American War

by Omar El Akkad

  How cathartic it must have been then, on that April day, when finally five of those near-vegetative subjects momentarily came alive, their faces breaking into ecstasy, their fingers gingerly uncurling. How the young scientist must have wept with delight that one of his potions finally worked. How he must have wanted, against his better judgment, to open the fortified door and lead his patients out to the laboratory’s great central lawn, to show them off like prize crops in spring.

  And how cruel the universe must have seemed by the end of the same week, as the bodies of the momentarily unfrozen subjects were cast lifeless into the incinerator. In time, the thing Gerry Tusk created would come to be known as the Quick—a virus even more contagious than the one that put Carolina to sleep, and universally lethal. But at the moment of its genesis he knew it only as he knew all his failed creations, by a simple serial number: 032-072.

  There exists no written record of the scientist’s own thoughts. But it is difficult to imagine those two days in April, when so bright a light so quickly turned to darkness, and not believe that it was at that moment that Gerry Tusk made the decision to trade his old life for something—anything—else.

  It is all but known now that the Bouazizi Empire, eager to prolong the American civil war as much as possible, arranged the deal that granted the virologist his escape. On the morning of December 3, 2094, Gerry Tusk boarded the merchant vessel El Fattah at the Richmond harbor, bound eastward. His lethal creation paid his fare. The following year, the monster he bred would come alive on the steps of Reunification Square in Columbus, Ohio, and the first of more than one hundred million people would die.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By the banks of Chalk Hollow, Sarat hunted for pet food. She moved in graceful rampage over the broken branches and dried-up leaves, the dead things emitting a satisfying crunch beneath her bare feet. The branches were sharp and the leaves dusted with nettles but the girl felt none of it, her soles tough as leather.

  She knelt and dug into the soil near where it met the water. On the surface the soil was warm from the sun but below it was cooler. She dug an elbow-length hole, looking for the little burrowing worms she recalled from her childhood. But there were none. Soon the bottom of the hole began to fill with river water, and she abandoned it.

  Nearby, Marcus Exum picked at the fungi growing on the bark of stunted sweetgum trees. He slashed with a penknife at the roots of the wide, white-fleshed mushrooms and placed the bounty in his stitched blanket knapsack. One tree, collapsed completely, was barely visible beneath a second skin of mushrooms. Marcus picked at the parasitic growth until his bag was full, and a small segment of the tree’s coal-black bark was bare.

  “He’ll eat that for sure,” Sarat said, climbing over the dead tree. “Heck, I’d eat that.”

  “I don’t know,” Marcus replied, bending the edges of the mushroom back and forth. “Maybe it’s poisonous. My dad says a lot of the stuff growing out here is. Says anything growing out here people can eat, they already ate.”

  “We’re feeding it to a turtle,” Sarat said. “A turtle ain’t people.”

  “Yeah, but poison’s poison. It don’t know who’s eating it.”

  “Well, she’s gotta eat something around here. Keep looking.”

  Sarat wiped the soil from her hands on the sides of her COSCO Shipping T-shirt and scrambled back down the ravine in the direction of the creek.

  She was confined to boys’ clothes now, there being no girls and hardly any women in the camp as tall as she was. And although it limited her to the worn-through jeans and scuffed shirts that once belonged to Simon and his friends, she found it liberating to no longer be measured against the unbearable standard of her sister, who counted in her sprawling wardrobe not a single piece of clothing fit for adventures like these.

  She picked the green leaves and tiny flowers of an Alabama supplejack perched low against the water, its branches limp and thirsty. On the ground she discovered a small tangle of sweetgum seeds and black peppervine fruit. All these she deposited in her knapsack.

  A few feet away, a clearing led down to the water’s edge. Sarat scrambled down until she was ankle-deep in the warm, muddy creek. A fine sheet of blue-green scum covered the surface of the water. She brushed it away and dipped a thermos into the river and filled it. The water below was tinted brown and, lifted to the light of the sun, glistened with fine particulate.

  A hundred feet beyond, the sheltered estuary of Chalk Hollow fed into Sandy Creek, and a mile further to the east, Sandy Creek met the Tennessee River. Sarat could see the rebel skiffs in the far distance, docked near the ruined wharf of an abandoned marina. When the daylight began to fade, they would cross.

  Many times the children had seen the rebels, and the rebels had seen the children. Often they crossed paths at Chalk Hollow, where the camp’s feeble fencing was bent and torn to shreds. Over the years, the camp’s residents had learned not to venture this far east, where the rebel boats docked, nor to the north, where clashes between the rebels and the Northern militias had grown more and more frequent.

  But to Sarat this place was a small paradise—a land teeming with life, away from the human pollution and unmagical monotony of the camp itself. Soon the rebels became used to the site of the broad, fuzzy-haired girl and her runty friend. They ignored the children, saw in them neither threat nor enticement; the boy was too small, the girl too big.

  Marcus clambered down the embankment to where Sarat stood. “We should go,” he said.

  “Relax. Have some fruit.” Sarat picked two black peppervine pebbles and offered one to Marcus, who declined. She shrugged and popped both into her mouth. The skin was mushy and broke open with little resistance.

  The children marched back inland. For a while they followed the broken, sand-covered remains of Highway 25. Not a mile to the north lay the severed bridge to the Blue country.

  They walked west, toward the now abandoned tents that marked the northern end of the camp. From experience they knew which tents to avoid—the ones that, though unoccupied, contained the rebels’ illicit cargo ferried nightly across Sandy Creek.

  Officially, these tents near the fence were assigned to refugees long since dead or relocated. And newly arrived refugees, when given assignments here, were quickly warned by more senior residents; inevitably they found some way to relocate further south, closer to the camp’s interior.

  The children arrived at a tent near the border between the Mississippi and Alabama slices. It was indistinguishable from all others in the area but for a rectangular gash on the east-facing canvas, cut there by Sarat so as to let more sunlight in.

  Using the Phillips head on his knife, Marcus had learned to turn the door’s metal bolt from the outside, and in this way the children believed they could keep the tent’s contents secret from prying eyes. He wrestled with the bolt’s screw head for a moment, and the bolt unlocked. The children stepped inside.

  In the center of the tent, four cots were stationed on their sides in the shape of a rectangle, forming a makeshift pen. The inside of the pen was lined with charity blankets.

  A yellow-and-black-shelled turtle shuffled glumly in one corner of the pen. It was a small, rotund animal, about six inches in length. The yellow markings on its back were split with black lines in patterns that resembled the fractal aesthetics of butterfly wings. It moved on ancient, leathery feet, at the ends of which grew sharp pointed claws that tore softly into the blanket.

  The animal watched the children approach with a muted consternation. Gently it retreated into its shell.

  “Is he ever going to like us?” Marcus asked.

  “She’s a girl,” Sarat said.

  “How do you know she’s a girl?”

  “I found her, so she’s a girl.”

  “Is she ever going to like us, then?”

  “She’s gonna like us when she sees all the food we got her,” Sarat replied.

  “Maybe we should just take her back to the creek,” Marcus said, but Sarat
brushed him off. She reached into her sack and began laying out the leaves and berries in small mounds on the far end of the pen from where the turtle had backed itself into a corner. Reluctantly, Marcus followed, setting the mushroom heads on the blanket.

  “Not like that,” Sarat said. “They’re bigger than she is. Break them first.”

  The children lay the food in the pen and then backed away a few feet. Eventually the turtle reemerged from its shell. It observed the spread on the other side of the pen, but did not move.

  “Maybe she’s lonely,” Marcus said.

  “Can’t do anything about that,” Sarat replied. “When’s the last time you saw another turtle anywhere around here? Or a lizard, or crickets even.”

  “Well she must have come from somewhere. She was born, so she must have had parents, maybe brothers and sisters too.”

  “Just because she had them doesn’t mean they’re still there.”

  The children waited a while longer but the turtle refused to move. Soon Sarat could no longer stand the sight of nothing happening.

  She marched to the far side of the pen. As she approached, the turtle once more ducked into its shell. Sarat picked the animal up and carried it to the other end of the pen and set it next to the food. Then she stepped back.

  The turtle reemerged. It observed the children again with its orange-backed eyes, and then turned and shuffled away.

  “Dammit,” Sarat said.

  “Maybe we should try my idea,” Marcus offered.

  “I’m telling you, it won’t work,” Sarat replied. “That rat is almost as big as she is. She’s just gonna get more scared.”

  “What have we got to lose by trying?”

  Sarat acquiesced, and quickly Marcus left and sprinted to his own tent further south. In a few minutes he returned with a galvanized steel bucket. He held the bucket over the pen and tilted it. A small brown field mouse skittered down the side.

  All four of the tent’s occupants stood frozen, eying one another. Then the mouse scurried to the pen’s bountiful corner and began eating the berries.

  “Well, least she won’t be lonely anymore,” Sarat said.

  The children left the tent. They parted in southern Alabama; Marcus returned home. Sarat said she’d come by later in the evening so they could check again on the welfare of their pets.

  “You know we’re not supposed to go up near the fence at night,” Marcus said.

  “We’re not supposed to go up near the fence in the day, either,” Sarat replied. “You scared?”

  “No.”

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  Sarat said goodbye and left. She walked south through the western part of Alabama and then into Mississippi. Before she reached home, a couple of boys cut across her path, high with excitement.

  “I’m telling you, he lost it in the shit,” said one of the boys. “Came off his arm when he was swinging at a fastball, and landed right there in the shit.”

  Curious, Sarat followed the boys.

  They led her to the banks of Emerald Creek. A crowd of perhaps a dozen boys and girls from the nearby tents were assembled near the foul-smelling sewage ditch.

  In the center of the commotion was a boy named Ethan. The forlorn boy, who was a year Sarat’s senior, was pointing to something in the ditch and arguing with a handful of other boys, all of whom seemed to be talking at once.

  One of the girls, holding her nose against the stench, caught sight of Sarat approaching.

  “Hey, maybe Sarat can get it,” she said. “She’s bigger than all y’all.”

  “Get what?” Sarat asked. The boys looked her over in a way she’d gotten used to: a cautious curiosity at the girl who was not like the other girls. She ignored them and pushed her way to the banks.

  In the ditch the wastewater flowed brown and thick as gravy. It was the pungent soup of the camp’s excrement and filth. Small crescents of the blue disinfectant that the cleaning staff flushed twice daily down the bowls swirled along the surface. Cigarette butts and empty cans and ration wrappers littered the banks and floated in the effluent.

  An ancient heirloom wristwatch lay upon a rock in the middle of the creek. Like so many of the functionally deceased things the refugees carried with them—the washed-out photos and the obsolete or corrupted stores of memory and the keys to homes long since bombed or otherwise demolished—it bore a vital link to some distant, happier past.

  “Used to be my grandfather’s,” Ethan said. “My mom’s gonna kill me if I don’t get it back.”

  “So go in there and get it,” Sarat said.

  “Don’t be gross. I’m not gonna step in shit.”

  Another boy whispered something in Ethan’s ear. He listened and nodded.

  “Why don’ you get it, Sarat?” he said. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you do.”

  Sarat shrugged. “All right.”

  Once more she pushed the boys aside and walked away from the creek, toward the nearest tents. A few of the children followed, among them Ethan, who held Sarat by the wrist and warned her against telling any grown-ups.

  “I’m not telling anybody,” Sarat said, shaking the boy’s hand loose. “Stop being so scared of everything.”

  She walked between two tents, where an unused clothesline hung. She unhooked the metal holders on either tent and rolled the line around her fist. Then she returned to the creek. The children followed.

  At the banks she uncoiled the line and tossed it into the ditch. On her first try she fired too far left and then overcompensated. But on the third throw the hook landed just past the rock on which the watch was stranded. Slowly she pulled on the line.

  “Careful, careful!” Ethan cried from behind her. “You’re gonna knock it in.”

  “Be quiet,” Sarat said.

  She tugged gently on the line until the metal hook rested on the rock just beside the watch. With surgeon’s hands she edged the hook closer until it dislodged the watch from its place. The watch began to slide down the polished side of the rock toward the stream, but caught on the edge of the hook. A couple of the children yelped in triumph.

  “You got it!” Ethan yelled. “Pull it in, pull it in.”

  “Hold on,” Sarat said. “Give me that bat of yours.”

  One of the boys picked up a baseball bat nearby and handed it to Sarat. With the line still in her left hand, she lifted the bat with her right. She held it as far out in front of her as she could without losing her balance. Slowly she began lifting it up underneath the line to create a pivot point. Then she reeled in the catch. The hook lifted, the watch rising with it. As it came off the rock the watch swung and skimmed across the surface of the creek. Coiling the line around her wrist, Sarat pulled the watch in and set it on the ground.

  She turned to Ethan. “Pay up,” she said.

  The boys stared at the watch on the ground as though it had landed from outer space. Finally Ethan pulled a wad of Redbacks from his pocket and paid Sarat what he owed her.

  The children began to disperse. Some of the boys revived their baseball game, a little further away from the creek this time. One of the younger girls, whom Sarat did not know, offered to return the clothesline for her.

  As she made to leave, Sarat was approached by another of the boys, a fourteen-year-old from Georgia named Michael. She knew him only tangentially. He was the older brother of a boy named Thomas, who as a toddler had suffered a shrapnel injury that had frozen his mind at the age of two. The older brother had been sleeping in the same bed the night the Birds came, but through blind chance had escaped uninjured.

  “Hey, Sarat—wait, girl, where are you going so fast?” Michael said. He pointed at the creek. “I’ll give you another fifty if you go in.”

  The departing children halted. Sarat eyed them, and then Michael. He was wiry and lanky, swimming inside his too-big Sinopec Solar T-shirt, a hand-me-down from the Augusta docks.

  Sarat said nothing.

  “C’mon now,” Michael said. “You ain’t sca
red, are you?”

  He had pasted on his face a smirk with which Sarat was well acquainted. She’d seen the same look on so many of the other boys’ faces over the years. A self-satisfied grin. It was the smirk of knowing he’d left her with an impossible choice—step into the river of filth or be labeled a coward.

  Even then, at such a young age, she understood that smile for what it was: a mask atop fear, a balm for the crippling insecurity of childhoods deeply damaged. They were fragile boys who wore it, and their fragility demanded menace. Sarat knew the boys better than they knew themselves. And she knew there was no winning this dare. That was the point—for there to be no winning, only different magnitudes of losing.

  “How do I know you’re not lying?” she said.

  Michael pulled a wrinkled Redback from his pocket. He held it up to Sarat. She inspected the gray pastoral of McCoy Auditorium—the place where Julia Templestowe spit in the Northerners’ eyes all those years ago—drawn on its back.

  “She’s not really gonna do it, is she?” said one of the boys in the crowd. Another boy elbowed him and told him to shut up.

  Sarat turned away from Michael and took a step down the embankment, easing down with her backside braced against the slope. She descended slowly, the dirt gradually becoming cooler against her feet as she neared the fetid pool. In all her years at Camp Patience, the smell of Emerald Creek had never bothered her, but as she came closer now there was a thickness to the stench she’d never known before; it overwhelmed the borders between the senses and soon she could almost taste the acrid sweetness on her tongue.

  Her throat tightened and she felt the urge to gag, but fought it. Everywhere in the camp the bustle of daily life continued unhindered but here the children stood watching, silent and entranced.

  Where the embankment met the creek, Sarat’s foot disappeared into the brown sludge. She felt the liquid stick to the short hairs of her shin, syrupy and warm. A sharp sigh broke out among the children behind her as her feet went through the surface. She heard a young girl say, Gross.