The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Mr. Snodgrass seemed eager to think about anything except what had just happened to him.

  “Something will have gone wrong,” Gran said. That was just about her favorite prophecy. And here it was much too likely to be true.

  Watching the—the armored fighting vehicles, that was what Mr. Brooks called them—fall back through Elizabeth made Justin scratch his head. “Something’s gone wrong,” he said. “It must have.”

  “Pretty good bet,” Mr. Brooks agreed. “But what? They weren’t under what you’d call heavy pressure or anything. Why pull back?”

  “Beats me,” Justin said. “What do you want to do, ask them?”

  To his amazement, the coin and stamp dealer headed for the door. “Why not? Maybe they’ll tell us.”

  “Maybe they’ll shoot us, you mean,” Justin said. But he followed. He didn’t want Mr. Brooks to think he was afraid, even if he was.

  “Why should they?” the older man said as he walked outside. “We’re just ordinary citizens of Virginia, going about our lawful business and trying to find out what our very own soldiers are doing. It’s a free state, isn’t it? Except for the sales tax, I mean.”

  “Funny,” Justin said. “Funny.”

  Mr. Brooks ignored him. He waved to somebody standing up in the cupola of a tank—and yes, by now Justin recognized tanks and could tell them from the other armored behemoths that clanked through Elizabeth. “Where are you guys going?” Mr. Brooks yelled, pitching his voice to carry through the racket. “Y’all just got here.” If he laid the accent on a little thicker than he might have, well, so what?

  “We’ve got to pull back,” the real Virginian said—sure enough, he didn’t mind talking to a civilian.

  “How come?” Mr. Brooks asked in a civilian-sounding way.

  The soldier in the tank—they called them trackforts or mobile pillboxes in this alternate—cussed. He swears like a trooper, Justin thought. Then the fellow said, “Blacks went and rose up back in the cities. We’ve got to go and squash them before we can give those Ohio rats what they deserve.”

  Mr. Brooks swore, too, the way a real Virginian would have when he got news like that. Justin was very impressed. “What are we supposed to do here?” Mr. Brooks asked.

  “Best you can till we get back,” the tankman answered.

  Justin and Mr. Brooks trotted down the street to keep up with him. “What’s going on in Charleston?” Justin called. If Mr. Brooks could do it, he could, too. “My mother’s down there,” he added, in case the soldier thought he was a spy. It was even true.

  “Don’t know much. There’s some shooting—I’ve heard that,” the soldier said. “Like I told you, just hang on. We’ll be back.” He waved as the tank clattered away. The pavement on Route 14 was taking a devil of a beating.

  “Well, we might have known they’d play that card,” Mr. Brooks said.

  Justin hardly paid any attention to him. “There’s fighting in Charleston!” he exclaimed.

  Mr. Brooks nodded. “I heard what he said.” He set a hand on Justin’s shoulder. “Your mom’s a smart woman. She’ll know how to stay out of trouble.”

  “Sure she will—if she has the chance,” Justin said. “But what if she was out shopping somewhere or something when the shooting started? She wouldn’t have a chance then.” Seeing everything that could go wrong was much too easy.

  “Even when bullets start flying, they miss most of the time,” Mr. Brooks said. “If that weren’t so, I’d’ve been holding a lily for a long time now.” He looked past Justin, probably looking back into another timeline a long time before.

  “Can we get back to Charleston?” Justin asked.

  The older man returned to here and now in a hurry. “We can try,” he said, and Justin brightened—till he went on, “if you don’t mind getting arrested somewhere south of Palestine or along whatever other highway we use. They’re serious about not letting people move around.”

  Justin pointed to the armored vehicles pulling out of Elizabeth. “What about them?”

  “They’re soldiers. Soldiers always break the rules,” Mr. Brooks said with a shrug. “I know what the consul was thinking when he ordered them to move, though. Maybe they’re not infected. If they are, maybe they’ll go someplace where other people are infected, too. But whether they’re infected or not, he needs them to fight the uprising. And so—they’re moving.”

  “If they’re infected, they won’t keep fighting long,” Justin said.

  “Mm, maybe not,” the coin and stamp dealer allowed. “But if they’re that sick, chances are they’ll infect the Negroes they’re shooting at. Do you think the consul’s heart would break if they did? I sure don’t.”

  “You’ve got a nasty way of looking at things, don’t you?” Justin said.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Brooks answered, which left him with no comeback at all.

  Explosions blossomed with a terrible beauty, there on the TV screen. The rattle and bang of small-arms fire blasted from the speakers. Bodies lay in the street, some white, some black. A white man and woman supported a reeling teenage boy. Blood ran down his face. “Why?” he said as he staggered past the camera.

  A box in the corner of the screen said this was Charleston. But it might have been Richmond or Newport News or Alexandria or Roanoke. Uprisings crackled through the whole state—blacks murdering whites, whites savagely striking back.

  Beckie watched with a special kind of horror. Every time somebody—who didn’t matter—fired a burst from an automatic rifle, she flinched. Finally, she couldn’t stand it any more. She put her hands up in front of her eyes. “Oh, my God!” she moaned. “Oh, my God!”

  “See how bad it is?” Gran didn’t mind when it was bad. If anything, she liked it that way—then everybody was complaining along with her. “Those people are getting what they deserve.”

  She hadn’t talked about Negroes that way when she lived in California. Coming back to Virginia was bringing out all sorts of nasty things Beckie didn’t know about and didn’t want to know about.

  But that wasn’t why she couldn’t bear to watch the TV right now. “Uncle Luke!” she said. By the way it came out, she couldn’t have found anything nastier if she tried for a year.

  “What about him?” Mr. Snodgrass asked. “He’s the fellow who drove you here, isn’t he?”

  “My sister’s husband,” Gran said with a grimace that declared it wasn’t her fault.

  That would have been funny if the TV were showing something else. The way things were … “He was running guns,” Beckie said.

  “What?” Mr. Snodgrass and Gran said at the same time. No, her grandmother hadn’t believed her when she said it before. She might have known Gran wouldn’t.

  “He was,” Beckie said. “He dropped us off here, and then he went on to wherever he went to deliver them.”

  “I never heard anything so ridiculous in all my born days,” Gran said. “Lord knows I don’t love Luke, but—”

  “Why do you say that, Rebecca?” Mr. Snodgrass broke in.

  “Because I was in the back seat, and there was this blanket so I couldn’t put my feet all the way down on the floor,” Beckie said. “And I moved it back to see why I couldn’t, and I found all these rifles.”

  “Why didn’t you say something then?” Gran asked, which had to be in the running for dumbest question of all time.

  “What was she supposed to say?” Mr. Snodgrass asked. “‘Got any ammunition for these?’”

  “I was just scared the customs people would find them when we crossed the bridge,” Beckie said, remembering how scared she’d been and wishing she could forget it. “Wouldn’t that have been great?”

  A millimeter at a time, Gran got the idea that she wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t blowing smoke. She should have known that since they got out of Uncle Luke’s Honda here in Elizabeth, but … As the realization sank in, her grandmother started to get angry. “Why, that low-down, no-good, trifling skunk!” she ex
claimed. “I told my sister when she wanted to marry that man, I told her he was …”

  She went on. Beckie stopped listening to her. Maybe she had told Great-Aunt Louise what a so-and-so Uncle Luke was. Or maybe she’d had a good time at the wedding and kept her mouth shut. That didn’t seem like Gran, but it was possible. Either way, what difference did it make now? But Beckie knew the answer to that. Gran had to prove, to herself and to the world, that she was right all along.

  “Maybe he wasn’t sending the guns—selling the guns—to the Negroes,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “Maybe they went … somewhere else, anyway.” When you had to go that far to look for a bright side to things, weren’t you better off leaving them dark? It looked that way to her.

  On the television, meanwhile, planes dropped bombs on what was probably the Negro district in Roanoke. Virginia soldiers were herding prisoners—black men, most of them in jeans and undershirts—along a highway. “These fighters will receive the punishment they so richly deserve,” the announcer said. He sounded happy about it.

  One of the prisoners turned toward the camera and mouthed something. I’m innocent, I didn’t do anything. Beckie was no great lip-reader, but she could figure that out. Figuring out whether to believe him was another story. There was a Negro rebellion here. Blacks were playing for keeps just as much as whites were. She would have bet anything that some of the men in that column, maybe most of them, were part of the uprising. She also would have bet not all of them were. The white soldiers would have grabbed anybody who looked as if he might be dangerous—if they left someone alone, he might get the chance to prove he was.

  Mr. Snodgrass was watching, too. “What a mess,” he said. “What a crazy mess.” But he didn’t seem to see that if white Virginians treated black Virginians better they might not have this kind of mess. He wasn’t a bad man, but he just didn’t see it—couldn’t see it. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

  Justin nodded to Beckie when she let him into the Snodgrasses’ house. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Not so good,” she answered, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Mrs. Snodgrass died yesterday—a doctor in Parkersburg managed to get a call through to let Mr. Snodgrass know.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Justin wasn’t just sorry, though—he was jealous. “I still can’t reach Charleston.”

  “Charleston?” Then Beckie remembered. “Your mother’s down there. I hope she’s okay.”

  “You ain’t the only one!” Justin exclaimed. “Somehow or other, I’ve got to get down there and find out.”

  “How?” Beckie asked reasonably. “Those aren’t just roadblocks between here and there. Those are roadblocks with soldiers. Can you go sneaking through the woods?”

  Justin wanted to say yes. He told the truth instead: “No, I’m a city kid.” He wanted to add some pungent comments to that. In the home timeline, he would have; people there took swearing for granted. They weren’t so free-and-easy about it here.

  “Well, then, do what’s smart,” Beckie said. “Sit tight. Maybe your mom will be able to get through to you if you can’t get through to her.”

  “Maybe.” Justin didn’t believe it. He couldn’t reach her with his cell phone. Mail was shut down. Telegrams here were as dead as they were in the home timeline. E-mail was wireless, again like home. That was great—convenient as anything—when the system was up. When it went down … It was down now, in this part of Virginia, anyhow.

  “What could you do there that you can’t do here?” Beckie had to be able to tell he meant no even if he didn’t say it.

  “I could know she was all right. She could know I was all right, too.” Schrödinger’s mom, he thought. Schrödinger’s kid. Just like the cat in the thought experiment, Justin and his mom weren’t all right to each other till each one knew the other was all right … or wasn’t. Uncertainty gnawed at him.

  One thing he didn’t say, or even think, was, I could go back to the home timeline. He couldn’t. He knew too well he couldn’t. There were too many genetically engineered viruses in the home timeline already. No transposition chamber would come to the room deep under Mr. Brooks’ shop till somebody found a cure for this one. The quarantine methods the home timeline used were a lot more effective than roadblocks, with or without soldiers. Stuck. The word resounded in his mind. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

  “She’ll be the way she is. And you are all right—as long as you don’t come down sick.” Beckie knocked wood. Justin wondered how old that superstition was. Plenty old enough to be in both this alternate and the home timeline. Older than the breakpoint, then. Thinking about things like that hurt a lot less than thinking about the disease or the war or what a mess this assignment turned out to be.

  “I’m not the only one to worry about. You’re in as much danger as I am,” Justin said.

  “Everybody in Elizabeth’s in danger,” Beckie said, which was bound to be true. She laughed. “If I didn’t come with Gran, I could be lying on the beach right now, you know?”

  “Sorry about that,” Justin said.

  “You want a fizz?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Justin said. They walked into the kitchen together. Before she opened the refrigerator, he put his arm around her. She gave him a surprised look—but not too surprised. “Thanks for listening to me,” he told her. “Thank for putting up with me, you know?”

  “No problem,” she said. “It works both ways, believe me.” She squeezed him for a second. Then she slipped away. “Fizzes.”

  He drank his in a hurry. It wasn’t just like anything in the home timeline, but it was sweet and cold. It even had caffeine in it. What more could you want? He wondered if he should try something more with Beckie. Something about the set of her mouth told him it wouldn’t be a good idea right this minute.

  Then her grandmother walked into the kitchen. “Oh,” she said. “The boy.” By the way she eyed him, he might have been something she’d just cleaned off the floor with a wet paper towel.

  “Gran!” Beckie said.

  “What?” her grandmother said. “It is him, isn’t it?”

  Oh, yeah, Justin thought. You stick in the knife and then you try to pretend you didn’t mean anything by it. And if he got mad—if he told her where to go and how to get there or even if he showed he was annoyed any way at all—she won. She was a sweet old lady, and he was just a punk kid. The very best he could do in the game was break even, and the only way he could do that was to make believe he didn’t notice a thing. Kids had had to do stuff like that since Urk the australopithecine broke an antelope bone over Urk, Junior’s, head for making a monkey out of himself when he shouldn’t have. Nope, you couldn’t win.

  Beckie’s grandmother took a pear out of the fridge, looked at it, breathed all over it, and then put it back and got out another one. She went away, munching. You chew with your mouth open, too, Justin thought.

  Once her grandmother was gone, Beckie sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s like that.”

  “What can you do?” Justin said. “My aunt’s a world-class dingbat. People choose their friends. Your family? You’re stuck with your family.”

  “Stuck with.” Beckie looked in the direction her grandmother had gone. “Boy, you can say that again. I feel like she’s my ball and chain.”

  “Yeah, well …” Justin kind of shrugged. “It’s not like you’re going anywhere much, not the way things are.”

  “Tell me about it.” Beckie cocked her head to one side, listening. “What’s that? That rumble, I mean?”

  “Sounds like more trackforts and stuff,” Justin answered. “But that’s crazy. They pulled out to fight the uprising, and now they’re coming back? Why would they do that?” Suddenly he flashed on Mr. Brooks, and he knew just what the older man would say, right down to his tone of voice. “I bet the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing.” He sounded cynical enough to alarm himself.

  He made Beckie blink, too. But she said, “I bet you’re right. Either that or�
�—she looked scared—“they’re soldiers from Ohio instead.”

  She probably didn’t care about Virginia or Ohio. She didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of fighting, that was all. Since Justin felt the same way, he couldn’t very well argue with her. Even so, he said, “I don’t think they’re Ohioans. The noise is coming from that way, not that way.” He pointed first east, then west.

  Beckie listened, then nodded. “It is, isn’t it? That’s a little better.” No, she didn’t care about either side. After a couple of seconds, she remembered he was supposed to. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “To somebody from a rich state on the other side of the continent, this whole thing probably looks pretty silly.”

  “Nothing where you can die from a horrible disease or get blown to pieces looks silly when you’re stuck in the middle of it.” Beckie spoke with great conviction.

  “You hit that nail right on the thumb,” Justin said gravely.

  Beckie started to nod, then gave him a peculiar look. “You come out with the weirdest stuff sometimes, you know?”

  “Thanks,” he said. This time, he knew exactly what kind of face she made at him. Before he could say anything more, he heard rising screeches in the air.

  “What’s that?” Beckie said again.

  He didn’t answer. He knocked her flat, and threw himself flat, too, even while she was squawking. He was dragging both of them toward the kitchen table—get under something, he told himself—when the first shells went off. Something slammed into the kitchen wall, and all at once the house started leaking air-conditioned air through a hole the size of his head.

  “What was that?” Beckie’s grandmother called. “Did anything break?”

  Justin lost it. There with artillery raining down on Elizabeth, he started laughing like a loon. Half a second later, Beckie was doing the same thing. They clung to each other. Either they were both crazy or they were an island of sanity in a world gone mad. Part of it, probably, was simple fear of death. The rest was proof of just how far out of it Beckie’s grandmother really was.