you really can’t take her anywhere.”

  “No, nothing to do with that. You can see for yourself—she’d look sicker if she did,” Mr. Brooks said. He was right about that. Gran, as usual, looked healthy as an ox. She also looked surprised to hear she was sick. Usually, she complained about her health. It would be just like her to say she was fine now. To Beckie’s relief, she didn’t. Mr. Brooks went on, “She’s been getting her therapy in Parkersburg. We can’t go there now, so I have to take her down to Charleston for treatment. You don’t want her to die, do you?”

  By the look on the soldier’s face, he couldn’t have cared less. “Let me talk to my sergeant,” he said at last. “You stay right there till I get back if you know what’s good for you.”

  He walked back to the revetment. When he returned, he had an older man with him. “What the devil’s going on here?” the noncom said.

  Mr. Brooks went through his song and dance again. “She’s a sweet old lady,” he said—with a straight face, too, which proved he was a good actor. “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to, believe me.”

  “Well …” The sergeant rubbed his chin. “All right. Go on. I hope your mother gets better.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Mr. Brooks hadn’t said anything about that. In his shoes, Beckie wouldn’t have, either. But he rallied fast—maybe he could have been an actor. “Yeah, thanks. Twonk’s Disease is treatable if you catch it in time.” He drove away before the sergeant could change his mind.

  “Twonk’s Disease?” Beckie said.

  He cast off his usual air of gloom to grin at her. “First name that popped into my mind.”

  “Is there such a thing as Twonk’s Disease?”

  “There is now. If you don’t think so, ask that soldier.”

  Beckie thought it over. Mr. Brooks had something, no doubt about it. What people believed to be true often ended up as important as what really was true. “What would you have done if he told you to turn around?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I could have taken out the whole checkpoint.” He didn’t sound as if he was kidding. He sounded more like someone weighing the odds. Beckie didn’t know what kind of weapons he had. She hadn’t known he had any, though she would have guessed he did.

  “More to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?” she said.

  “Me?” He shook his head. “Nah. I’m about as ordinary as—”

  “Somebody who talks about taking out a checkpoint full of soldiers,” Beckie finished for him. Had he tried, she suspected he could have done it. He might look ordinary, but he wasn’t. Come to think of it, neither was Justin. An interesting family. An unusual family, Beckie thought. She wondered what Justin’s mother was like.

  Mr. Brooks looked faintly embarrassed. Embarrassed at talking that way, or embarrassed at showing too much of himself? Beckie wasn’t sure. “Talk is cheap,” he said. “I got mad at that guy, and so …”

  “Sure,” Beckie said. Yeah, sure, she thought.

  “You know,” Gran said, “I saw a TV show about Twonk’s Disease once. I think I should go to the doctor and get looked at, because I may have it.”

  Beckie didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. Mr. Brooks just kept driving. If his eyes twinkled a little, if his cheeks and even his ears turned pink, then they did, that was all. If he was laughing inside, nobody could prove it. And that was bound to be just as well.

  Things weren’t as simple as Justin wished they were. They weren’t as simple as he’d expected them to be. That seemed to be how growing up worked. Once you got into the middle of something, it usually turned out to be more complicated than you figured it would when you started.

  With most things, that was annoying, but you dealt with it and went on. When you were pretending to be a soldier, complications were liable to get you killed.

  Justin hadn’t thought he would have to go on pretending very long. He hadn’t thought he would have to go into combat, either. He had thought he would be able to slip away from the real soldiers as soon as he got into Charleston. He turned out to be wrong, wrong, and wrong, respectively.

  Gunfire started up again well before sunup. He didn’t hear it, not at first. Even if he was sleeping on the ground, he was sleeping hard. He didn’t want to wake up even when Smitty shook him. “Come on, man—move,” Smitty said. “You want to get shot?”

  “Huh?” All Justin wanted to do was close his eyes again.

  “
Come on.” Smitty shook him some more. Then a bullet cracked by overhead. That got Justin moving. It got him moving faster than Smitty was, in fact. His lifelong buddy of not quite twenty-four hours laughed at him. “There you go,” Smitty said. “See? I knew you could do it.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Justin said as he dove into a hole a shell had torn in the ground.

  Smitty went on laughing, but not for long. “Hey, man,” he said, “you better pile some of that dirt in front of you. You’d rather have a bullet or a fragment get stopped there. That way, it won’t tear you up.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Justin pulled an entrenching tool—halfway between a big trowel and a small shovel—off his belt and started work. He dug some more dirt out of the hole and piled that in front of him, too. The deeper he dug, the thicker the rampart got, the safer he felt. Maybe some of that safety lay only in his mind, but he’d take it any which way.

  Would he have thought to dig in if Smitty didn’t suggest it? He hoped so, but he wasn’t sure. Soldiering seemed like any other job—it came with tricks of the trade. Smitty knew them. He’d probably learned them in basic training, or whatever they called it here. Justin … didn’t.

  In an ordinary job, knowing the tricks let you work better, work faster. Maybe it kept you from getting hurt if you worked with machinery. Here, knowing what was what helped keep you alive. Justin had seen a lot of dead bodies since he got to Charleston. He could smell more that he couldn’t see. It was another hot, sticky day, and corpses went bad in a hurry. The sickly-sweet stink made him want to puke.

  He could smell himself, too, and the other soldiers. He’d been in this uniform for more than a day, and done plenty of sweating. How long before he could shower or change clothes? He had no idea. Nobody’d told him anything about stuff like that. People told you what to do. They didn’t bother with why. You were supposed to know, or else not to care. That didn’t strike Justin as the best way to do things, but nobody cared what he thought. Getting ignored by the people set over you also seemed to be part of soldiering.