The Disunited States of America ct-4

by Harry Turtledove

  One thing that hadn't happened in this alternate was a peaceful civil-rights movement. Negroes here hadn't set out to persuade whites that they were as good as anybody else. Justin wondered why not. Maybe their being crammed into the Southern states and not spread across the continent had something to do with it. And maybe the history of uprisings left whites and blacks too distrustful of each other to look for common ground.

  More questions than answers, Justin thought unhappily. Things often worked that way out among the alternates. Crosstime Traffic tried to keep an eye on so many of them, it hadn't had the chance to study them all as well as it might have.

  "You ready, Justin?" Mr. Brooks asked. He couldn't know what Justin was worrying about.

  "Yeah," Justin said. "I guess so."

  They talked with the grocer a little more as they paid for their food. "Take care, now," Mr. Kerfeld said when they walked out.

  The air felt hot and sticky. Clouds built up in the west. "Rain coming," Mr. Brooks remarked.

  "I guess so," Justin said, and then, softly, "Do you suppose anyone here but Charlie knows what his last name is?"

  "People know," Mr. Brooks answered. "They just don't care. There's a difference." Justin nodded. But didn't that make it worse, not better?

  Six

  Lightning flashed, not far enough away. Beckie counted vampire bats. She'd barely counted two of them before thunder boomed, loud as a cannon's roar. Rain came down in buckets.

  "Wow!" she said. "You hardly ever see this in California."

  "This isn't anything special," Gran said. "Why, when I was a little girl. . . When was that storm, Ethel? You know the one I mean—the bad one. Was that in '36? Or was it '37?"

  "It was '37,1 think," Mrs. Snodgrass answered, so of course Gran decided it must have happened in 2036. They went back and forth, back and forth. Either way, it was more than forty years before Beckie was born, so she didn't worry about it a whole lot. Another flash of lightning strobed across the sky. This time, the thunder came even sooner. The Snodgrasses' house shook.

  "You don't want to see the lightning and hear the thunder at the same time. That's real bad news," Mr. Snodgrass said. He glanced at his wife and Gran. One of his gingery eyebrows rose a little. Was he thinking they were the lightning and the thunder? Beckie wouldn't have been surprised.

  Water drummed on the roof. No, you didn't get rain like this in Los Angeles. It came down, and it kept on coming. Nine zillion raindrops danced on the growing puddles in the back yard.

  Beckie wondered how often the Snodgrasses' house got flooded. They didn't seem antsy, so maybe it didn't happen as much as she guessed it might.

  Mr. Snodgrass had other worries on his mind. "Hope we don't get tornadoes," he said.

  "Bite your tongue, Ted!" his wife exclaimed. Mr. Snodgrass really did stick out his tongue and make as if to chomp down on it. Mrs. Snodgrass rolled her eyes before she went on, "We haven't had a twister tear through Elizabeth for as long as anybody can recollect. But remember the one that got Palestine? What year was that, Ted? Was it 71? Or 72?"

  "Well, I reckoned it was 73 myself, but I'm not gonna get all hot and bothered about it," Mr. Snodgrass answered, a dig plainly aimed at his wife and Gran. Mrs. Snodgrass rolled her eyes again. Gran didn't even notice she'd been zinged. Beckie might have known—had known—she wouldn't. None so blind as those who will not see, Beckie thought.

  More thunder boomed and rumbled, this time a little longer after the lightning that lit up the front room with a white-purple flash. Beckie could imagine funnels forming in weather like this. "What do we do if there is one?" she asked.

  "We go down cellar and say our prayers," Mrs. Snodgrass answered. "If God is listening, it'll stay away from us. If He's not. . ." She screwed up her face into what was meant for a smile. "If He's not, I expect He's got somebody else He needs to save more than us. His will be done."

  She sounded as if she meant it. People here took their religion more seriously than they did in California. Back home, Gran went to church but Mom and Dad didn't, or not very often. In Elizabeth, almost everybody seemed to. Beckie had gone since she came here—with the Snodgrasses and her grandmother going, staying away would have made her seem rude and weird. At seventeen, she felt the need to fit in. She didn't think she was getting much out of going—the preacher was a bore. But people smiled and nodded just to see her there. That counted, too.

  Another flash of lightning lit everything up for a moment. As Beckie blinked, she counted bats again. Halfway between five and six of them, the thunder crashed. "That's more like it," she said. "A mile away, or pretty close."

  "About what I figured myself," Mr. Snodgrass said. "I bet that one came down on Jephany Knob. A lot of times after a thunderstorm you'll see trees knocked down up there. It draws lightning, sure enough."

  High ground did. Beckie knew that. She'd seen pictures of trees blasted during thunderstorms. She tried to imagine what they'd smell like. What was the odor of hot sap? She didn't know, but she wanted to find out. "After the rain stops—if the rain ever stops—I'd like to have a look up there," she said. Look wasn't all of what she meant, but saying something like I want to have a sniff up there would only make everybody think she was strange.

  "Well, you can do that," Mr. Snodgrass said.

  "I don't want you going up there by yourself," Gran said.

  Beckie started to say everything would be fine. What she wanted to say was that Gran was an old foof who belonged back in the twentieth century, or maybe the nineteenth. Before she could get the words out, Mr. Snodgrass said, "Myrtle's right, Rebecca. There may be snags up there. There may be rattlers, too—there usually are."

  And there may be people with guns, Beckie remembered. She swallowed whatever protest she might have made and nodded instead. "Okay, I won't," she said. "Maybe Justin will want to go up there with me."

  That didn't make Gran any happier—but then, what did? "I don't know what that boy has in mind," she said, but that wasn't what she meant. She meant she knew just what Justin had in mind, and she didn't like it one bit.

  "Don't be silly, Gran," Beckie said.

  "I'm not being silly. Don't you wish you could say the same?" The look Gran gave her meant her grandmother thought she had the same thing in mind as Justin did. The only thing Beckie had in mind right then was picking up a lamp and bashing Gran over the head with it. She didn't, but it sure was tempting.

  "Justin's a nice enough fella," Mr. Snodgrass said.

  "Yes, and a whole lot you know about it," Gran said.

  "Oh, I recollect, I do," he answered. "I may not be young any more, but I'm not dead yet, either, not by a long chalk. Isn't that right, sweetie?" He turned to his wife for support.

  "Men," Mrs. Snodgrass sniffed. By the way she made it sound, half the human race was in big trouble if she had anything to say about it. Mr. Snodgrass mimed being cut to the quick. His wife laughed, but she wasn't kidding—or not much, anyhow.

  The high-topped running shoes Justin had worn when he came up to Elizabeth were good enough for almost anything. Oh, he'd get stares if he went to a fancy dinner in them, but he doubted anybody in Elizabeth had ever set out that fancy a dinner. They weren't hiking boots or anything, but he felt more than surefooted enough in them to climb Jephany Knob.

  "How you doing?" he asked Beckie.

  "I'm fine," she answered. Just then, her foot came down on some slick mud. She almost took a pratfall, but a wild flail of her arms and a helping hand from Justin kept her upright. "Thanks," she said.

  "Sure," he said. "You helped keep me from landing on my can a couple of minutes ago." He didn't much want to let go of her hand, but he did. Right now, she was a girl he knew, not a girlfriend. He knew Mr. Brooks wouldn't want her to turn into a girlfriend. Romances between Crosstime Traffic people and locals almost always turned out badly.

  "It's nice, isn't it?" she said. "The air feels . . . washed clean."

  Justin nodded. Now that the rain had moved through,
the nasty humidity was down. Everything smelled green—almost like spring but not quite so sweet, because fewer flowers were in bloom.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Justin's mind than a wisp of breeze brought a new odor with it. His nose wrinkled. So did Beckie's. That sickly-sweet smell was unmistakable. They both said the same thing at the same time: "Something's dead!"

  It had to be something good-sized, too, or the stink wouldn't have been so obvious. Feeling a little—a very little—like Daniel Boone, Justin followed the breeze up the knob.

  "Look!" Beckie pointed. "There's a tree down." Her laugh sounded shaky. "When the storm was bad a couple of days ago, I wondered if a tree would get hit, and what hot sap smelled like. But that's not sap."

  "No." Now Justin shook his head. "It's a dead bear or . . ." His voice trailed away. He saw what he'd hoped he wouldn't see. "Are you sure you want to look? It's a dead man."

  "It's Charlie!" Beckie said. In and around Elizabeth, the black man stood out, all right. "He must have run over by the tree when the lightning started coming close, and. . . ."

  "That's the worst thing you can do," Justin said. "People are supposed to know it is, too, but they do it anyway."

  "What's that by him?" Beckie asked.

  Justin took a closer look. However much he wished it would, that didn't change a thing. "It's a gun," he answered.

  "It's not just an ordinary gun, is it?" Like him, Beckie seemed to be doing her best not to say what desperately needed saying. She went on, "I mean, it's not a squirrel gun or a deer gun on. ..."

  "No, it's not any of those." Then, because he had no choice, Justin said the thing he had to say: "It's an assault rifle." Guns made for shooting game could be works of art in their own right. Guns made for shooting people were ugly and functional. This one, of metal and plastic with a big, fat magazine, was no exception. It was an infantryman's weapon, not the kind a janitor out hunting had any business carrying.

  And why would Charlie have gone hunting in the middle of a thunderstorm that had everything in it but the crack of doom? Justin couldn't think of any good reason. He had no trouble coming up with piles of bad ones, though.

  "What are we going to do?" Beckie said in a small voice.

  "Why are you asking me?" Justin snapped. He wasn't angry at Beckie—he was angry at himself. The question had several obvious answers, and he didn't want to think about any of them.

  Beckie sent him a hurt look. "You're the Virginian. You know what you're supposed to do when something like this happens."

  "Something like this?" He laughed harshly. "Nobody ever wants to run into something like this."

  That was true. It was also one of the biggest understatements of all time. He especially didn't want to have to deal with this mess, because he wasn't a real Virginian—not from this alternate, anyhow. If he were, he would have reacted without even thinking. He was sure of that. A black man with an assault rifle? What could that mean but an uprising against the whites who'd ruled this Virginia as long as there'd been a Virginia here? And what else could you do about it but report it to the authorities and turn them loose on all the African Americans for kilometers—no, for miles—around?

  Because he was from the home timeline, Justin didn't see things the way a local would have. He knew the blacks here were oppressed. He sympathized with them for wanting to do something about it. He didn't want to get shot himself, though, any more than an ordinary white Virginian here would have.

  "We need to call the police, don't we?" Beckie said.

  "The sheriff, you mean," Justin said. Elizabeth wasn't big enough to have a police department. But it was a county seat, and the sheriffs office and the county jail were in the same building as the county courthouse.

  "That's right. I've talked with him before," Beckie said. She took her phone off her belt. "Do you want to call, or shall I?"

  "I'll do it," he said. "We're both strangers, but at least I come from Virginia." One more lie he had to tell.

  He didn't have the Wirt County sheriff's number, but a call to information took care of that. "This here is Sheriff Cochrane," said a deep voice on the other end of the line. "Who am I talking to?" Justin gave his name. He told Sheriff Cochrane where he was, and what he and Beckie had found there. "Good God in the foothills!" the sheriff burst out. "Charlie? Are you sure?"

  Before Justin answered, he breathed in another lungful of that foul odor. "I'm sure, all right," he answered grimly.

  "Okay. I'm on my way—top of Jephany Knob, you said? Don't touch anything before I get there, you hear?" Without waiting for an answer, Cochrane hung up.

  "Well?" Beckie asked when Justin gave her phone back.

  "He's coming," Justin said. "He says not to touch anything."

  That made her mad, which Justin thought was funny. "How dumb does he think we are?" she demanded.

  "He probably doesn't think we are. He probably said it just in case," Justin answered. "He probably says it every time anything happens." How often did things happen in Wirt County? Justin had no idea.

  Sheriff Cochrane wasted no time. Red lights flashing, his car pulled to a stop at the bottom of the knob inside of five minutes. He wore brown boots, a khaki uniform, and what Justin thought of as a Smokey the Bear hat, though nobody in this alternate had ever dreamed up Smokey. He climbed Jephany Knob with the air of a man who knew the ground as well as he knew his own office—and with a pistol in his right hand.

  "You two," he muttered when he saw Justin and Beckie. "Strangers." By the way he said it, that was almost a crime in itself. He didn't quite aim the pistol at them, but he sure had it ready.

  Justin pointed to the lightning-blasted tree. "There's the body."

  "Uh-huh." As soon as Cochrane turned towards it, his long face got even longer. "Yeah, that's Charlie, sure as the devil." His nostrils twitched. He grimaced. "And he's been here a couple days, hasn't he?" He did some more muttering, then walked over and crouched next to the dead man—and next to the assault rifle by his right hand. Cochrane pointed to it. "You kids touch this piece? At all? I won't get mad—well, 1 won't get real mad—if you tell me yes. But if you tell me no and your prints show up, you don't even want to think about how much trouble you're in, not in wartime you don't. So—did you?"

  "No, sir," Justin and Beckie said together.

  "Okay." The sheriff put on rubber gloves. He picked up the assault rifle, holding it by the barrel, and put it in a plastic evidence bag. Then he looked down at Charlie and shook his head. "I hadn't seen him around, but I didn't think anything of it, you know? His wife didn't call him in missing, either. I don't like that a bit. I don't want to believe any of this. If Charlie's not to be trusted, there's not a colored fellow in the whole blamed state who is."

  He was likely to be right. Why would blacks in Virginia stay loyal to the government that didn't give them the rights whites took for granted? The only reason Justin could see for their staying quiet was that they were afraid to rise up. If they lost that fear . . . Well, there Charlie lay.

  "Strangers," Sheriff Cochrane muttered again. He eyed Justin and Beckie. "What were you two doing up here, anyway?"

  "Just taking a walk," Justin answered.

  "We were glad to get out after the rain cooped us up," Beckie added.

  "Uh-Huh" the sheriff said. That might have meant he wondered if they'd come up here to fool around. Rules or no rules, Justin wouldn't have minded. But Cochrane was also thinking of something else. "You weren't by any chance up here while it was raining, were you?"

  They were white. He had to be careful how he questioned them. But Justin knew what he meant. He wanted to know if they had anything to do with the Negro and the assault rifle. That was what they got for being strangers. They both shook their heads at the same time. "You can ask my grandmother and Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass," Beckie said. "Besides, I would have drowned if I went out in that."

  "My uncle will tell you I was with him all the time," Justin said.

  "Another stranger
," Sheriff Cochrane said. But he went on, "Well, I've known the Snodgrasses since dirt. They wouldn't have any truck with a thing like this, that's a fact." He got to his feet. "You kids come on back to the car with me. I'll take you into town."

  "What about Charlie?" Justin asked.

  Sheriff Cochrane looked back at the janitor's body. "He's not going anywhere," he said, and Justin couldn't very well argue with that. The sheriffs voice took on the snap of command: "Come on, I told you."

  Down Jephany Knob they went, all of them skidding when they hit slick patches of mud. Nobody fell, which Justin took for a minor miracle. The sheriff started to open the back door to the bright red car, then changed his mind and opened the front door instead.

  "Crowd in beside me," he said. "If I put you in back, everybody who sees you in there'll figure I've jugged you, and I've got no call to do that." As with most police cars, this one had a fine metal grill between front seat and back to make sure prisoners didn't kick up any trouble.

  The front seat was crowded with three people in it. Justin, in the middle, didn't mind getting squeezed against Beckie.

  Sheriff Cochrane was a different story. He smelled of tobacco, and the pistol on his right hip was an uncomfortable lump. Justin was glad it wasn't more than a couple of minutes' ride back to Elizabeth.

  Cochrane stopped the car at the corner of Route 14 and Prunty. "Guess I'll let the two of you out right here, if that's okay," he said.

  "Sure," Beckie said, and got out in a hurry. Justin slid out after her. The sheriffs car headed on up toward the courthouse. "Shall we go back to the Snodgrasses'?" Beckie asked.

  Justin shook his head. "Let's just wait here for a little bit." She looked puzzled, but she didn't say no.