The Disunited States of America Read online

  But the coin and stamp shop was still standing. Even if it weren’t, the room in the subbasement where the transposition chamber came and went wouldn’t be damaged. But could Mom have got down there fast enough? Even if she could have, would Crosstime Traffic have let her leave this alternate with a genetically engineered disease on the loose? It seemed unlikely.

  Justin hoped that was all wasted worry. He looked up and down the street. No other soldiers in sight. Nobody to notice if he went in here. He pulled at the door. It was locked. He muttered—he should have known it would be. He still had a key. He put it in the lock and turned, then tried the door. It opened.

  Nobody stood behind the counter. Justin took a couple of steps forward into the shop, letting the door click shut behind him. The sharp little noise brought his mother out from the back room. She looked alarmed—she looked terrified—at seeing a large soldier with an assault rifle in the shop. But her voice was brisk and didn’t wobble as she asked, “What do you want, Private?”

  She didn’t recognize him. He was wearing a grimy uniform she didn’t expect, a helmet that changed the shape of his face, and a couple of days’ worth of filth and stubble. He grinned. “Hi, Mom,” he said.

  Her jaw dropped. “Justin?” she whispered. Then she said, “Justin!” at something not far from a scream and threw her arms around him. When she finally let go, she said, “I never thought I’d hug anybody carrying a gun.”

  That reminded him of what he’d seen and done while he wore the uniform and the helmet and the dirt and stubble. With a shudder, he set the rifle down and said, “If I never see this … this thing again, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Oh.” She looked at him again—for real this time. “You weren’t just carrying ME! You used it, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” He grimaced. “If I didn’t, one of the rebels would have used one on me. I lost my lunch right after that.”

  “I believe you,” his mother said. “How come you had it in the first place?”

  “It was the only way I saw to get back here from Elizabeth,” Justin answered. “It worked, too.” He wasn’t exactly thrilled that it had. People said you could buy something at too high a price. He’d understood that with money before, but no other way. He did now.

  Mom must have seen as much on his face. “Well, you are here,” she said. “That may not be the only thing that matters, but I’m awful glad to see you—now that I’m not scared to death any more, I mean. Is Randy all right?”

  “He was fine the last time I saw him, a couple of days ago,” Justin said. “But how have you been? You were in the middle of everything.”

  “More like on the edges,” Mom said. “If this place were in the middle, it wouldn’t still be standing.”

  She was right about that. “Can they cure the disease the Ohioans turned loose?” he asked. “Can they get us out of here?”

  “They already have a vaccine. They’re getting close to a cure,” his mother answered.

  “A vaccine’s just as good,” Justin said, and then, remembering Irma and Mrs. Snodgrass, “Well, unless you’ve already got it, anyway.”

  “Unless,” his mother agreed. “The problem now, the way I understand it, is getting the vaccine to the Virginians without making them suspicious. Last I heard, we were thinking of mailing it to Richmond as if it came from a lab in Pennsylvania or Wabash.” The state of Wabash wasn’t too different from Indiana in the home timeline. “The hope is they’ll be so glad to get it, they won’t ask many questions.”

  “What about getting us back to the home timeline?” Justin asked. That was the thing that was uppermost in his mind.

  “They … aren’t quite ready yet,” Mom said. “We’ve been exposed to the virus. The air the transposition chamber picks up when it opens for us may have the bug floating around in it, too. They don’t want to bring it back to the home timeline.”

  “But they’ve got the vaccine! You said they’re close to a cure!” Justin had come back to Charleston wanting to get home. If he couldn’t, if he was still stuck in this alternate, he might almost have stayed in Elizabeth—though it was nice to be sure Mom was okay.

  “They’ve got ’em, and they don’t want to have to use ’em,” she said. “That would be expensive, and if they start having cases anyway … . Well, can you imagine the lawsuits? They really—I mean really—don’t want another black eye so soon after the slavery scandal.”

  Justin could see that. It made good sense in terms of what Crosstime Traffic needed. In terms of what he and his mother and Mr. Brooks needed, though, it wasn’t so great. “They can’t just strand us here … can they?”

  “I don’t think they’ll do that,” Mom said.

  “If they do, we’ ll sue them,” Justin said fiercely.

  “Well, no.” His mother shook his head. “We signed liability waivers before we came here. This isn’t company negligence or anything. This is part of the risk we take when we come to a high-tech alternate. No lawyer will touch this one, and we’d get thrown out of court if we found one who would.”

  “Oh.” Justin didn’t think he’d ever made a gloomier noise.

  “They’re working on it,” Mom said. “I don’t know the details—they haven’t told me. But they don’t want to leave us here. That wouldn’t look good, either.”

  “Well, hooray.” Getting saved because it helped Crosstime Traffic’s image wasn’t exactly what Justin had in mind, either.

  “You ought to be glad they’ve got some reason to want to bring us back,” Mom said. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t try so hard.”

  “How hard are they trying now?”

  “I think something is happening. I hope so, anyway.”

  “It had better be,” Justin said, though he had no idea what he could do if it weren’t.

  A car pulled up in front of the shop. Justin wasn’t very surprised when Mr. Brooks got out. If he’d managed to get down to Charleston himself, that had to be the boot in the behind the coin and stamp dealer needed. Justin opened the door for him. Mr. Brooks greeted him with, “You dummy.”

  “I made it,” Justin said.

  “Oh, boy.” He didn’t impress the older man. Mr. Brooks pointed to the assault rifle leaning against the wall. “Did you have to use that?”

  “Yeah,” Justin admitted in a small voice.

  “How did you like it?”

  Justin didn’t say anything. His face must have said it all, though, because Mr. Brooks set a hand on his shoulder. Justin managed a shaky nod. “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Brooks answered. “If you did like it, that would worry me. It’s not a game out there. Whoever you shot, he was real. You always need to remember that. Sometimes it happens. If he’s gonna shoot you, you take care of yourself and worry about it later. But you always have to take it seriously, because the other fellow wants to live just as much as you do.”

  “I … found that out.” Justin wondered if finding it out would set him apart from everybody he knew back in the home timeline. Knowing things your friends didn’t couldn’t help but isolate you from them … could it?

  “You’ve joined a club nobody wants to belong to.” Mr. Brooks was scarily good at thinking along with him. The older man went on, “Chances are you’ll meet more members than you know about, because the others won’t talk about it any more than you will.” He turned to Justin’s mother. “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m still alive. Nobody’s robbed the place,” she answered. Then she filled him in on the bigger picture, the way she had with Justin.

  He nodded. “Okay. Thanks. It could be worse. It could be better, too, but it could always be better.”

  He was asking Mom more questions when Justin went into the back room. He got out of Adrian’s uniform as fast as he could and put on the clothes he had in the pack. They were wrinkled as anything, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about going upstairs for a different outfit, either. He wanted to turn into himself again, as fast as he coul
d, not a Virginia soldier any more. Anything but a Virginia soldier, in fact.

  When he came out again, Mr. Brooks nodded to him. “Took the whammy off, did you?”

  “Yeah!” Justin said.

  “Don’t blame you a bit.”

  Justin nodded now. He was glad the coin and stamp dealer didn’t blame him. But, all things considered, how much difference did that make? He’d blame himself for the rest of his life. If he hadn’t put on the uniform … what?

  He started to think, That African-American kid would still be alive then. But was that true? Was it even likely? Wouldn’t Smitty or one of the other real Virginia soldiers have shot him instead? Or, if they hadn’t, wouldn’t the self-propelled guns have killed him? How could you know? You couldn’t, not for sure. He wondered if he was looking for an excuse to feel less guilty. He hoped not. He would stay a member of Mr. Brooks’ unhappy club no matter what. He’d just have to figure out how to live with it, and that wouldn’t happen overnight, either.

  He had the rest of his life to worry about it. The kid he’d shot didn’t, not anymore. And that was exactly the point.

  “I don’t feel good.” Gran said it in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. Most of the time, she was proud of her aches and pains. She used them to outdo other people around her who might have the nerve not to be well. But coming out and announcing something like this wasn’t her usual style.

  Because it wasn’t, Beckie paid more attention than she would have otherwise. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “The light seems too bright. And I’m warm, even though I know the air conditioner is running,” Gran said.

  Beckie walked over to her and put a hand on her forehead. She almost jerked it back in alarm. Her grandmother wasn’t just warm. She was hot, much too hot. It could have been a lot of things. Beckie feared she knew what it was.

  “Can you get me some water?” Gran usually milked her symptoms for all they were worth, too.

  This time, Beckie didn’t mind. As she went to the sink, she wondered what to do. Call the local emergency number? With fighting still going on in the city, would anybody pay attention? A long burst of machine-gun fire underscored her fears. Somebody screamed—not a short, frightened scream like the ones in the movies, but a shriek that went on and on and on. Anybody who screamed that way was dying as fast as he could, but not fast enough.

  But with people in Charleston making noises like that, how long would the emergency people take to get here if they came at all? What would they do when they did? Will they stick me in quarantine somewhere? Will I ever get out again? She and Gran were foreigners here. Did California even have a consulate in Charleston? She looked in the phone book and didn’t find one. Especially during a rebellion, the Virginians could do anything they wanted.

  “Let me have some more,” Gran said, so Beckie did.

  Then she looked in the phone book again. Sure enough, there it was: CHARLESTON COINS AND STAMP COMPANY. It gave an address along with the phone number. Beckie didn’t know where that address was. She’d never expected to come to Charleston. But the room had a computer terminal. It was slow and clunky by California standards, but it worked.

  As she’d hoped, the coin and stamp shop was just a few blocks away. She’d figured Mr. Brooks would put her and Gran somewhere close to his shop. He and Justin were the only people she knew here. They could tell her what to do.

  Whatever it was, she needed to do it in a hurry. Gran was sitting there, sort of staring at the TV. She often watched without really knowing what was going on, but this was different. Her brain wasn’t working right. She would have stared the same way if she were pointed in some other direction.

  Beckie tried using her cell phone to call the coin and stamp shop. No luck—all she got was static. The hotel room had no phone, any more than one in California would have. Land lines were dead, dead, dead. She wished she were in some backward part of the world where they still used them—Russia, maybe, or central Africa. She’d never imagined low tech could be better than high, but she’d never been in a war before, either. Phone service was probably out all over western Virginia and eastern Ohio. What a mess.

  If she couldn’t call, she had to go. She didn’t like leaving Gran by herself, but she couldn’t see that she had much choice. Gran wasn’t likely to wander off. If she got sicker … Beckie gnawed on the inside of her lower lip. She didn’t like to think about that.

  I’m going to get help, she told herself. I won’t be gone long. I hope I won’t, anyway.

  Then she told Gran the same thing. Gran nodded vaguely. “I think the muffins are spoiled,” she said, which meant she didn’t hear or she was out of her head with fever or all of the above.

  Three blocks over and two blocks down toward the river. That was what the terminal said. It didn’t say anything about what might be going on between here and there. Beckie wished it would have. She wasn’t brave—not even close. But she knew she had to go, and so she left the hotel room before she gave herself much of a chance to think about it.

  The bellhops and porters were Negroes. So were the waiters and, she presumed, the cooks. In California, she wouldn’t have paid much attention—and there would have been all kinds of people doing those jobs. Here, seeing black faces made her nervous. She knew it shouldn’t have … or should it? How much did they hate whites? How many good reasons for hating whites did they have?

  When a bellhop tipped his cap to her as she went out, she almost screamed. What was he thinking? How much did he despise himself—and her—because he had to make that servile gesture? How much did he wish he had a rifle in his hands and were fighting the soldiers from Virginia? Wouldn’t paying them back almost be worth getting shot?

  A lot of Negroes in Charleston sure seemed to think so.

  Going out on the street, getting away from those people who wouldn’t have been polite if they weren’t getting paid, came as a relief … for a little while. Then she found out how much the hotel’s soundproofing muffled the noise of gunfire. It was much louder, and much closer, than she’d thought.

  “Let’s see your papers!” a soldier barked at the first checkpoint she came to. She handed them over. His eyebrows jumped in surprise, almost disappearing under the brim of his helmet. “California passport! What in blazes are you doing here?”

  “Visiting friends,” Beckie said, which wasn’t even a lie. “I didn’t know I’d get stuck when the war started.” That was also true.

  “Who are these friends?” the soldier asked.

  “Justin Monroe and his uncle, Randolph Brooks,” Beckie answered. “Mr. Brooks runs a coin shop not far from here.”

  “He does, Everett,” another soldier said. “I remember seeing the place.”

  “Okay.” Everett looked at the passport again, shook his head, and gave the document back to Beckie. “You can go, I guess. But be careful. Things aren’t exactly safe around here yet.”

  She found out what he meant when she walked around the corner. Two bodies lay there—one white, one black. Flies buzzed over them and settled in the blood that had pooled on the sidewalk. A mockingbird—a cheerful, sweet-voiced mockingbird—pecked at one of the corpses and swallowed … something. Stomach knotting, Beckie waved her arms. The bird screeched but flew away.

  Those bodies were fresh. Something in the air told Beckie of others she couldn’t see. The ones she smelled had been dead longer. How long would that stench last? How could anyone stand to live here till it went away?

  People were on the streets. Some moved warily, as if afraid of what might happen next. Beckie moved that way herself. Who could tell when a wacko of any color might pop out of a doorway and start shooting? But others walked along as if things were normal. A man in his twenties smiled at Beckie the way he might have on any street in the world. She nodded, but couldn’t make herself smile back.

  Three blocks over then a left turn, then downhill toward the Kanawha. Lots of Charleston—lots of western Virginia—seemed to be uphill or downh
ill or sidehill or somethinghill. California had country more rugged than this, but hardly anybody lived in it. There were no towns in the Sierras with a couple of hundred thousand people in them.

  On the way down toward the river, she had to go by one of the bodies she’d been smelling. There it lay, all bloated and stinking, a monument to … what? To stupidity. To man’s inhumanity to man. But the Virginians wouldn’t see it, neither the whites nor the blacks. Why not? It sure looked obvious to her.

  Not even Justin and Mr. Brooks would admit it, and they seemed different from the other Virginians she’d met. The Snodgrasses couldn’t even see the problem. Beckie had the feeling Justin and his uncle could, but they didn’t want to look.

  She wondered if she was imagining things. She didn’t think so. That was probably a big part of why she was on her way to the coin and stamp shop. They were unusual people, and they might have unusual ways to help.

  And there was the shop, across the street. Actually, first she saw the car in which Mr. Brooks drove her and Gran to Charleston. But COINS AND STAMPS was neatly lettered in gold on the plate-glass window closest to it. So was the street number. In Los Angeles, odd numbers were on the western and northern sides of the street, evens to the south and east. She hadn’t needed long to see they didn’t do things that way in Ohio and Virginia. The stamp and coin shop was on the west side of the street, but its address was 696. Close to the number of the beast, but not quite, Beckie thought.

  There wasn’t much traffic. Beckie didn’t feel the least bit guilty about jaywalking. In Charleston right now, she was more likely to get hit by a sniper than by an oncoming car. She wished she hadn’t thought of it like that. She especially wished she hadn’t when a burst of automatic-weapons fire only a couple of blocks away made her jump in the air. A woman screamed, and went on screaming. She shuddered. One more noise you never wanted to hear.