Reincarnations

by Harry Turtledove

  As soon as the deputy finished the turn, of course, the clicking stopped. Price wished his mind had been going in some other direction a moment before. The deputy drove toward Philadelphia for a minute or two, then used the turn signal again. Click! Click! Click! Cecil Price cherished and dreaded the sound of those passing seconds, both at the same time. He grimaced when the deputy finished the new left turn and the indicator fell silent again.

  "Where the hell are we?" Muhammad Shabazz muttered.

  Before Price could answer him, the deputy did: "This here is Rock Cut Road. Ain’t hardly anything around these parts. That’s how come we’re here."

  "Oh, shit," Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. Price couldn’t have put it better himself.

  The deputy wasn’t kidding. Looking out the car’s dirty windows, Price saw nothing but a narrow red dirt road and weed-filled fields to either side. Behind the black-and-white, car doors slammed as the Black Knights of Voodoo got out and advanced.

  "I’m gonna open the door and let y’all out now," the deputy said. "You don’t want to do anything stupid, you hear?"

  "What the hell difference does it make at this stage of things?" Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.

  "Well, some things are gonna happen. They’re gonna, and I don’t reckon anything’ll change that," the deputy sheriff said seriously. "But they can happen easy, you might say, or they can happen not so easy. You won’t like it if they happen not so easy. Believe you me, you won’t, not even a little bit."

  He got out of the car. Can we jump him when he opens the door? Price wondered. He shook his head. Not a chance in church. Not a chance in hell.

  One more click!: the door opening. Heart racing a mile a minute, legs feather-light with fear, Cecil Price got out of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department car. The dirt scraped and crunched under the soles of his shoes. Is that the last thing I’ll ever feel? It didn’t seem like enough.

  Two Black Knights of Voodoo grabbed Tariq Abdul-Rashid. Two others seized Muhammad Shabazz, and two more laid hold of Cecil Price. Another BKV man walked up to Tariq Abdul-Rashid, pistol in hand. The headlights of the cars behind the black-and-white picked out the globe and anchor tattooed on his right bicep.

  "Go get ‘em, Wayne," somebody said in a low, hoarse voice-the Priest, Cecil Price saw.

  "I will, goddammit. I will," answered the BKV man with the pistol. Price happened to know that Wayne Roberts, in spite of the tattoo, had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. In the Black Knights of Voodoo, though, he could be a big man.

  He scowled at Tariq Abdul-Rashid. "No," the Black Muslim whispered. "Please, no."

  "Fuck you, man," Roberts said. "You ain’t nothin’ but a stinkin’ buckra in a black skin." He thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and pulled the trigger.

  The roar was amazingly loud. The bullet, from point-blank range, caught Tariq Abdul-Rashid in the middle of the forehead. He went limp all at once, as if his bones had turned to water. "Way to go, Wayne!" said one of the men who held him. When his captors let go, he flopped down like a sack of beans, dead before he hit the ground.

  "You see?" the black deputy said. "Hard or easy. That there was pretty goddamn easy, wasn’t it?"

  The BKV men who had hold of Muhammad Shabazz dragged him forward. Even as they did, he was trying to talk sense to them. "I understand how you feel, but this won’t help you," he said in a calm, reasonable voice. "Killing us won’t do anything for your cause. You-"

  "Shut up, asshole." Wayne Roberts cuffed him across the face. "You bet this’ll do us some good. We’ll be rid of you, won’t we? Good riddance to bad rubbish." He shot Muhammad Shabazz the same way he’d killed the other Black Muslim.

  "Easy as can be," the deputy sheriff said. "Easier’n he deserved, I reckon. Fucker never knew what hit him." The hot, wet air was thick with the stinks of smokeless powder, of blood, of shit, of fear, of rage.

  Easy or not, Cecil Price didn’t want to die. With a sudden shout that even startled him, he broke loose from the men who had hold of him. Shouting-screaming-he ran like a madman down Rock Cut Road.

  He didn’t get more than forty or fifty feet before the first bullet slammed into his back. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his face, dirt in his mouth, more dirt in his nose. Something horrible was happening inside him. He felt on fire, only worse. When he tried to get up, he couldn’t.

  Big as a mountain, hard as a mountain, the deputy sheriff loomed over him. "All right, white boy," he ground out. "You coulda had it easy, same as your asshole buddies. Now we’re gonna do it the hard way." He crouched down beside Price, grabbed his right arm, and broke it over his thigh like a broomstick. The sound the bones made when they snapped was just about like a breaking broomstick, too. The sound Cecil Price made… How the BKV men laughed!

  With a grunt, the sheriff got to his feet. With the arrogant strut he always used, he walked around to Price’s left side. With the coldblooded deliberation he’d shown before, he broke the white man’s left arm. Price barely had room inside his head for any new torment.

  Or so he thought, till one of the Black Knights of Voodoo kicked him in the crotch. "Ain’t gonna mess with no black women now, are you, buckra?" he jeered. More boots thudded into Price’s balls. That almost made him forget about his ruined arms. It almost made him forget about the bullet in his back, except he couldn’t find breath enough to scream the way he wanted to.

  After an eternity that probably lasted three or four minutes, the deputy sheriff said, "Reckon that’s enough now. Let’s finish him off and get rid of the bodies."

  "I’ll take care of it. Bet your sweet ass I will," Wayne Roberts said. He fired at Price again, and then again. Another gun barked, too, maybe once, maybe twice. By that time, Price had stopped paying close attention.

  But he didn’t fall straight into sweet blackness, the way Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid had. He lingered in red torment when the BKV men picked him up and stuffed him into the trunk of one of their cars along with the Black Muslims’ bodies.

  The car jounced down the dirt road, every pothole and every rock a fresh stab of agony. At last, it stopped. "Here we go," somebody said as a Black Knight of Voodoo opened the trunk. "This ought to do the job."

  "Oh, fuck, yes," somebody else said. Eager gloved hands hauled Cecil Price out of the trunk, and then the corpses of his friends.

  "Hell, this dam’ll hold a hundred of them." That was the deputy sheriff, sounding in charge of things as usual. "Go on, throw ‘em in there, and we’ll cover ‘em up. Nobody’ll ever find the sons of bitches."

  Thump! That was one of the Black Muslims, going into a hollow in the ground. Thump! That was the other one. And thump! That was Cecil Price, landing on top of Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz. An Everest of pain in what were already the Himalayas.

  "Fire up the dozer," the deputy said. "Let’s bury ‘em and get on back to town. We done us a good night’s work here, by God."

  Somebody climbed up onto the bulldozer’s seat. The big yellow Caterpillar D-4 belched and farted to life. It bit out a great chunk of dirt and, motor growling, poured it over the two Black Muslims and Cecil Price. Price struggled hopelessly to breathe. More dirt thudded down on him, more and more.

  Buried alive! he thought. Sweet Jesus help me, I’m buried alive! But not for long. The last thing he knew was the taste of earth filling his mouth.

  He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth seemed to fill his mouth.

  He sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, heart sledgehammering in his chest as if he’d run a hundred miles. He looked around wildly. Tiny stripes of pale moonlight slipped between the slats of the Venetian blinds and stretched across the bedroom floor.

  Beside him on the cheap, lumpy mattress, someone stirred: his wife. "You all right, Cecil?" she muttered drowsily.

  A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. Was he all right? That was a different question, a harder question. "I guess… I guess mayb
e I am," he said, wonder in his voice.

  "Then settle down and go on back to sleep. I aim to, if you give me half a chance," his wife said. "What ails you, anyhow?"

  "Bad dream," he answered, the way he always did. He’d never said a word about what kind of bad dream it was. Somehow, he didn’t think he could say a word about what kind of bad dream it was. He’d tried two or three times, always with exactly zero luck. The words wouldn’t form. The ideas behind the words wouldn’t form, not so he could talk about them. But even if he couldn’t, he knew what the dreams were all about. Oh, yes. He knew.

  He still lived in the same brown clapboard house he’d lived in on that hot summer night in 1964, the brown clapboard house he’d lived in for going on forty years. It wasn’t more than a block away from Philadelphia’s town square.

  He’d been Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price then. He ran for sheriff in ‘67, when Larry Rainey didn’t go for another term, but another Klansman beat him out. Then he spent four years away, and after that he couldn’t very well be a lawman any more. Once he came back to Mississippi, he worked as a surveyor. He drove a truck for an oil company. And he wound up a jeweler and watchmaker-he’d always been good with his hands. He turned into a big wheel among Mississippi Shriners.

  But the dreams never went away. If he hadn’t seen that damn Ford station wagon that afternoon… He had, though, and what happened next followed as inexorably as night followed day. Two Yankee busybodies: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. One uppity local nigger: James Chaney.

  At the time, getting rid of them seemed the only sensible thing to do. He took care of it, with plenty of help from the Ku Klux Klan.

  He wondered if the others, the ones who were still alive, had dreams like his. He’d tried to ask a couple of times, but he couldn’t, any more than he could talk about his own. Maybe they’d tried to ask him, too. If they had, they hadn’t had any luck, either.

  Dreams. His started even before the damn informer tipped off the FBI about where the bodies were buried. At first, he figured they were just nerves. Who wouldn’t have a case of the jitters after what he went through, when the whole country was trying to pull Neshoba County down around his ears?

  Well, the whole country damn well did it. Back in June 1964, who would have dreamt a Mississippi jury- -a jury of Mississippi white men-would, could, convict anybody for violating the civil rights of a coon and a couple of Jews? But the jury damn well did that, too. Price got six years, and served four of them in a Federal prison in Minnesota before they turned him loose for good behavior.

  He went on having the dreams up there.

  Sometimes weeks went by when they let him alone, and he would wonder if he was free. And he would always hope he was, and he never would be. It was as if hoping he were free was enough all by itself for… something to show him he wasn’t.

  Did the dreams make him change? Did they just make him pretend to change? Even he couldn’t say for sure. Ten years after he got convicted, he told a reporter-a New York City reporter, no less-he’d seen Roots and liked it. When he talked about integration, he said that was how things were going to be and that was all there was to it.

  He spent years rebuilding his name, rebuilding his reputation. And then, in 1999, everything fell to pieces again. He got convicted of another felony. No guns this time, no cars racing down the highway in the heat of the night: he sold certifications for commercial driver’s licensing without doing the testing he should have. A cheap little money-making scheme-except he got caught.

  They didn’t jug him that time. He drew three years’ probation. But you could stay a hero-to some people-for doing what you thought you had to do to people who were trying to change the way of life you’d known since you were born. When you got busted for selling bogus certifications, you weren’t a hero to anybody, even yourself. You were just a lousy little crook.

  A lousy little crook with… dreams.

  Two years later, a season after the turn of the century, he climbed up on a lift at an equipment-rental place in Philadelphia. He fell off somehow, and landed on his head. He died three days later at a hospital in Jackson-the same hospital where he’d brought the bodies of Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney for autopsy thirty-seven years earlier, after the FBI tore up the dam to get them out. He never knew that, but then, neither had they.

  He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.

  THEY'D NEVER -

  This one is Esther Friesner’s fault. No one-and I mean no one-else could have come up with an anthology called Alien Pregnant by Elvis. Mashing tabloid reality, real reality (if there is such a thing), and science fiction together should be illegal. For all I know, it is. Nobody’s busted me for it. Yet.

  Mort Pfeiffer slung his jacket over the back of his chair, then plomped his ample bottom into said chair and turned on his computer. Another day, he thought gloomily. He looked around the office of the Weekly Intelligencer.

  It looked like a newspaper office: other people dressed no better than he was sat around in front of screens and clicked away at keyboards. Those clicks made it sound like a newspaper office, too. It even smelled like a newspaper office: stale coffee and musty air conditioning with two settings, too hot and too cold.

  But it wasn’t a newspaper office, or not exactly. If the Intelligencer wasn’t the trashiest supermarket and 7-Eleven rack filler around, the troops hadn’t done their job for the week. "For this I went to journalism school?" Mort muttered.

  He wished for a cigarette. The smoke would have made the place smell even more authentic. But the Intelligencer office had gone smoke-free a couple of years before-it was either that or lose their health insurance. Besides, he was wearing a transdermal nicotine patch. Smoke while you had one of those things stuck to you and you were a coronary waiting to happen.

  Behind glasses that were going to turn into bifocals the next time he got around to seeing his optometrist, his eyes lit up for a moment. Transdermal patches… he might be able to do something with that. They were hot these days, and no more than three percent of the lip-movers who bought the Intelligencer were likely to have even a clue about what transdermal meant.

  So… the beginning of a headline formed in his mind, 72-point type, sans-serif, with an exclamation point at the end. TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE…!

  "Cause what?" he mused aloud.

  Cause heart attacks if you’re stupid enough to keep lighting up while you’re wearing one? He shook his head. That wasn’t scary enough. You didn’t necessarily die from a heart attack, and if you did, it was over quick.

  Cause cancer? That one was stale even for the Intelligencer (which was saying something). Besides, the whole idea behind nicotine patches was to keep you from getting lung cancer. Pfeiffer’s ethical sense was stunted (Would I be here otherwise? he thought), but it hadn’t quite atrophied.

  Cause AIDS? He shook his head again. Something there, though. Suddenly, like striking snakes, his hands leaped at the keyboard. Letters flowed rapidly across the screen: TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE AIDS-LIKE SYNDROME! He knew just how to write that one up. When you took the patch off, you went through some of the same whimwhams you did when you gave up smoking (he’d call a trained seal of a doctor for the impressive-sounding quotes he’d need). And some of those whimwhams were enough like early AIDS symptoms to give the piece the germ of truth his editor liked.

  Speak of the devil, he thought, because his editor came by just then, paused to see what he was working on, and nodded approvingly before heading off to the next desk. Don’t think of Ed Asner as Lou Grant here. Katie Nelligan looked more like Mary Tyler Moore with red hair.

  Mort sighed. If she hadn’t been his boss, and if he hadn’t had a well-founded suspicion that she was smarter than he was (although if she was all that smart, why did she work for the Intelligencer?), he’d have asked her out a year ago. One of these days, he kept telling himself. It hadn’t happened yet.

  Katie came back, dropped a wire service re
port into his IN basket. "See what you can do with this one, Mort," she said.

  He looked at the news item. Kids in Japan, it seemed, raised stag beetles (not Japanese beetles, for some reason) as pets. Then they’d put them up on round cushions two at a time to see which one could grab the other by the projecting mouthparts and throw it off. They’d just chosen a national champion beetle.

  "Jesus Christ," Mort said. "Sumo-wrestling bugs!"

  "That’s just the slant we’ll want on it," Katie said. She nodded again-twice in one morning, which didn’t happen every day. "Can you give me a draft before you go home tonight?"

  "Yeah, I think so," he answered. What was he supposed to tell her?

  "Good," she said crisply, and went on down the aisle between desks. Mort looked back at her for a couple of seconds before he returned to his computer.

  He discovered he’d forgotten what he was going to write next about the transdermal patches. No wonder, he thought. Sumo-wrestling bugs-Lord, that was enough to derail anybody’s train of thought. Bullshit about patches and the truth about bugs… "Hell of a way to make a living," he said under his breath.

  Nobody glanced over at him to see why he was talking to himself. People at the Intelligencer did it ever day. Nobody, but nobody, was ever a bright-eyed, eager eighteen-year-old getting himself ready for a hot career writing for a supermarket tabloid. It wasn’t a job you went looking for, it was a job you fell into- generally from a great height.

  "If I weren’t Typhoid Mary, I wouldn’t be here," Mort said, again to himself. He’d worked for four different papers in three years, each of which went belly-up within months of hiring him. The jobs had disappeared, but his rent and his car payment and his child support hadn’t. He’d been here five years. Whatever else you said about it, the Intelligencer wouldn’t go broke any time soon. What was that line about nobody going broke overestimating the stupidity of the American people?