Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  In the last war, O’Doull didn’t remember anyone asking to be killed so he could escape his torment. It might well have happened, but he hadn’t seen it. He did now. More than once, he’d been tempted to ignore the Hippocratic oath he’d sworn and give the victims what they wanted.

  “That’s why God made morphine, sir,” McDougald said.

  “God made morphine—and we make addicts,” O’Doull replied.

  “If you’re in pain, that’s the least of your worries,” the corpsman said. “All you want to do is stop hurting. You can get over morphine addiction once you’re not hurting any more. As long as the burns are giving you hell, you might as well be dead.”

  O’Doull thought of addiction as a personal failing, even if pain relief caused it. He eyed McDougald thoughtfully. The corpsman had a different slant on things. “You look at it from the patient’s point of view, don’t you? Not the doctor’s, I mean.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” McDougald said, which was formally true. He went on, “And we’re here for the patients, aren’t we?”

  A lot of people at aid stations thought they were there to advance their own careers, or to stay out of the front-line fighting. And there were some men from churches that did not approve of members who carried guns, but that had nothing against helping the wounded. “Everybody ought to think the way you do,” O’Doull said. “We’d all be better off.”

  The corpsman only shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. My guess is, we’d just be screwed up a different way.”

  “Doc! Hey, Doc!” O’Doull had come to dread that call. It meant another wounded man coming in. Sure enough, the corpsman outside went on, “Got a belly wound for you, Doc!”

  “Oh, hell,” O’Doull said. Even with sulfa drugs, belly wounds were always bad news. The chance for peritonitis was very high, and a bullet or shell fragment could destroy a lot of organs a person simply couldn’t live without. O’Doull raised his voice: “Bring him in.”

  The corpsmen were already doing it. They lifted their stretcher up onto the makeshift operating table that had been someone’s kitchen table till the Medical Corps commandeered it. The soldier on the stretcher wasn’t groaning or screaming, as men with belly wounds often did. He’d passed out—a mercy for a man with an injury like that. He was ghost pale, and getting paler as O’Doull eyed him.

  “I don’t think you’d better wait around real long, Doc,” said the corpsman who’d shouted for O’Doull.

  “I don’t intend to, Eddie,” O’Doull answered. He turned to McDougald. “Pass gas for me, Granny?” McDougald wasn’t an anesthetist, either, but he’d do a tolerable job.

  He nodded now. “I’ll take a shot at it.” He grabbed the ether cone and put it over the unconscious man’s face. “Have to be careful not to give him too much, or he’s liable to quit breathing for good.”

  He was liable to do that anyway. He looked like the devil. But he was still alive, and O’Doull knew he had to give it his best shot. He said, “Eddie, get a plasma line into his arm. We’re going to have to stretch his blood as far as it’ll go, and then maybe another ten feet after that.”

  “Right, Doc.” Eddie grabbed for a needle. O’Doull hoped it wasn’t one he’d just used on some other patient, but he wasn’t going to get himself in an uproar about it one way or the other. This wounded man had more important things to worry about. Surviving the next half hour topped the list.

  When O’Doull opened him up, he grimaced at the damage. The bullet had gone in one side and out the other, and had tumbled on the way through. There were more bleeders than you could shake a stick at, and they were all leaking like hell.

  Granville McDougald said, “You don’t want to waste a lot of time, Doc. He’s just barely here.”

  “What’s his blood pressure, Eddie?” O’Doull asked. His hands automatically started repairing the worst of the damage.

  “Let me get a cuff on him,” the corpsman said. “It’s . . . ninety over sixty, sir, and falling. We’re losing him. Down to eighty over fifty . . . Shit! He’s got no pulse.”

  “Not breathing,” McDougald said a moment later, and then, “I’m afraid he’s gone.”

  Eddie nodded. “No pulse. No BP. No nothin’.” He loosened the cuff and pulled the needle from the plasma line out of the soldier’s—the dead soldier’s—arm. “Not your fault, Doc. You did what you could. He got hit too bad, that’s all. I saw what you were trying to fix up. His guts were all chewed to hell.”

  “That they were.” Leonard O’Doull straightened wearily. “Get his identity disk. Then call the burial detail and Graves Registration. Somebody’s going to have to notify his next of kin.”

  “That’s a bastard of a job,” McDougald said. “In the last war, no one wanted to see a Western Union messenger coming to the door. Everybody was afraid he had a, ‘deeply regret’ telegram. It’s gonna be the same story this time around, too.”

  O’Doull hadn’t thought spending the last war in a military hospital had shielded him from anything. Now he discovered he was wrong. People in Quebec hadn’t had to worry about telegrams with bad news—not in the part of Quebec where he’d been stationed, anyhow. Farther west, Quebec City and Montreal had held out for a long time before falling. Francophones had defended them along with English-speaking Canadians.

  Lucien doesn’t have to worry about the war. He can get on with his life. That was a relief, anyhow. Quebec’s conscription law wasn’t universal, and Lucien had never had to be a soldier. And with the Republic formally neutral—even if it did lean toward the USA and help occupy English-speaking Canada—it wasn’t likely the younger O’Doull would ever have to aim a rifle in anger.

  That bothered the elder O’Doull not at all. He’d seen too much of what rifles aimed in anger could do in the last war. The refresher course he was getting now—including the poor son of a bitch who’d just died on the table—had done nothing to change his opinion.

  He discovered he was still holding the scalpel. He chucked it into a wide-mouthed jug of rubbing alcohol. The jug had a big red skull and crossbones on it, plus a warning label in red capital letters: poison! do not drink! He hoped that would keep thirsty soldiers from experimenting. You never could tell. He’d heard that sailors were draining the alcohol fuel from torpedo motors and drinking it. But that really was ethyl alcohol, and wouldn’t hurt them unless they were pigs. Rubbing alcohol was a different critter. It was poison even in small doses.

  He scrubbed his hands with strong soap. He could get the dead soldier’s blood off of them easily enough. Getting it off his mind . . . ? He shook his head. That was another story. If anybody could sympathize with Lady Macbeth, a battlefield surgeon was the one to do it. Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. And Macbeth himself:

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No, this hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

  Making the green one red.

  Macbeth, unlike his lady, had borne up under what he’d done. O’Doull had to do the same.

  “Can’t save them all, Doc,” Eddie said.

  It was meant to be sympathy. O’Doull knew as much. He wanted to punch the corpsman even so. Instead, he hurried out of the tent. He gaped and blinked in the sunshine like some nocturnal creature unexpectedly caught out by day. That wasn’t so far wrong. He spent most of his time under canvas trying to patch up what the fierce young men on either side were so eager to ruin.

  For the time being, the front was pretty quiet. The Confederates had got what they wanted most. The United States hadn’t yet decided how their real counterattack would go in. Only an occasional shot or brief burst of gunfire marred the day.

  O’Doull pulled out a pack of Raleighs. They were spoil of war: taken from a dead Confederate soldier and passed on to him in appreciation of services rendered. The C.S. tobacco was a hell of a lot smoother than what the USA grew. Even since he’d got to the fr
ont, O’Doull had noticed a steep dive in the quality of U.S. cigarettes as stocks of imported tobacco got used up. These days, brands like Rose Bowl and Big Sky tasted as if they were made of dried, chopped horse manure.

  He still smoked them when he couldn’t get anything better. They relaxed him and calmed his nerves even if they did taste lousy. Most of the time, his hands steadied down when he got to work. Still, a dose of nicotine didn’t hurt.

  Raleighs, now, Raleighs had it all. They gave your nerves what you craved, and they tasted good, too. How could you go wrong?

  O’Doull stopped with the half-smoked cigarette halfway to his mouth. How could you go wrong? He wouldn’t have been enjoying this savory smoke if some kid from North Carolina or Mississippi or Texas hadn’t stopped a bullet or a shell fragment. Things had gone wrong for the Confederate soldier, and they’d never go right for him again. O’Doull started to throw down the cigarette, then checked himself. What was the point of that? It wouldn’t do the dead man any good. But the smoke didn’t taste as good now when he raised it to his lips.

  He finished the Raleigh, then stomped it out. Behind the line, U.S. guns began to roar. Shells flew through the air with freight-train noises. Gas rounds gurgled as if they were tank cars full of oil or molasses. O’Doull’s mouth twisted. The Confederates would respond in kind, of course. Each side always did when the other used gas.

  “Different kinds of casualties,” he muttered. “Happy goddamn day.” He ducked back into the tent to get ready for them.

  They put Armstrong Grimes’ company into two boxcars. It wasn’t quite the 8 HORSES or 40 MEN arrangement the French had used during the Great War—Armstrong didn’t think the cars had housed horses or cattle or anything similarly appetizing. But he did come to feel a strong and comradely relation with a sardine. The only difference was, they hadn’t poured olive oil in after his buddies and him. Maybe they should have. The grease might have kept the men from rubbing together so much. Just getting back to the honey buckets was trial enough.

  “How come we’re so lucky?” he grumbled.

  “Can’t you figure it out for yourself?” Corporal Stowe asked. “I thought you were a smart fellow. You graduated high school and you stayed alive, right? That’s why you made PFC.”

  Armstrong was convinced simply staying alive had more to do with the stripe on his sleeve than the high-school diploma did. He had that more because his old man would have walloped the snot out of him if he’d quit beforehand than for any other reason. Yeah, only about one guy in three in the USA did, but so what? It didn’t mean anything to him.

  He said, “Maybe I’m a moron especially for today, but I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “No, huh?” The grin the corporal sent his way wasn’t especially friendly or amused. “All right—I’ll spell it out for you. We’re going where we’re going on account of we ended up west of fucking Sandusky when the Confederates cut the country in half. If we’d been east of the goddamn place, they’d’ve done something different to us—I mean, with us.”

  “Oh.” Armstrong Grimes thought it over. It made more sense than he wished it did. Getting from, say, Cleveland to Utah would have been hard, long, and dangerous. Getting from western Ohio to Mormon country was a straight shot—except, with luck, nobody would be shooting at them till they got there. He nodded. “Yeah, I guess maybe you’re right.”

  “Bet your ass I am.” Stowe’s laugh was the laugh of a man waiting for the gallows the next morning. “I’ll tell you something else, too: I’d sooner fight Featherston’s fuckers than the damned Mormons. The Confederates play by the rules, pretty much. The Mormons, it’s you or them, and they don’t quit till they’re dead.”

  “How do you know that?” Grimes asked.

  “That’s how it was in the last war, anyway,” Stowe answered. “Men, women, kids—they threw everything at us but the kitchen sink. And they probably loaded that full of TNT and left it for a booby trap.”

  “Oh, boy,” Armstrong said in a hollow voice. His father hadn’t fought in Utah, and so he’d never had much to say about the Mormons. History books in school made them out to be bad guys, but didn’t talk about them a whole lot. The books seemed to take the attitude that if you didn’t look at them, they’d go away. All he knew about them was that they wanted to have lots of wives and they hated the U.S. government. The wives didn’t seem to matter. Hating the U.S. government did.

  The train rattled west. Every so often, it would stop at a siding. They’d open the doors to the boxcars and let the soldiers out to stretch. The country gradually got flatter and drier. They clattered over the Mississippi between Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri. The bridge had a nest of antiaircraft guns around it. Armstrong doubted they would have done much good had Confederate bombers come calling.

  Missouri gave way to Kansas. Armstrong discovered why they called them the Great Plains. Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. Western Colorado was the same way. But then, in the distance, the Rockies poked their way up over the horizon. Those were mountains. Nothing Armstrong had ever seen in the eastern part of the USA prepared him for country like that.

  The next day, the train went over them. Even the passes were high enough to make his breath come short. He was glad he didn’t have to do anything serious there. The train went down the other side, but not so far down.

  It stopped again in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers came together. Again, Armstrong was glad to get out and stretch. A sign on the train station said, biggest town in colorado west of the rockies. That might have been true, but it didn’t strike him as worth bragging about. If Grand Junction had ten thousand people, that was pushing things. It was full of frame houses, most of them painted white. Not far from the railroad yards, several factories and packing plants dominated the business district.

  Railroad workers hooked up a car full of coal and scrap iron in front of the locomotive. Pointing, Armstrong asked, “What the hell’s going on there?”

  Corporal Stowe laughed. Again, the sound didn’t hold a whole lot of mirth. “Goddamn Mormons are mining the train tracks. Better if they blow up a car full of junk than an engine with people in it.”

  “Oh.” Armstrong thought that over. “Yeah, I guess so.” He eyed the forward car. “Bastards really are playing for keeps, aren’t they?”

  “I said so before. You better believe it,” Stowe answered. Behind them, somebody blew a whistle. The noncom grimaced. “Time to get back in.”

  “Mooo!” Armstrong said mournfully. Stowe laughed once more, this time as if he really meant it.

  Armstrong couldn’t have said for sure when they crossed from Colorado into Utah. The train went at a crawl all the way. If that warning car did touch off a mine, the engineer wanted the damage to be as limited as possible. He was probably thinking more of his own neck than of his passengers’. Armstrong didn’t mind. He was in no great hurry to meet the Mormons.

  Nothing blew up in the trip across the rebellious state, for which he was duly grateful. The train stopped at a place called Woodside. Soldiers threw the doors to the cars open. “Out!” they yelled. “Out! Out! Out! This here’s the end of the line.”

  “Jesus!” Armstrong said when he got a look around. “It sure as hell looks like the end of the line.”

  Grand Junction had been a small city. Woodside, Utah, was barely a wide place in the road. Along with a railroad depot, it boasted two gas stations and, between them, a trickle of water that had a sign above it: WOODSIDE GEYSER. DO NOT DRINK.

  Armstrong jerked a thumb toward the sign. “What the hell’s that?”

  “Bad water, that’s what,” answered one of the men who looked to have been there for a while. “Railroad dug for water back around the turn of the century and got a gusher they couldn’t cap. Only trouble was, it was bad water. People couldn’t drink it. Cows kept trying—and kept dying. Ain’t much of a geyser now, but from what the old-timers say it really used to be something.�
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  “Oh, boy.” Armstrong tried to imagine what being an old-timer in Woodside, Utah, would be like. If you had a chance between living here for fifty or sixty years and blowing out your brains, wouldn’t you think hard about picking up a rifle?

  But even the old-timers had probably never seen Woodside the way it was now. Green-gray tents spread out in all directions. For reasons known only to itself and possibly to God, the Army had decided to make this miserable place its chief staging area for moves against the Mormon rebels farther west. The rebels were holding the parts of Utah worth hanging on to. They seemed perfectly willing to let the Army have the rest.

  Off in the distance, artillery muttered and growled. Armstrong was more familiar with that noise than he wished he were. He wasn’t sorry to hear it at a distance, though. He’d heard artillery at much closer ranges than this. He’d heard soldiers after shells landed among them, too. He shoved that thought out of his mind. He didn’t want to remember what happened when things went wrong.

  For the rest of that day, things went right. He and his buddies lined up for showers—presumably not in water from the Woodside Geyser. They lined up again for chow. They got steaks and french fries, the first meal that didn’t come out of cans they’d had since leaving Ohio. It wasn’t a great steak, but the only thing really wrong with it in Armstrong’s eyes was that it was too damn small.

  He slept on a real steel-framed cot with a real mattress that night. When first conscripted, he’d hated Army cots. They weren’t a patch on his bed back home. Compared to the floor of a jouncing freight car, though, or to sleeping in a muddy foxhole, this one was a good approximation of heaven. He got rid of at least a few of the kinks of travel before reveille the next morning.

  Breakfast was even better than supper had been. Bacon and real scrambled eggs, biscuits with gravy, fresh-brewed coffee . . . He ate till he was groaningly full. He wasn’t the only one, either. The cooks had a devil of a time keeping ahead of the ravening hordes of hungry men.