In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  Even with no more than a scratch force of guards, Camp Humble went right on doing what it was designed to do: reducing population. Jefferson Pinkard was proud of that. He was proud of the men he had left, and he was proud of the way he’d designed the camp. It was so smooth, it almost ran itself. You just didn’t need a whole lot of guards to herd Negroes from the trains to the trucks and bathhouses, and then to chuck bodies into the crematoria. Everything went as smoothly as it did in any other well-run factory.

  Every few weeks, the latest batch of Negro trusties who thought they’d dodged death by playing along discovered they’d made their last mistake. The only thing Jeff kept on being unhappy about was the ovens. The company that made them had come out a couple of times to try to get them to perform better, but without much luck. Pinkard’s conclusion was that the contractor had sold him a bill of goods from the start. The greasy black smoke that belched from the stacks and the burnt-meat stench that went with it were part of the operation, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Trains still brought Negroes to the camp, trains from Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas. He’d also had loads of blacks from Florida and Cuba arrive. The local authorities rounded up their Negroes and sent them to Houston or Galveston by ship. He’d heard reports that subs operating in the Gulf of Mexico had sunk some of those ships. That was funny, in a grim way: the damnyankees were doing some of the Confederacy’s work for it.

  The telephone on his desk rang. He scowled. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone and let him take care of his job? It rang again. Scowling still, he picked it up. “Pinkard here,” he rasped.

  “This here’s Lou Doggett, General,” the mayor of Humble said. Pinkard wasn’t a general; he had a Party rank instead. But he didn’t argue. He’d been a PFC the last time around. If somebody wanted to call him General, he didn’t mind a bit.

  “What’s up?” he asked now.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, General—the wind’s blowing this way from your camp, and it’s pretty bad,” Doggett answered. “This ain’t how you told me it was gonna be when you put that camp in.”

  “It ain’t the way I thought it was gonna be, neither,” Jeff answered. “But it’s the way it is. I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

  “If it don’t get better pretty damn quick, I’m gonna talk to the Governor,” the mayor warned.

  Jeff Pinkard laughed. “Go right ahead. You do that. Be my guest. You reckon the Governor amounts to anything when you set him next to Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston?”

  To his surprise, the mayor of Humble answered, “Matter of fact, General, I sure do. Richmond’s gone. Even if it wasn’t, there’s damnyankees in between here and there. What the hell can Koenig and Featherston do way out here?”

  He might be right. A nasty chill of fear ran through Pinkard when he realized as much. Like any government, the Confederacy ran because people agreed it ought to. What happened if they stopped agreeing? What happened if Texas Rangers came out here with guns? How could you know ahead of time?

  “Let me ask you a question, your Honor,” Pinkard said heavily. “Who went down on his knees beggin’ for me to put this here camp where it’s at? Who damn near jizzed in his dungarees when I said I would? Was that anybody who looks like you?”

  “That was then,” Doggett returned. “You didn’t tell me it was gonna stink the way it does and belch out black smoke you can see for miles.”

  “I didn’t know, goddammit. Those bastards who put in the ovens and the stacks went and rooked me,” Jeff said. “But even if it does stink, it’s doing something the country needs. You gonna try and tell me I’m wrong?”

  “Well, no. I got no more use for coons’n any other decent, God-fearing white man does,” the mayor said. “But godalmightydamn, General, it sure does stink. Makes the whole town smell like a barbecue pit some stupid fool went and forgot about. You’re in a fancy uniform, so you get to give orders. Me, I got voted in, and I got a hell of a lot of people here in Humble who sure ain’t gonna vote for me again ’cause of that smell. I mean, gettin’ rid o’ niggers is one thing. Doin’ it so you can smell ’em roast—that’s a whole different story.”

  “You want to eat roast beef, but you don’t want to butcher your cow,” Jeff said. “Camp’s gotta be somewhere. I liked it where it was at before, too, but the damnyankees went and ran us out of there. That ain’t my fault.”

  “I didn’t say it was, but it’s another problem. Suppose we go and lose the war.”

  “That’s defeatism,” Jeff said automatically.

  The mayor of Humble astonished him by replying, “Oh, cut the crap, General. We’re fucked, and you know it as well as I do. Like I said, Richmond’s gone. They chopped us in half in Georgia. The President’s on the run. How are we gonna win? I wish we could, but I ain’t a blind man. And suppose we lose, like I said. What if the damnyankee soldiers march in here and ask, ‘What the devil were you doin’ with a murder camp there on your doorstep, Mr. Mayor?’ What do I tell ’em then, hey?”

  “Fuck,” Pinkard muttered under his breath. That was insubordination so bad, it was damn near treason. Or it would have been, if it weren’t such a good question.

  Suppose we do go and surrender. Suppose the Yankees do come marching in. What do I tell them? The only answer that came to mind was, I was just doing what the bigwigs in Richmond told me to do. Would they buy that? What would they do to him if they didn’t?

  “General? Hey, General! You there?” How long had Doggett been yelling in his ear? A little while, evidently. He’d had other things to worry about.

  “Yeah? What is it?” he managed, dragging himself back to the business at hand.

  “You don’t get that camp cleaned up in jig time, I will talk to Governor Patman. You see if I don’t.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you do.” Jeff thought he meant that, anyway. He knew damn well he had more firepower than the Texas Rangers could bring to bear against him. But whether his guards had the will to fight other Confederate white men…He wasn’t so sure about that. He hoped like anything he wouldn’t have to find out.

  “If you’re smart, General, you’ll take off your uniform, put your wife an’ young ’uns in a civilian motorcar, and head for some town where nobody knows your face. You think the damnyankees’ll have questions to ask me? What’ll they say to you?”

  Pinkard hung up. He did it by sheer reflex. The mayor’s thoughts didn’t just run parallel to his. They’d got ahead of them on the same road. If U.S. soldiers came here, they would have things to say to him.

  Unpleasant things.

  “But I can’t leave,” he said aloud. No matter what the Yankees had to say to him, he was proud of everything he’d done here, and over in Snyder, and outside of Alexandria, too. He’d had an important job to do, and he’d done it well. If not for him, the whole population-reduction program would have been a hell of a lot less efficient. Didn’t that count for anything?

  The Attorney General thought so. Hell, the President of the Confederate States of America thought so. What else mattered?

  Nothing else mattered—as long as his side was calling the shots. Never mind Texas Rangers. U.S. soldiers wouldn’t like what he’d done. And the main reason they wouldn’t like it—or so things seemed to him—was that his own side did.

  “Fuck ’em,” Jeff muttered. “Fuck ’em all.”

  He wondered whether Mayor Doggett would send cops around to give Edith and the boys a hard time. He didn’t intend to put up with anything like that. Maybe his guards would have trouble against the Rangers. Against this little town’s one-lung police force, though, they could start a reign of terror.

  No sooner had that crossed his mind than the telephone rang again. He said some things that should have melted the glass out of the windows in his office. What did Doggett want now? “Pinkard here,” he snarled.

  “Jeff, it’s me.” That wasn’t the mayor—it was Edith. “My pains have started. We’re going to
have us a baby.”

  “Oh, good God!” Jeff said, mentally apologizing to the Lord whose name he’d done worse than take in vain a moment before. “You ready to go down to Houston?”

  “I sure am!” his wife answered. “Miss Todd next door, she’ll take care of Willie and Frank till you can get home.”

  “I’ll send a guard with an auto for you right away,” Jeff said. He couldn’t leave the camp himself right now, especially not after the brawl with the mayor. Humble wasn’t big enough to boast a hospital of its own. But it was only twenty miles from Houston, so that shouldn’t matter.

  He summoned a reliable troop leader to drive one of the Birminghams attached to Camp Humble. As he gave the three-striper his orders, he thought, Damn, I wish Hip Rodriguez was still around to do this for me. His old Army buddy would have done it right, one hundred percent guaranteed. Oh, Porter was more than reliable enough, but still…. As always, Pinkard knew a moment of pained incomprehension when he thought about Hipolito Rodriguez. What the devil made Hip eat his submachine gun? He was doing a good job, and doing a job that needed doing.

  That was something to brood on as he poured himself a big snort from the highly unofficial bottle in a desk drawer. He couldn’t have taken the whiskey along if he had torn himself away from this and gone to the hospital. What could he do in the waiting room, anyway? Worry. He could do that here, too. He could, and he did.

  Dammit, what possessed Hip to do that? He didn’t see any damnyankee writing on the wall; things were going well enough when he shot himself. Why, then? It was as if he’d suddenly decided he’d made some vast mistake, and blowing off the top of his head was the only way he could fix it.

  “But that’s crazy,” Jeff said, taking a slug from the drink. “Just plain old crazy.” It wasn’t as if Hip didn’t believe in getting rid of Negroes. He couldn’t have had woman troubles, either. Jeff knew Hip got laid every once in a while on the women’s side. Not many male guards didn’t. (For that matter, the same was true of female guards.) He felt guilty about fooling around on his wife—Jeff remembered as much from the Great War. But he didn’t feel all that guilty, which Jeff also knew.

  So what went wrong, then? The obvious answer—that Hip couldn’t stand killing people any more even if they were black—stared Pinkard in the face. It had ever since Rodriguez shot himself. And ever since then, Jeff had stubbornly refused to look at it.

  He didn’t change now. He’d come too far down this road to change…unless he put the barrel of a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. He refused to look at doing that, either. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one.

  He kept on drinking for the next seven hours. The camp didn’t fall to pieces in that time, which was just as well, because he wouldn’t have cared if it had. He spilled whiskey when the telephone rang. “Pinkard here,” he slurred.

  “Congratulations, sir! Your wife is fine, and you’ve got a boy!” Troop Leader Porter said. “What’ll you name him?”

  “Raymond,” Jeff answered at once—drunk or sober, he knew. “Raymond Longstreet Pinkard.” He knew where he stood, too, even now.

  Every time Irving Morrell came into Philadelphia, the city looked worse. The Confederates kept finding new ways to hit the de facto capital of the USA. U.S. forces had driven the Confederates from their own capital and held bridgeheads across the James. The rocket factories in Huntsville were history. But Jake Featherston’s forces kept launching their damn birds. Not all of them had been driven out of range of Philly, not yet. Their bombers still managed to sneak up here by night, too. Fresh craters and wrecked buildings loudly insisted the war wasn’t over yet.

  But the people in Philadelphia had a jaunty spring in their step that wasn’t there the last time Morrell came into town. Maybe it was all the general’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. Folks figured things were on the downhill slope. And, by God, they had plenty of good reasons to think so.

  Not without pride, Morrell knew he’d given them more than a few of those good reasons himself.

  His driver, a sergeant with a Purple Heart and three oak-leaf clusters—not the kind of decoration anybody in his right mind would want to win—said, “We’ve got those cocksuckers whipped, don’t we, sir?”

  “Well, we’d have to screw up pretty good to blow things now,” Morrell allowed. “Are you on permanent light duty, Sergeant, or will you go back to the front? You’re two wounds ahead of me, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

  “I’ll be at it again in a couple of weeks, sir,” the noncom answered. “None of ’em’s been real bad. I limp a little from the latest one, and I’ve lost a finger, but the other two…hell, I don’t even notice ’em if I don’t see the scars. For a guy who’s not real lucky, I’m pretty lucky, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Morrell said, and he did. The way the sergeant put it was kind of loopy, but it made sense anyway. The Ford rolled past a wall with a few bomb scars and a big splash of dried blood. Morrell was afraid he knew what that meant: “People bomb?”

  “Afraid so, sir. They think this one was a diehard Mormon. He took out four or five soldiers when he went.”

  “Damn,” Morrell said. How long would the USA—and other countries all over the world—have to worry about people willing, even eager, to die for their cause? Get some dynamite, some nails or scrap metal, and there you were: your own artillery shell. And you could aim yourself better than the best gunner in the world. The assumption in war had always been that the other guy didn’t want to die. How were you supposed to protect yourself against somebody who did?

  “Mormons. Canucks. Confederates,” the sergeant said mournfully. “Even what they call peace won’t be the same.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Morrell said. “I don’t know what to do about it. If you get any brainstorms, for Christ’s sake tell the War Department. You’ll be a captain faster than you can blink.”

  “No offense, sir, but I don’t know if I want to be an officer.” With some relief, the noncom hit the brakes in front of the War Department. “Here you go. You don’t even have to tip me.”

  “Heh,” Morrell said. He stepped between concrete barriers that kept autos from getting too close: they could carry a lot more explosives than mere people could. The War Department building had a big chunk bitten out of a corner. Those C.S. rockets weren’t supposed to be real accurate, but one seemed to have landed right on the money.

  Not even stars on his shoulder straps kept him from having to show his ID, or from getting patted down after he did. He submitted without a murmur; times were still dangerous. Once he’d placated the entrance dragons, an escort took him down to General Staff headquarters.

  It hadn’t been buried so deep the last time he came to the War Department. Of course, if it weren’t now, it might have gone sky high when that rocket came down. “Here’s General Abell’s office, sir,” the escort said. “Telephone when you need to come up again, and somebody will take you.”

  “Thanks,” Morrell said. The kid gave him a crisp salute and hurried down the corridor. Morrell was much less eager to enter John Abell’s sanctum, but he did.

  “Welcome,” the General Staff officer said with what passed for warmth from him. Brigadier General Abell sometimes reminded Morrell of a ghost mostly congealed into the real world. He was tall and thin and pale, and so cool of manner that he sometimes hardly seemed there at all. The General Staff suited him perfectly; he was a dab hand at moving divisions around, but would have been hopeless with dirty, smelly, wisecracking, foul-mouthed soldiers.

  “Thanks,” Morrell answered, and couldn’t help adding, “See? It wasn’t a two-year campaign after all.”

  “So it wasn’t. Congratulations.” Yes, Abell was in a gracious mood. “We managed to attrit the enemy so he couldn’t resist with as much persistence as I thought he might utilize when we first broached the issue early last year.”

  Morrell distrusted officers who said utilize when they meant use. As for attrit
…Well, obviously it came from attrition, but that didn’t mean he ever wanted to hear it again. He managed a nod.

  That seemed to satisfy John Abell. “The question now, of course, is, Where do we go from here?”

  He could speak clear English when he wanted to. Why didn’t he want to more often? “On the western flank, Birmingham and Huntsville are pretty much in the bag,” Morrell said. “We’re hitting Selma and Mobile hard from the air. We’ll get to ’em before too long. New Orleans…Well, we can bomb it. If we smash the levees, we can flood a lot of it. But we won’t get soldiers there any time soon.”

  “A reasonable estimate,” Abell agreed. “And in the east?”

  “I’m shifting most of the effort there up into South Carolina,” Morrell replied. “Charleston, Columbia…If the General Staff has a different idea, I expect you’ll let me know.” He wondered if that was part of the reason he’d been summoned to Philadelphia. What did they think he would do if he stayed down in the Confederacy and got orders he didn’t like? Set up on his own? He admired Napoleon as a soldier, but not as a politician.

  “At present, no. That seems adequate, or more than adequate,” John Abell said. He acted nervous, though.

  For a moment, that made no sense at all to Morrell. The United States was manifestly winning the war. They’d cut the CSA in half. The campaign in Virginia was going well at last. Even the minor struggles in Arkansas and Sequoyah and west Texas all inclined toward the USA. So why wasn’t Abell even happier?

  Morrell didn’t expect hosannas and backflips from the General Staff officer. He’d known Abell too long and too well for that. But still…Then a light went on, a light as bright and terrible as the sun. “That goddamn superbomb!” Morrell exclaimed. “How close is Featherston?” He didn’t ask how close his own country was. That, he assumed, would be a secret more tightly held than the other.

  “Ah. Good. You do understand the basic difficulty under which we labor,” Abell said. “The answer is, we just don’t know—and that is our principal area of concern at this point in time.”