The Disunited States Read online

  She went back into the Snodgrasses' house. Mr. Snodgrass wore a handlebar mustache that had been red once upon a time—pictures of him in his younger days were all over the house. Now it was the color of vanilla ice cream with a little strawberry mixed in. Beckie thought it made him look like a hick no matter what color it was. Nobody in California wore a handlebar mustache. Nobody in Ohio did, either, not even someone like Uncle Luke.

  But if he was a hick, he was a nice hick. He nodded and said, "Mornin', Rebecca." He didn't call her Beckie, the way almost everybody did. She'd almost told him to a couple of times, but she always held back. This was a more formal kind of place than California. She didn't hate her full name or anything. She just didn't use it very often.

  "Good morning, Mr. Snodgrass," she said. Even though his name sounded funny to her, she didn't feel comfortable calling him Ted. He was old enough to be her grandfather, after all. "You've got your coin stuff out."

  He nodded again. "Got a dealer fella comin' up from the city." In Elizabeth, Charleston was the city. It wasn't anything next to Los Angeles. Compared to this little place, though, it had to seem like L.A., New York City, and Riverton all rolled into one. He went on, "He's got a goldpiece I want to buy if I like it when I see it with my own eyes and not just online. If he wants cash money for it, I'll pull out my credit card. But if he wants to work a swap—well, that's part of the fun of this."

  "It is?" Beckie couldn't see why.

  He plainly meant it, though. "He's got somethin' I want—or I expect he does, 'cause he plays straight about his coins. Seeing what I've got that'd interest him . . . It's not all what the catalogues say a piece is worth. It's what he's interested in, and what he reckons he can sell down there, and stuff like that."

  "Okay." Beckie had a friend who collected stuffed animals, but they were almost like pets to her. She didn't care about what they were worth.

  Mr. Snodgrass smiled over the tops of his glasses. "Some card games—hearts, for instance—are fun just to play. But poker's not interesting without money on the table."

  "I don't know anybody who plays poker," Beckie confessed.

  He blinked. His glasses magnified his eyes, which made his expressions look strange sometimes. "What do they do to pass the time out there?" he murmured. For a second, he made Beckie feel as if she were the hick. That was ridiculous, but it happened anyway. Then he poked a thumb at his own chest. "You do so know somebody like that—me."

  "Sure." She laughed. "I didn't till now, though."

  "That's a different story." Mr. Snodgrass looked at his watch. "He ought to be here any minute now."

  Justin Monroe had his driver's license. All the same, he wasn't sorry Mr. Brooks was behind the wheel. "I know why they build the roads like this," he said as the car went around another hairpin bend. There was no guard rail on the curve. There wasn't anything off the road but a lot of straight down.

  "Why's that?" Mr. Brooks asked, hauling the Mercedes into another turn, just as tight, that went left instead of right.

  "Because of wars, that's why," Justin said, glad he wasn't the sort who got carsick easily. "If anybody tried to invade, he'd have about three tanks and six soldiers left by the time he made it down to Charleston."

  He waited for the older man to laugh, but Mr. Brooks nodded instead. "Wouldn't be surprised if you're right. Pretty rugged country around here."

  "Oh, just a little." Justin tried to stay cool about how rugged it was. Watching the vultures circle overhead didn't help.

  "Buzzards," Mr. Brooks said when he remarked on them.

  "They mostly call 'em buzzards here. Black buzzards and turkey buzzards."

  "Buzzards. Right." Justin hoped he would remember that. People would understand him if he said vultures instead. They would understand, yes, but they would decide he wasn't from around these parts. He wasn't, of course, but he was supposed to be.

  "Besides, things could be worse," Mr. Brooks went on. "We could have headed east instead of north. We're coming down into the lowlands here—well, the lower lands, anyhow. If we were going up into the mountains ..."

  Justin didn't want to think about that. Because he didn't want to, he didn't—much. They left the state highway at a little town called Ripley. Believe it or not, Justin thought. The cartoonist was a century and a half dead, but his name and the phrase stayed tied together—in the home timeline. Here, if Rip-ley had lived, he never got famous. Forgetting believe it or not was as important as remembering buzzards. More important, probably: some people in this alternate did say vultures, but there was no connection here at all between Ripley and the phrase.

  The road that went east to Elizabeth was barely wide enough for two cars. That didn't keep the few people who used it from driving like maniacs. Justin saw some wrecked cars by the side of the road. He wasn't surprised—the only surprise was that he didn't see more.

  "Here we are," Mr. Brooks said when they drove into Elizabeth.

  "Oh, boy." Justin could hardly hide his enthusiasm. It looked like the same sort of little town as Ripley. It also looked as if the twenty-first century, and a good deal of the twentieth, had passed it by. Even the bricks seemed old and faded. Nothing had gone up anytime lately—that was plain enough. Justin wondered if there was a fasarta in the whole town. They had them down in Charleston—not the fancy suhflexive kind people used in the home timeline, but fasartas even so. Here? He wouldn't have bet on it.

  When he said as much, the coin and stamp dealer looked surprised. "You know, I never noticed one way or the other. Maybe you'll get the chance to see for yourself."

  Justin did notice one thing: houses here didn't have satellite dishes on the roof. It made them seem incomplete, like people without ears. California might have sent men to Mars, but there was no continent-wide entertainment market in this alternate. English was the dominant language of this North America, yes. But the dialects were much more pronounced, and the social differences between states were much wider than in the home timeline. What was funny in California might be offensive in Virginia, and the other way around. (What was funny in Alabama might touch off terrorism in Mississippi, and the other way around.)

  Except for the missing dish, the house in front of which Mr. Brooks stopped his car seemed nice enough. The front lawn was neatly trimmed. It didn't have any cars parked on it, which a lot of lawns here did. All the trim had been painted not very long before.

  Before Mr. Brooks got out of the car, he looked carefully in all directions. He carried a briefcase in one hand. The other didn't go far from the waistband of his trousers. Did he have a gun there?

  He noticed Justin looking at him. "I'm a stranger here," he said. "I'm a stranger, and my stock in trade is small and valuable. That might make me fair game. Why take chances?"

  "I didn't say anything," Justin answered. How often did a town like this see strangers? Did they ever come in and not go out again? Once Justin started stephenkinging, he had a hard time stopping.

  "Okay." Mr. Brooks went up the walk. Justin followed. The older man rang the bell.

  The door opened right away. "Hello, Mr. Brooks," said the man who stood there. He scratched at his almost-white mustache as he eyed Justin. "Who's your accomplice here?"

  "My sister's son—his name's Justin Monroe," Mr. Brooks answered. "They're over from Fredericksburg for a bit. I brought him along to see some of this side of the state. Justin, this is Ted Snodgrass."

  "Nice to meet you, Mr. Snodgrass." Justin stuck out his hand.

  "Pleased to meet you, too, Justin—mighty pleased." Mr. Snodgrass shook hands. He still had a pretty good grip. His accent held the same sort of twang as Mr. Brooks', only more of it. "Are you a collector yourself?"

  "Not really," Justin said. "I'm interested, but I don't know a whole lot." This alternate's North American coins and stamps, like the history of the continent, were much more complicated than they were in the home timeline.

  "Everybody starts that way. If you are interested, you'll learn." Ted Sn
odgrass stepped aside. "In the meantime, why don't you come on in?" One of his eyelids went down and then up again. Was that a wink? It sure looked like one. He went on, "Matter of fact, I'm right glad you came."

  "How's that?" Mr. Brooks asked. The house wasn't real big, but it looked comfortable, even if it also seemed old-fashioned to Justin. The furniture could have come out of the twentieth century, or maybe the nineteenth. And nobody, but nobody, used maroon velvet upholstery in the home timeline these days. That didn't mean the chair to which Mr. Snodgrass waved Justin felt bad to sit in, though.

  "How's that?" Mr. Snodgrass echoed, and he winked again. Justin wondered what in the world was going on. Then Mr. Snodgrass raised his voice a little: "Rebecca! Come out here a minute, would you?"

  The girl who stepped into the front room was about Justin's age—maybe a year younger, he thought. She was blond and cute—not gorgeous, but definitely cute—and the last thing he'd expected to meet here. Was she Mr. Snodgrass' granddaughter?

  "Beckie, this is the coin dealer I was telling you about, Mr. Randolph Brooks," Ted Snodgrass said. "And this tall young fellow is his nephew, Justin, uh, Monroe. Friends, this is Rebecca Royer. My wife's cousin went out to California to live, and she's back here for the first time in a coon's age. Rebecca here is her grandchild."

  "Hello," Justin said. "I'm glad I decided to come along for the ride." Mr. Brooks laughed. So did Mr. Snodgrass.

  "Good to meet you," Rebecca—Beckie?—Royer said. Her accent was nothing like Mr. Snodgrass'. She sounded more as if she came from the home timeline, but not quite. Something else was there. Justin tried to figure out what it was.

  "Why don't the two of you grab fizzes from the icebox and get to know each other while Mr. Brooks and I break out the skinning knives?" Ted Snodgrass said.

  "Oh, I don't aim to skin you—much," Mr. Brooks said. He and Mr. Snodgrass laughed again, this time on a different note.

  The icebox was a refrigerator that looked almost the same as the one at Justin's house back in the home timeline, except that one wasn't pink. Fizzes were sodas. "Thanks," he said when she handed him one.

  "You're welcome," she said. "Did I hear your uncle say you were from Fredericksburg?"

  "That's right." Justin had to remember not to talk about the Civil War battle there. In this timeline, it never happened. Neither did that war. Others, yes. Which reminded him . . . "Are you stuck here in Virginia because of the trouble with Ohio?"

  Her mouth twisted. "It sure looks that way. Gran didn't think this would happen when she decided to come back here."

  "That must be fun," he said.

  She smiled a little. "But of course," she said. Someone from the home timeline would have said Yeah, right or And then you wake up, but it amounted to the same thing. And he worked out what was odd—to his ear—about the way she talked. Ever so slightly, she rolled her r's. California in this alternate had even more connections with the Mexico of which it had once been a part than it did in the home timeline. Spanish had rubbed off on the English the local Californians spoke.

  "Good heavens, but you're a thief!" Mr. Snodgrass said to Mr. Brooks. Justin felt alarmed. Rebecca Royer looked alarmed. What was going on in the other room?

  Then Mr. Brooks answered, "I thank you for the compliment," and he and Mr. Snodgrass both laughed some more. Whatever was going on, it didn't seem serious.

  "Do you want to see the back yard?" Rebecca asked. "That way, they can yell at each other as much as they want." She might have been a mother talking about two little boys.

  "Sure." Justin nodded. They went outside. "Nice trees," he said. He meant that. This alternate had missed out on both chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease. Genetic engineering had finally got ahead of both of those in the home timeline. But the resistant trees were still scarce, and hadn't had time to grow tall. Some of the ones Justin could see in the distance were probably older than the Revolution.

  "They are, aren't they?" Rebecca Royer sipped her fizz. It was lemon-limey, on the order of Sprite, and called 6+. It wasn't bad, but Justin didn't think it was anything to get excited about. She went on, "Everything is so green here compared to what I'm used to."

  "Where in California are you from, Rebecca?" Justin asked. "I know it's a big place."

  "Call me Beckie—almost everybody does. I'm from Los Angeles." Beckie made a face, then grinned. "I'm not one of those San Francisco people." Wherever both towns existed, they were rivals.

  He tried to think of something else to say. He found one obvious question: "What do you think of Virginia?"

  "It's very pretty. Like I said, things are a lot greener than they are back home. The people seem nice." She wrinkled her nose. "They put up with Gran, so they must be nice. But this is an awful small town when you come from the big city."

  "I guess," Justin said. Los Angeles here wasn't the enormous sprawl that it was back home. They didn't have so many of the irrigation projects that let the basin fill up with people. But Elizabeth, Virginia, could disappear in it and never get noticed.

  "Some things here are different," Beckie said. "Can I tell you something without making you mad?"

  "Huh? Sure," Justin said. He'd taken a shower in the morning. He'd brushed his teeth. His fly wasn't open—he glanced down to check. What could she say that might make him angry, then?

  He found out. "In California, we try to treat everybody the same, no matter what people look like," Beckie said. "We don't always do it, but we try. It's . . . really strange being in a place where people don't even try to do that."

  "Oh," Justin said, and then, before he thought about it, "I feel the same way."

  Beckie stared at him. "You do?" she said. "Really? You're the first person here who ever said anything like that to me."

  That meant he'd made a mistake. Virginians in this alternate were convinced they were doing the right thing by lording it over the African Americans in the state. And if those African Americans ever grabbed power, they wouldn't give whites a big smile. No—they would do what the blacks in Mississippi had done, and rule the roost themselves.

  "Don't tell anybody," he said. "It would ruin my reputation." He wasn't kidding, either. Mr. Brooks would want to skin him alive if he heard about his falling out of character like that. And any white Virginian from this alternate would think he'd gone round the bend. Black Virginians were liable to think he was crazy, too.

  Beckie looked at him—looked through him, he thought miserably. "All right," she said. "But it's too bad you have to be ashamed of a decent thought."

  "Things are different here." Justin didn't just mean different from California, though Beckie couldn't know that. He also meant different from the home timeline.

  "Are they?" she said. "Some things are decent and right no matter where you go, seems to me."

  That could have been the start of a lovely argument. But Justin had to act like what he wasn't. "Things aren't as simple as they look, you know," he said. "There really are black terrorists here. People in places like Ohio really do run guns to them. Is that decent and right?"

  She turned white. No—she turned green. The only time he'd ever seen people turn that color before was on a tour boat that went out into the Pacific from San Francisco Bay. The waves then were a lot heavier than the captain expected. What Justin said now hit a lot harder than he thought it would, too.

  "Well, you're right," she said, and he didn't expect that, either. "I wish you weren't, but you are." She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.

  "How come you're so sure?" he asked. Maybe they'd had a TV show that convinced her, or something.

  Instead of answering, she turned even greener. He hadn't thought she could. She gulped a couple of times, and he wondered if she was going to be sick all over her shoes. "I don't want to talk about that," she said in a muffled voice. "I'm sorry, but I really don't."

  "Okay. Whatever." Justin didn't know what kind of nerve he'd poked, but it was a sensitive one. He could see that.


  He was trying to figure out what to say next when Ted Snod-grass stepped out onto the back porch and said, "I reckon you kids better come inside a minute."

  Justin looked at Beckie. She was looking at Mr. Snodgrass, and seemed just as surprised and confused as Justin felt. He didn't know whether that was good or bad. He could try to find out—and he did, asking, "What's up?"

  "Well, I turned on the noon news for a minute, and there's something you need to see," Mr. Snodgrass said.

  In one way, Justin was glad to hear that. It meant Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Brooks weren't quarreling. In another way . . . He hurried inside, Beckie right behind him.

  In the home timeline, the newscaster's tie would have been too short and too wide and too loud. His jacket, with its little lapels and broad pinstripes, would have been almost too fashionable to stand in 1891. But his handsome, sober face and deep, smooth voice would have marked him as a TV performer anywhere.

  "To repeat," he said, "outbreaks of this illness have been reported here at Richmond, at Newport News, and at Roanoke in the south-central part of the state. Doctors have declared that it is a genetically engineered disease. It seems to be highly contagious. Because of this, Consul Pendleton has ordered all unnecessary travel suspended until further notice. He has vowed that shipments of food and fuel will go through. Stay tuned for further bulletins."

  The TV cut to a commercial. Justin stared at Mr. Brooks. Beckie was staring at Mr. Snodgrass. They both said the same thing at the same time: "Oh, my God! Does that mean we're stuck here?"

  Sheriff Chester Cochrane was one of the biggest men Beckie had ever seen. He was several centimeters—no, they said two or three inches here—taller than Justin Monroe. He was wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, and had a long, sad face that showed very little of what he thought. "Is this about where they were at?" he asked as he and Beckie paused near the top of Jephany Knob.

  She looked down toward the road by the river. "I think so," she said. "Somewhere close, anyway." She pointed that way. "I was right about there when the shots went off."