Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  “Sure do.” The soldier going the other way nodded. “Ka-boom! They had that the last time I went up.”

  “Yeah, but now they’ve started loading the screaming meemies with mustard gas. They can carry a lot of it, too.”

  “Well, shit,” the other soldier said bitterly. “If it’s not one goddamn thing, it’s another. If I have to put on that rubber gear, the heat’ll kill me.”

  It was probably somewhere in the upper nineties. That wasn’t so dreadful as it would have been back in Washington or Philadelphia. As people from out West never got tired of saying, it was a dry heat. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hot, though. And when you wore full antigas gear, you cooked in your own juices. Who needed humidity then?

  A little blond girl came out of the ruins to stare at Armstrong. She was about eight years old, and would have been pretty if she weren’t scrawny and filthy and wearing what looked like a torn burlap bag for a dress. The stony hatred on her face didn’t help, either.

  “Jesus!” He wanted to make the sign of the cross to ward off that look, and he wasn’t even Catholic. “She’ll shoot at us in the next go-round, and her kid’ll pick up a gun in the one after that.”

  “We oughta just shoot all of these bastards and start over here,” Stowe said. “Treat ’em like the Confederates treat their niggers. Then we could do this place right.”

  “You think Featherston’s fuckers really are doing that shit?” Armstrong said. “Seems hard to believe.”

  “You’d better believe it—it’s true,” Yossel Reisen said. “My aunt knows more about that stuff than she ever wanted to find out. They’re filthy down there, really filthy.”

  His aunt was likely to know if anybody did. Armstrong said, “Still seems crazy to me. Why would anybody want to do that to somebody else just on account of what he looks like? I mean, I’ve got no use for niggers, God knows, but I don’t want to kill ’em all.” He had no idea how many oversimplifications and unexamined ideas he’d packed into that, and was probably lucky he didn’t.

  “People do it all the time,” Yossel said. “You’re not Jewish, that’s for sure.”

  “Nope, not me.” Armstrong might have had more to say on the subject of Jews, too, but not where his buddy could hear it. You didn’t do things like that. Life at the front was tough enough as is. If you pissed off somebody who might save your ass one day soon, you only made it worse.

  A sign led to the trucks that would take them back to the R and R center at Thistle. Before long, they’d have to leave again, but Armstrong looked forward to getting clean, getting deloused, and eating real food and sleeping on a real mattress.

  As happened too often in the Army, somebody’d screwed up. There were far more soldiers than trucks to take them to Thistle or anywhere else. The men milled around, waiting for something to happen. A lot of Army life was like that. A captain climbed up on what was left of a brick wall and shouted that more trucks would be along in an hour or so. The cheers he drew were distinctly sarcastic. The catcalls, on the other hand, came from the heart. The captain turned red and got down in a hurry.

  Armstrong didn’t know what drew his eye to the woman who walked toward the crowd of soldiers. Maybe it was just that she was a woman. Most of the ones he’d seen lately wore dungarees and carried rifles and wanted to kill him. He returned the favor the best way he knew how.

  This one had on a dress, a baggy dress that reached almost to her ankles. Her face was pinched and pale. Maybe that was what kept Armstrong’s eye on her—not her good looks, though she wasn’t half bad, but her absolute determination. An alarm bell went off in his mind. He nudged Rex Stowe. “Sergeant, something’s wrong with that broad.” He pointed.

  “Yeah?” Stowe didn’t see it for a second. Then he did. “Yeah.” He took a step toward her, and started to take another one—

  And the world exploded.

  Next thing Armstrong knew, he was on his back. Something that stung ran into his eyes. He put up a hand and discovered it was blood. He was bleeding from the leg, too, and from one arm. He looked around. Yossel Reisen, somehow, was still on his feet and didn’t seem to be scratched. Sergeant Stowe was down and moaning, both hands pressed to a swelling scarlet stain on his belly.

  “She blew herself up!” The words seemed to come from a million miles away. Armstrong realized the bomb must have stunned his ears. He hoped they weren’t ruined for good.

  He scrambled to his feet. Closer to the woman—who wasn’t there anymore, of course—the landscape was a surreal mess of bodies and body parts. How many had she killed? How many had she hurt? Armstrong watched a soldier pull a nail out of his arm. He realized the woman hadn’t just carried explosives. She’d had shrapnel, too. She’d done what she’d done on purpose, and she’d made sure she did as much damage as she could when she did it.

  “You all right?” Yossel’s voice came from far, far away, too.

  “If I’m not, I’ll worry about it later,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got to do what we can for these poor mothers.”

  He bent beside Rex Stowe and gave him a shot of morphine. He might have wasted it; Stowe was going gray. He put a dressing on the noncom’s wound, but blood soaked through right away. “Corpsman!” Yossel Reisen shouted. But a dozen other soldiers were yelling the same thing, and no medics seemed close by. Who would have thought trouble might strike here?

  Nobody would have. Nobody had. And that was probably why it had happened here. The men waiting for transport hadn’t paid any attention to the Mormon woman . . . till too late.

  Yossel Reisen slapped a bandage on Armstrong’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” Yossel said absently—he had other things on his mind. In disbelieving tones, he went on, “She blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up on purpose.”

  “She sure as shit did.” Armstrong liked that no better than his buddy did. “How do you stop somebody who wants to make like a bomb?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Yossel said. “Who would have thought anybody could be that crazy?”

  “Mormons,” Armstrong said. The Mormons had caused so much trouble for the USA, and had notions so different from those of most Americans, that blaming things on them just because they were Mormons came easy. But even Armstrong, who was anything but reflective, realized more than that went into it. Despite the heat, he shivered. “A woman. She waited till she could hurt the most soldiers, and then—she did.”

  “They could pull shit like this anywhere,” Yossel Reisen said, a new horror in his voice. “Anywhere at all. On a bus, in a subway, in a theater, at a football game—anywhere there’s a crowd. If you hate enough and you want to hit back enough . . . you just do.”

  “Fuck.” Armstrong meant the word more as prayer than as curse. He said the worst thing he could think of to follow it: “You’re right.”

  Men with Red Cross armbands did rush up then. They got Rex Stowe on a stretcher and carried him away. He was still breathing, but Armstrong didn’t think he’d live. Even if he did, he’d be out of the war for months, probably for good.

  Bodies and pieces of bodies remained after all the wounded were taken away. So did the butcher-shop stink of blood. Armstrong walked over to where the woman had been standing. He found a torn and charred shoe that wasn’t Army issue. But for that, there was no sign she’d ever existed—except the carnage all around. “Fuck,” he said again, no less reverently than before.

  A dozen U.S. trucks painted Army green-gray rumbled up then. The drivers stared in disbelief at the blood-soaked scene. “What the hell happened here?” one of them said.

  Somebody threw a piece of broken brick at his truck. It clanged off the hood. “You son of a bitch!” the soldier shouted. “If you’d got here on time, we wouldn’t have been here when she did that!”

  Another rock or brick banged off a different truck. For a moment, Armstrong wondered if the soldiers who’d su
rvived the bomb would lynch the truck drivers. They might have if a burly first sergeant hadn’t said, “She was gonna do it anyways. If it wasn’t us, it woulda been the next poor bunch of bastards. What the fuck you gonna do?”

  He was so obviously right—and so large—that he threw cold water on the lynching bee. An officer thought to set up a perimeter in case more Mormons decided to blow themselves to kingdom come for their cause. And then the unwounded and the walking wounded got on the trucks and headed down to Thistle after all. What the fuck are you gonna do? Armstrong thought. Like Yossel, he had no idea. He hoped somebody did.

  ****

  Flora Blackford had never warmed to the Philadelphia cheese steak. The only way they could have made it more treyf was to add ham and oysters. She stuck with pastrami on rye. Robert Taft probably wouldn’t have minded if they’d added ham and oysters to his cheese steak. Those weren’t forbidden foods for him.

  The Old Munich was near the damaged Congressional building. It had pretty good prices and air conditioning. Looking around, Flora didn’t think she could assemble a quorum from the Representatives and Senators in the place, but she didn’t think she would miss by much, either.

  Taft raised a schooner of beer. “Here’s to you—most of the time,” he said, and sipped from it.

  Flora had a gin and tonic: almost as good a cooler as the refrigerated air. “Same to you,” she said. “We see eye to eye about the war, anyhow.”

  “Seems that way.” Taft made a very unhappy face. “Maybe the President knew what he was doing when he tried to come to terms with the Mormons.”

  “Maybe.” Flora sounded unhappy, too. Did Taft know that woman had almost blown up her nephew? Instead of asking, she went on, “Would you be comfortable making peace with people who do things like that?”

  “It depends,” Taft said judiciously. “If peace meant they weren’t going to do them, I might. If every nut with a grievance is going to strap on some dynamite and start seeing how many honest people he can take with him, we’ve really got a problem.” He drained the schooner. “The way things look now, we’ve really got a problem.”

  Flora remembered that she was about to answer. The explosion outside beat her to the punch. Women screamed. So did a couple of men. Flora didn’t, quite. What came out instead—a soft, “Oh, dear God!”—was close to a sob of despair.

  Taft jumped to his feet, the cheese steak forgotten. “We’d better see if we can do anything to help,” he said, and hurried out of the Old Munich. Flora paused long enough to pay the check, then ran after him.

  A bus halfway down the block sprawled sideways across the road. The crumpled shape was burning fiercely. Window glass glittered in the streets and on the sidewalk like out-of-season snow. Some people were still trapped on the bus. Their shrieks dinned in Flora’s ears. One of them threw himself out a window. He was on fire. Passersby tried to beat on the flames with their hats and with their hands.

  “He blew himself up!” shouted a man with blood rilling down his face. “The motherfucker blew himself up! He had a, a thing, and he pushed it, and he blew himself up.” He paused, then spoke again in an amazingly calm voice: “Somebody get me a doctor.” He folded up and passed out.

  Plenty of others were wounded. Flora couldn’t tell whether some had been on the bus or were just luckless passersby. Others, the burned, had obviously been passengers along with the man with the thing—some sort of switch, Flora supposed. She tore her handkerchief in half and made two bandages with it. After that, she used the tissues in her handbag on smaller cuts.

  Robert Taft sacrificed his handkerchief and his tie. Then he took off his shirt and his undershirt and used a pocket knife to cut them into strips of cloth. “Other people need them worse than I do,” he said, and he wasn’t the only bare-chested man around, either.

  “Good for you,” Flora told him. “Let me have some of those, too, please.”

  Ambulances roared up, sirens wailing. Philadelphia was good at responding to disasters. And so it should have been—it had had enough practice. “Somebody put a bomb on the bus?” asked a white-coated man from an ambulance.

  “Somebody was a bomb on the bus,” a woman answered. The man’s answer was eloquent, heartfelt, and altogether unprintable.

  “Well,” Taft said, “looks like we have the answer to my question, and it’s not the one I wish we had.” He was splashed with blood past his elbows. His trousers were bloodstained, too, but Flora didn’t think any of the gore was his.

  She glanced down at herself. The cotton print dress she had on would never be the same. Blood also dappled her arms. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked, a question aimed more at the world at large than at Senator Taft. “How do we fight people who’ll kill themselves to hurt us?”

  “If we have to, we—” Taft broke off, as if really hearing what he’d been about to say. He shook his head. “Good Lord. I started to sound like Jake Featherston.”

  “Yes.” Flora wanted to cry, or to scream. Here, for once, the USA faced a knottier problem than the CSA. Negroes looked like Negroes. Mormons? Mormons looked and talked just like anybody else. Anybody here could be a Mormon, and could have another bomb waiting. How would you know till it went off?

  “Good Lord,” Taft said again. “We’re going to have to start searching people before we let them gather. Football games, films, trains, buses, department stores—for all I know, we’ll have to check anybody who goes into the Old Munich.”

  “I was thinking how many members of Congress were in there,” Flora said shakily. “If that bomber had walked inside instead of blowing up the bus . . .” Philadelphia was its usual hot, muggy summer self. That kind of weather wouldn’t last much longer, but it was still here—sweat ran down Flora’s face. She shivered anyhow.

  “Auto bombs are bad enough,” Taft said. “People bombs . . .” Like Flora, he seemed to run out of words. He spread his bloody hands. “What could be worse?”

  What were they working on, out in western Washington? Something they thought might win the war. Whatever it was, that all but guaranteed it would be a horror worse than any they’d known up till now. Worse than poison gas? Worse than the camps where the Confederates were systematically doing away with their Negroes? She had trouble imagining such a thing. That didn’t mean the people out in Washington State had any trouble, though.

  While horror swelled inside her, rage seemed to fill Taft. “This is no fit way to fight,” the Senator from Ohio ground out. “If they want to meet us like men, that’s one thing. If they want to see how many innocent civilians they can blow up—”

  “They used it against soldiers first,” Flora said, remembering Yossel’s narrow escape again. “And we drop bombs on civilians all over the CSA. It’s just that . . . Who would have expected people to be weapons instead of using weapons?”

  “Well, the genie’s out of the bottle now,” Taft said grimly. “Nobody in the world is safe from here on out. Nobody, do you hear me? There isn’t a king or a president or a prime minister somebody doesn’t hate. A man comes up to you in a reception line. Maybe you didn’t appoint him postmaster. Maybe he just hears voices in his head. You reach out to shake his hand. Next thing you know, you’re both dead, and a dozen people around you, too. How do you stop something like that?”

  Flora only shrugged helplessly. For thousands of years, war had been based on the notion that you wanted to hurt the other side without getting hurt yourself. Now the rules had shifted under everybody’s feet. How could you stop someone who embraced death instead of fleeing it?

  Fresh dread filled her when she thought about how useful a weapon like this might be. Surely the United States could find men willing to die for their country. If you sent them after Jake Featherston and you got him, weren’t you doing more to win the war than you would by smashing a division or two of ordinary soldiers?

  But the Confederates would have targets of their own. I might even be one, Flora thought, and ice walked up her back again. Like it or not
, it was true. Nobody in the USA had spoken out more ferociously than she had about what the Confederate States and the Freedom Party were doing to their Negroes.

  “How many more of these bombs will we see in the next week? In the next month? In the next year?” Taft asked. “We’ve never known anything like this before. Never. That Canadian who kept blowing up American soldiers after the last war, the one who tried to blow up General Custer—he finally blew himself up, but he didn’t want to. If he’d been like these Mormons, he could have gone to a rally and done even worse.” He suddenly laughed, which made Flora stare.

  “What could possibly be funny about this?” she demanded.

  “I’d like to see Featherston’s face when he hears about it,” Robert Taft answered. “He knows how many people . . . mm, don’t love him, shall we say? He’s the one who’ll really have reason to be shaking in his boots. Sic semper tyrannis, by God—thus always to tyrants, if your Latin’s rusty.”

  It was; Flora hadn’t even thought about those classes in close to forty years. At the time, she hadn’t thought they were good for anything; it wasn’t as if she were likely to train for the Catholic priesthood! Looking back, though, they’d probably improved her English. And, looking back, that had probably been the point. It sure hadn’t occurred to her then.

  What Taft said made a certain amount of sense. What he said often did. People who had or should have had bad consciences would worry more about men—or women—with bombs than others would. And yet . . . “The Mormons are using them against us,” she said bleakly.

  “Yes, but the Mormons are a pack of crazy fanatics,” Taft said. But that wouldn’t do, and he realized it wouldn’t. “I see what you’re saying. I wish I didn’t. To them, we look like the tyrants.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Flora agreed. “A lot of it’s like beauty—it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

  “God help us,” Taft said.

  “Omayn,” Flora said, “or amen, if you’d rather.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Taft said. Flora believed him; whatever else he was, he was no anti-Semite. He sadly shook his head. “What are we going to do?”