The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  Probably about another thirty years, Beckie thought. Even if Gran always complained that she was about to shuffle off this mortal coil, she seemed ready to outlast people half her age. Everybody could see it but her. Besides, her aches and pains gave her something else to grumble about.

  “Well, we’ve all been exposed, that’s for sure,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “The one I worry about is Rebecca here. I’ve pretty much lived my life, and so have you, Myrtle. Rebecca’s got hers all out in front of her. Cryin’ shame to see that go to waste.”

  Gran only sniffed. She might have lived a long time, but she wasn’t ready to check out yet. Beckie didn’t suppose she could blame her. Who was ready to up and die, when you got right down to it? Terminally ill patients in a lot of pain, sure. Their time really was up. Anybody else? No.

  Mr. Snodgrass looked in the direction of Parkersburg. “I wonder when we’re going to give Ohio something to remember us by,” he said.

  “Maybe you already have,” Beckie said. “Ohio would keep it quiet if you did.” Virginia wasn’t we to her, and never would be. She’d stay a Californian all her life. If you lived in California, why would you want to move anywhere else?

  “I don’t reckon we’ve done anything,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “You’re right—Ohio wouldn’t blab, not unless they found a way to lick it. But the consul’d be all over the TV and the radio and the papers and the Net. He’d want people to know we were hitting back.”

  That made more sense than Beckie wished it did. “I just wish the war would stop so we can go home,” she said.

  “Don’t hold your breath, even after it does stop,” Mr. Snodgrass said.

  “Huh?” Beckie said brilliantly. Even Gran looked surprised.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” he repeated. “Don’t you reckon they’ll stick you in quarantine before they let you go home? Even if you don’t come down sick—and I hope to heaven you don’t—you’ve sure enough been exposed.”

  Gran let out a horrible squawk. It had no words. Had it had any, it would have meant something like, Oh, no! Beckie felt the same way. And, again, Ted Snodgrass was bound to be right. California wouldn’t want to see her and Gran again till it was sure they weren’t carrying the latest bioplague. How long would her home state need to decide? She imagined a glass cage with an air filter about three meters thick at one corner and an air lock for passing in food. It wouldn’t be just like that—she hoped—but that was the picture that came to mind.

  For that matter, what airline would let her and Gran on a plane? Half the passengers—more than half—might be infected by the time they got off.

  She wanted to cry. If you lived in California, why would you want to move anywhere else? Suddenly, she had an answer. Because your own state wouldn’t let you back in, that was why.

  “I wish I never came back here,” Gran said. By the way she scowled at Beckie, it might have been her granddaughter’s fault. Before long, Gran likely would think it was. She wouldn’t blame herself, that was for sure.

  Before Beckie could ask who’d wanted to see her relatives before she died, thunder rumbled off in the west. For a moment, Beckie took that for granted. You hardly ever saw rain in the summertime in L.A., but it happened all the time here. But even in Virginia, you didn’t see rain on a bright summer day.

  If it wasn’t rain … “Is that … guns?” Beckie hesitated before the last word, as if she didn’t want to bring it out. And she didn’t. The deep rising and falling roar went on and on.

  “Don’t be silly,” Gran said.

  But Mr. Snodgrass was nodding. “That’s guns, all right. Now—are we giving the dirty Ohioans what-for, or are they invading us?”

  “Turn on the TV,” Beckie said.

  He did, but slowly. “I wonder if I really want to know,” he said. “If those … people are in Parkersburg, they’ll grab the hospital—either that or they’ll blow it sky-high. My poor Ethel.” He sat in front of the screen with his head in his hands, the picture of misery.

  Eight

  The artillery fire was getting closer. Justin was sure it was louder than it had been the day before. Virginia didn’t want to admit that Parkersburg was lost, but it seemed to be.

  “What do we do when somebody else gets sick?” he asked Mr. Brooks. One of the things he most hoped was that the coin and stamp dealer would stay healthy. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in this little town on his own. For one thing, he would start going hungry unless his mother could transfer him some money—the credit cards belonged to Mr. Brooks. Justin was supposed to be nothing but a kid along for the ride. He wanted that supposition to stay true.

  “Maybe they haul them down to Charleston,” the older man answered. “Or maybe they decide the Ohioans are going to take Elizabeth, too, and so they’re welcome to all the diseased people in it.”

  “That’s—disgusting,” Justin said. It also sounded a lot like the way governments thought, especially during wartime. Then something else occurred to him. “If we’re occupied and Charleston isn’t, how do we get back to the home timeline?” How do I get back to Mom? was part of what he was thinking. The way he said it, though, sounded much more grown-up.

  “Good question,” Mr. Brooks said. “If you don’t have any other good questions, class is dismissed.”

  What did that mean? Justin saw only one thing it could mean: Mr. Brooks had no idea how they’d get back to Charleston, which meant getting back to a transposition chamber. Justin sent him a resentful look. What good were adults if they didn’t have the answers when you really needed them?

  Sometimes there weren’t any good answers. Was this one of those? It better not be, Justin thought, not that he saw anything he could do about it. He didn’t want to get stuck here the rest of his life. Oh, it wouldn’t be horrible, not the way getting stuck in a low-tech alternate that had never heard of antibiotics or anesthesia would be. But it still seemed backward next to the home timeline. And he would be a foreigner wherever he went, a foreigner with a tremendous secret he could never tell.

  Maybe I could settle down with Beckie in California, he thought, and then laughed at himself. How many conclusions was he jumping to with that? Enough to set an Olympic record, probably.

  If he talked about such records with her, she’d give him a funny look. They’d never revived the Olympics in this alternate.

  “Why aren’t there any Virginia soldiers here?” he asked.

  “They’re coming up Highway 77 from Charleston to Parkersburg—the highway we turned off of to get here,” Mr. Brooks answered. “That’s the easiest road they can come up—and almost the only road the Ohio soldiers can go down if they want to get anywhere worth having. Nobody cares about Elizabeth, not one bit.”

  “I guess not,” Justin said. “If I weren’t stuck here, I wouldn’t care about Elizabeth, either.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Mr. Brooks said with more feeling than he usually showed about anything. “At least you’ve got a pretty girl to keep you company. Ted Snodgrass is a nice man—don’t get me wrong. But he’s not the most exciting company in the world. And he doesn’t care about anything now with his wife sick—who can blame him?”

  “There’s always Beckie’s grandmother,” Justin said. Mr. Brooks didn’t dignify that with an answer. Had he suggested it to Justin, Justin wouldn’t have dignified it, either. Some people were just natural-born pains in the neck, and Beckie’s grandmother fit the bill.

  Something made itself heard over the hum of the air conditioner: a deep diesel growl and the rattle and clank of tracks. While Justin was still trying to figure out where it was coming from, Mr. Brooks said, “Unless we’ve been invaded by a herd of bulldozers, those are armored fighting vehicles.”

  “Armored … ?” That was a mouthful for Justin.

  “Tanks,” the older man translated. Before Justin could say, You’re welcome, Mr. Brooks went on, “Armored personnel carriers. Mobile antiaircraft guns or missile launchers. Self-propelled artillery. Engineering veh
icles. That kind of thing.”

  “Oh,” Justin said in a hollow voice, and then, “Oh, boy. How’d they get here, anyway, if they didn’t come up from Charleston?”

  “Well, they could belong to Ohio,” Mr. Brooks said, which was certainly true. “Or they could have come up Route 14 to get here. It’s the long way around and not a good road, but they could have done it. They might think they can hit the Ohioans in a flanking attack.”

  “Flanking attacks. Armored fighting vehicles. All this stuff,” Justin said. “How come you talk like a general?”

  The mild-mannered, bald coin and stamp dealer looked at him over the tops of his glasses. “When I was just a little older than you are now, I did a hitch near Qom in the Second Iranian Intervention. When something can mean you keep breathing, it sticks with you.”

  “Oh,” Justin said again, this time hardly above a whisper. For him, the Second Iranian Intervention was like the first one: something he had to remember for an AP test. The books said it hadn’t worked out the way the U.S.A. and the European Union wished it would have. He tried to imagine Mr. Brooks in a camouflage uniform with a gas mask and an assault rifle. It wasn’t easy.

  Then the armored vehicles rumbled past the motel, and he was too busy staring at them to imagine much of anything. “They’re Virginian, all right,” Mr. Brooks said.

  “How do you know?” Justin answered his own question: “Oh—because they’re heading west, toward Parkersburg.”

  “Well, that, too,” Mr. Brooks allowed. Justin must have made a questioning noise, because the older man—the veteran—explained, “They’ve all got Sic semper tyrannis painted on their sides, and that’s Virginia’s motto. Thus always to tyrants, you know.”

  “Right.” To Justin, it was what John Wilkes Booth yelled after he shot Abraham Lincoln—one more bit of trivia from an AP class. But was Sic semper tyrannis Virginia’s motto in the home timeline, too? Probably. Was that why Booth shouted it? Till this moment, Justin had never thought about why.

  He could figure out which machines were the armored personnel carriers: the ones with soldiers sitting in them. Brilliant, Justin—brilliant, he thought sourly. As for the rest of the large, snorting, purposeful machines, he would have thought of all of them as tanks. And he would have been wrong. By Mr. Brooks’ expression, he knew each one for what it was. As a—mobile antiaircraft gun?—clanked past, the coin and stamp dealer murmured, “That’s a good design—as good as we’ve got, except maybe the radar.”

  “What makes it good?” Justin asked. “How can you tell?”

  He found out. “It’s got a strong engine, well-shaped armor, and hard-hitting guns,” Mr. Brooks answered.

  When Justin thought of well-shaped things, he thought of girls and maybe cars. “How can armor be well-shaped?”

  “See how it’s sloped?” Mr. Brooks seemed eager to explain. “If a shell or a missile hits it, it’s liable to bounce off instead of going through. The guys inside appreciate that, believe me.”

  “I guess they would,” Justin said. They’re glad they aren’t getting killed—that was what he meant.

  The tail end of the column rumbled past. Mr. Brooks went on, “They’d better get under cover pretty darn quick, that’s all I’ve got to say. Ohio’s aerial recon is bound to have picked them up by now.”

  So many things Justin hadn’t thought about. He wasn’t sorry to be ignorant of them, either. The home timeline had stayed fairly peaceful the past hundred years, not least because so many countries could create so much havoc that most of them were afraid of starting trouble with their neighbors.

  A few minutes later, artillery started booming, close enough to make windows rattle. After a pause, the guns started up again somewhere else. Mr. Brooks nodded approval. “Shoot and scoot,” he murmured, like someone reciting a lesson he hadn’t thought about for a long time.

  The only trouble was, the lesson didn’t mean anything to Justin. “Huh?” he said.

  “Shoot and scoot,” Mr. Brooks repeated, louder this time. “They fire. The guys they’re shooting at pick up the incoming rounds on radar and shoot back. You don’t want to be there when the other fellow’s shells come down. Trust me—you don’t, even if you’ve got armor around you. So as soon as you fire, you scoot away and send off your next barrage from somewhere else.”

  Like any other game, this one had rules. Justin had never had to learn them. Mr. Brooks had never given any sign of knowing them. In civilian life, he could put them away because he didn’t need them. But when he found himself in the middle of a war, he knew what was going on. Justin wouldn’t have worried that he didn’t—except that his ignorance might get him killed.

  He heard high-pitched whines in the air. They swiftly got louder, and were followed by more window-rattling explosions. Mr. Brooks nodded to himself once more. “The Ohioans are plastering the place where the gun bunnies were. I’m pretty sure the guys from Virginia were gone before that stuff came down.” He cocked his head to one side and nodded yet again. “Sounds that way. I don’t hear any secondary explosions.”

  Justin knew what those were. He’d run into the term on the news. If something blowing up made something else blow up, that was a secondary explosion. “What happens if shells start coming down in town?” he asked.

  “Get flat,” Mr. Brooks answered. “If you can find a hole, jump in it. If you’ve got anything to dig a hole with, dig one. Keep your head down. Pray.”

  That all sounded practical, even the praying. Just the same, Justin almost wished he hadn’t asked the question.

  On the TV screen, talking heads blathered about Virginia’s brilliant counterattack. Beckie watched Mr. Snodgrass watching as much as she watched the TV herself. He looked much less happy than she’d thought he would. Then an announcer said, “Damage to Parkersburg is believed to be minimal,” and she understood. He didn’t care about Parkersburg for its own sake. He just didn’t want the fighting to hurt Mrs. Snodgrass.

  The phone rang. Mr. Snodgrass jumped. He took it off his belt. “Hello?” he said, and then he jumped again. “Oh, hello, Doctor! How is she?” The Ohioans were jamming cell-phone calls, but evidently not all of them. And then Mr. Snodgrass’ shoulders slumped. He looked as if he’d been kicked in the face. “Thank you … Thank you for letting me know, sir. You stay safe now, you hear?” He clicked off. He didn’t really need to say what he said next, but he did anyway: “She’s … gone.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  “I’m so sorry,” Beckie said.

  “God will take care of her,” Gran said. She got to her feet and pointed at Ted Snodgrass. “You stay there.” She went into the kitchen with a more determined stride than Beckie could remember seeing from her.

  Where would he go? Beckie wondered. He took off his glasses and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to wipe his streaming eyes. “What am I going to do without her?” he asked, which was a question without an answer. Then he said, “How can I even bury her? I’m on the wrong side of a stinking battle line.” That was probably another question without a good answer—maybe without any answer at all.

  “I’m sorry,” Beckie repeated, feeling how useless words were. “She was a nice lady,” she added, which was also true and also inadequate.

  “She was … everything to me,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “Now I’ve got nothing, and nothing left to live for.”

  “Here.” Gran came back, carrying a glass half full of amber liquid. Ice cubes clinked inside. She thrust it at Mr. Snodgrass. “Drink this, Ted.”

  “What is it?” Beckie asked.

  “A double,” Gran answered briskly. Beckie’s jaw dropped. Gran didn’t usually approve of drinking. Her husband had drunk a lot when he was alive. (Beckie thought she would have drunk, too, if she were married to Gran.) But she went on, “Go on, Ted. It won’t make you feel much better, but it’ll put up a kind of a wall for a little while.” She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.

  And if she’d told Mr. Snodgrass to g
o up on the roof and flap his arms and crow like a rooster right then, chances were he would have done that, too. He finished the drink sooner than Beckie thought he could. She’d tasted whiskey before, and didn’t like it. But when he got to the bottom of the glass, he said, “Thank you kindly, Myrtle. Most of the time, people who say they need a drink just want one. That one, I really needed.”

  “Drinks are for bad times more than they’re for good ones, I think,” Gran said.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.” Mr. Snodgrass blinked a couple of times. He still didn’t look happy, or anything close to happy. But he didn’t quite look as if he’d walked in front of a truck any more, either. He nodded to Gran. “I hope you stay well, you and Rebecca.”

  “And you,” Beckie said before Gran could stick her foot in her mouth and spoil the moment. She didn’t know Gran would do something like that, but it was the way to bet.

  “Me?” Mr. Snodgrass shrugged. “Who cares about me at a time like this? I don’t even care about me right now.”

  “Well, you should. You have to watch out for yourself,” Beckie said.

  “Nobody’ll do it for you,” Gran put in.

  Sure as the devil, that was the wrong thing to say. Mr. Snodgrass clouded up. “Not now, anyway,” he said.

  Beckie gave her grandmother a look that Gran didn’t even notice. Of course she doesn’t, Beckie thought. She couldn’t even come right out and say Gran was a jerk. Gran wouldn’t listen. And even the truth got you a name for disrespecting your elders. You couldn’t win.

  More artillery boomed—off in the distance, yes, but not nearly far enough away. That was especially true because these were incoming rounds, not ones fired by the Virginians. Beckie could tell the difference now. There was one bit of knowledge she’d never imagined she would have. She wouldn’t have been sorry to give it back, but life didn’t work that way. Too bad.

  Then she heard the rumble of diesel engines and the clatter of tracks. Route 14 was only about half a kilometer from the house, and the noise was easy to make out. “What’s going on?” she said. “They just went through here a couple of days ago. Now it sounds like they’re coming back.”