"K-Killed?" Beckie had trouble getting the word out.
"Killed," Mr. Brooks repeated. "If he's going back to Charleston . . . Well, there's still fighting there. Those soldiers weren't doing much up here. The powers that be might have decided to get some use out of them after all. You learn to fight same as you learn anything else: you practice, and then you do it for real. Justin's never had any training. He knows how to load a gun, and that's about it. If he doesn't give himself away, he's liable to stop a bullet because he doesn't know how not to."
"What can you do?" Beckie asked.
"Good question. If I had a good answer, I'd give it to you, I promise," Mr. Brooks said bleakly. "He's been gone since some time in the night. I don't know when—I was asleep. He could be in Charleston already. Or he could be in the stockade already, if they figure out he's no more a soldier than the man in the moon. I hope he is. If he's in the stockade, I have time to figure out what happens next. If they just throw him into a firefight. . . Nobody can do anything about that."
"Why would they even think he was only pretending to be a soldier?" Beckie asked. "Nobody would look for anyone to try something like that. Most people don't want to be soldiers, and the ones who do join their state's army for real."
"Right the first time. Right the second time, too. You're a smart kid, Beckie. Only thing is, I wish you weren't," Mr. Brooks said. "Because if you are right—and I'm afraid you are—Justin's in a lot more trouble than if you're wrong."
"We've got to be able to do ... something." Beckie wished she hadn't faltered there at the end. It showed she didn't know what that something might be.
"Yeah," Mr. Brooks said. "Something." His tone of voice and the worried look on his face said he didn't know what, either.
The convoy of trucks and armored fighting vehicles from around Elizabeth was getting close to Charleston. They'd already been waved through two checkpoints outside of town. The sergeant in charge of this—squad?—was listening on an earpiece and talking into a throat mike. He wore three chevrons on his sleeve, the way a U.S. Army sergeant would have. So what if they were upside down? Justin still knew what they meant. Virginia officers' rank badges were a different story. But if an officer told him what to do, he knew he had to do it.
"Okay, guys—here's what's going on," the noncom said. Everybody leaned toward him. "Those miserable people are still making trouble in Charleston. We're going to help make sure they stop."
He didn't really say people. The word he used was one nobody in the U.S.A. in the home timeline could say without proving he was a disgusting racist. People in the home timeline cussed a lot more casually than they did here. But words that showed you were a racist or a religious bigot or a homo-phobe . . . Nobody in the home timeline, not even people who really were racists or fanatics or homophobes, used those words in public. The taboos were different, but they were still taboos.
That thought was interesting enough to make Justin stop paying attention to the sergeant for a few seconds. If he were a real soldier, he didn't suppose he would have done that. Then I can't do it now, he told himself.
"We're going down to Florida," the sergeant said. That confused Justin till he remembered it was the name of a street in Charleston. The Virginian went on, "Stinking people have a barricade there." Again, people wasn't the word he used. "We'll be part of the infantry force that flanks 'em out, and the guns with us'll help blow 'em to kingdom come. Any questions?"
Justin had about a million, but nobody else said anything, so he didn't see how he could. The real soldiers probably knew the answers to most of them. One of those real soldiers, a guy named Eddie, tapped Justin on the leg and said, "Stick close to Smitty and me. I know you're out of your unit and everything. We'll watch your back, and you watch ours. Deal?"
"Deal." Justin didn't know exactly what kind of deal it was, but he'd find out. Any kind of deal seemed better than getting ignored.
Was he supposed to be excited now or scared? The other guys in the truck just seemed to be doing a job. Were they hiding nerves? How could they help having them?
They got into Charleston a few minutes later. The town, as Justin remembered from his brief acquaintance with it, had a funny shape. It stretched for several miles along the northern bank of the Kanawha River, but it never got very far from the stream. It didn't seem as big as the Charleston of the home timeline. It probably wasn't. That Charleston was a state capital, and the center of all the bureaucracy that went with being one. This Charleston was just a back-country town.
And it was, right this minute, a back-country town in trouble. Automatic weapons sounded cheerful. Pop! Pop! Pop! That brisk crackle might have been firecrackers on the Fourth of July. It might have been, but it wasn't. The occasional boom of cannon fire had no counterpart in the civilian world.
Whump! Justin wondered what that was, but not for long. A hole appeared, as if by magic, in the canvas cover over his truck's rear compartment. No, two holes—one on each side, less than a meter above soldiers' heads. Those were—couldn't be anything but—bullet holes.
He wanted to yelp, but nobody else did, so he kept quiet, too. How much of courage was being afraid to embarrass yourself in front of your buddies? A lot, unless he missed his guess.
"Hope one of the bad guys fired that," Smitty said. Justin stared at him, wondering if he'd heard straight. Smitty went on, "You feel like such a jerk if you get hit by a round from your own side."
"Hurts just as much either way," somebody else said. The soldiers' helmeted heads bobbed up and down.
The sergeant had the earpiece in one ear again, and a finger jammed in the other to keep out background noise. "Listen up," he said when he heard whatever he needed to hear. "When we get out, we go right two blocks. Then we turn left and go down five or six blocks—something like that, depending on what things look like. Then we turn left again, and we come in behind the people's position. Got it?"
"Right, left, left," Eddie said. "We got it, Sarge."
"Okay. Don't foul it up, then," the noncom said, or words to that effect. The truck stopped—stopped short, so that Justin got heaved against the guy in front of him. "Out!" the sergeant screamed. "Out! Out! Out! Move! Move! Move!"
Justin jumped out. So did the other soldiers. They all started running as soon as their boots hit the asphalt. The crackle of gunfire was a lot closer now, and didn't sound nearly so cheerful. Those are real bullets, Justin thought as he pounded after Eddie and Smitty. If one of them hits me, it'll really mess me up.
The African Americans firing those bullets had a genuine grievance against Virginia. The state did treat them badly. Were Justin an African American from this Virginia himself, chances were he would have been shooting at the white men in camouflage uniforms himself. He understood the fury and desperation that sparked the uprising.
All of which meant zilch to him now. However good their reasons for picking up a gun might be, those African Americans were trying to maim him or kill him. He didn't want them to do that.
Some of the other Virginia soldiers fired back. Most of them squeezed off a few rounds from the hip as they ran. They couldn't have expected to hit anybody, except by luck. But if they made the rebels keep their heads down, the ammunition wouldn't go to waste.
"Aii!" A soldier toppled, clutching at his leg.
Two of his buddies grabbed him and dragged him into a sheltered doorway. He howled and cursed all the way there. He left a trail of blood all the way there, too. It shone in the sun, red as red could be.
Something cracked past Justin's face. Automatically, he ducked. Then he looked around. Would Eddie and Smitty and the other soldiers think he was a coward because he flinched? He didn't need long to figure out that they wouldn't. They were ducking, too.
He saw a muzzle flash up ahead. Somebody there is trying to kill me. It wasn't a thought, not really. He felt it in his bones as much as anything else. He flopped down behind a trash can and fired a few shots at... at what? He tried to think of it as shooti
ng at the flash. That way, it seemed like a video game. If those flashes stopped, he wouldn't be in danger any more—from there, anyhow.
But part of him knew this was no game, and he wasn't shooting just at a flash. A man held that assault rifle, a living, breathing, sweating man. What was that living, breathing, sweating man thinking as bullets cracked past him? What would he think if bullets slammed into him?
Justin wondered if he really wanted to know. All he wanted was to stay alive. If that meant he had to kill somebody else . . . He wished he'd done more thinking about that before he decided to put on Adrian's uniform.
Much too late to worry about it now.
"Come on!" Smitty yelled. Justin couldn't stay behind the trash can forever, even if it would have been nice. He scrambled to his feet and ran on.
He wasn't more than a few blocks from Mr. Brooks' shop. That meant he wasn't more than a few blocks from Mom. If he could slip away . . . But he couldn't. He was caught in the middle of something much bigger than he was. People were watching him to make sure he stayed caught in it, too. What would they do if he tried to duck out? Arrest him if he was lucky, he supposed. Shoot him if he wasn't.
Down toward the river for a few blocks. Then turn left and swing in on the Negro rebels. It all sounded easy when the sergeant laid it out in the truck. But the sergeant went down with a worse leg wound than the first one Justin had seen.
Another soldier went down, too, shot through the face. The back of his head exploded, blown to red mist. He couldn't have known what hit him—he had to be dead before he finished crumpling to the pavement. That didn't make watching it any easier.
And when the Virginia soldiers turned in, they found black rebels banging away at them from behind a barricade of rubble. Several Virginians fell then. Eddie went down, clutching at his arm. Justin dragged him into a doorway before he really thought about what he was doing. "How bad is it?" he asked.
"I'll live." Eddie's face was gray. "Right now, I'm not so sure I want to. Give me a pain shot, will you?"
"Sure." But Justin didn't know where to find the syringe, not till Eddie groped for it with his good hand. Then, awkwardly, he stuck the soldier. Even more awkwardly, he dusted antibiotic powder onto the wound and bandaged it. Eddie would need more work than that—Justin could see as much. He was no doc himself, though. All he could do was all he could do.
"Thanks, man. You did good." Eddie sounded much better than he had a few minutes earlier. The pain shot—morphine? something like it, anyway—kicked in fast. The wounded man went on, "You were on the ball, getting me out of the line of fire."
"You would have done the same for me." And Justin didn't just say it—he believed it. You didn't show you were scared so you wouldn't look bad in front of your buddies. And you didn't let them down so they wouldn't let you down, either. He hadn't needed long to figure out some of what made soldiers tick.
"Get moving!" somebody yelled from the street. "We'll do pickup on the wounded pretty soon."
Justin didn't want to get moving, any more than he'd wanted to get up from behind the trash can. But Eddie was watching him, and so was the soldier—officer?—with the loud voice, and Smitty would be. This wasn't good, but what could he do? He ran out and got moving.
The first thing he ran past was a body. His ill-fitting boots splashed in the blood. Soldiers were scrambling over the barricade. Someone got hit climbing over it and fell back. That didn't make Justin enthusiastic about trying it himself. He couldn't stay here, though—again, too many people were watching him. Up he went, and thudded down on the other side. Bullets cracked past him. The blacks might have been driven from the barricade, but they hadn't given up.
He found out how true that was a few seconds later. A skinny African American kid who didn't look more than fourteen leaned out of a second-story window and aimed an assault rifle at him. Justin fired first, more because his finger was on the trigger and the gun pointed in the right direction than for any other reason. The kid dropped the rifle and fell out of the window, splat! on the sidewalk. Half his head was blown away.
Justin stopped and stared and threw up. How he missed his own shoes he never knew, but he did. He would have killed me, he thought as he spat and retched and spat some more. He would have killed me if I didn't shoot him. It was true. He knew it was true. And it did not a dollar's worth of good.
Somebody thumped him on the back—Smitty. "First one you know you scragged yourself?" he asked.
"Yeah," Justin choked out.
Smitty thumped him again. "That's never easy. You reckon he would have cared a rat's patootie if he nailed you?"
"No," Justin managed. The Negro kid was doing everything he could to kill him. He'd never had any doubts about that.
"Well, come on, then, before somebody else is luckier than that guy was," Smitty said. "It gets easier, believe me. After a while, you don't hardly feel a thing."
"Terrific," Justin said. Smitty smacked him on the back one more time, as if he really meant it. Maybe the genuine Virginia soldier thought he did. After a while, you don't hardly feel a thing. The scary part was, it was likely to be true. And he was liable to get shot if he just stood here.
Mr. Brooks hadn't talked about this. You probably couldn't talk about this, not unless you were talking to somebody else who already knew what you were talking about. Now Justin did, even if he wished he didn't. Wishing did him as much good as it usually does—none at all. He ran on, past the corpse of the kid he'd killed. He felt as if it were the corpse of his own childhood lying there in a spreading pool of blood.
Without Justin around, Elizabeth felt even more like Nowhere to Beckie than it had before. She had nothing to do except read and watch TV. Virginia TV mostly wasn't worth watching. She got into a screaming fight with Gran over nothing in particular. The two of them sulked around each other for the next several days.
She didn't realize till much, much later that her grandmother was worried about her. Seeing that Gran showed worry by snapping at people, Beckie's not noticing wasn't the hottest headline in the world.
She was sorry afterwards, but not sorry enough to apologize. Gran wouldn't have said she was sorry if torturers started pulling her toenails out with rusty pliers. The next time Gran admitted a mistake would be the first.
Beckie almost hoped. . . She shook her head, appalled at herself. How could she wish—almost wish—the disease on somebody she was supposed to love? Never mind that her grandmother was maybe the least lovable human being she'd ever known. She hoped it just meant she was stir-crazy, not that she was some kind of monster.
She wished she could talk it over with Justin. He would have understood. But he was down in Charleston, doing. . . what? Whatever a soldier had to do. Whatever they told a soldier to do. What would that be? Beckie didn't know, not exactly, and she was glad she didn't. Whatever it was, she suspected it wouldn't be so easy to get out from under as Justin had thought.
/ should have told him. She sighed and scowled and shook her head. Would he have listened? She laughed, not that it was funny. Justin was the sort of person who listened only to himself. He sure hadn't paid any attention to his uncle, and Mr. Brooks had more sense in his big toe than Justin did all over.
Of course, who didn't think he had sense? Or she, for that matter? Gran was convinced she knew what was what and Beckie was the one who needed to rent a clue if she couldn't buy one. And if that wasn't crazy, Beckie had never run into anything that was.
What about me? Beckie wondered. Am I sure Vm right when I really don't have any idea what's going on? It didn't look that way to her, anyhow. Here they were in Elizabeth, and here they were, stuck. You didn't need to be Sir Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin to figure that out.
What did Franklin say about the United States? We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately—that was it. Actually, he was talking about the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, but these days people remembered the quote as a kind of early epitaph for
the country that couldn't stay united. Now all the states were separate, and all of them positive they were better off because of it.
"Penny for 'em, Rebecca," Mr. Snodgrass said from behind her.
She jumped. She hadn't known he was there. When somebody asked her something like that, she felt obliged to tell the truth. "You'll laugh at me," she said, and spelled it out.
He didn't laugh, but he did smile. "You ought to start a movement," he said. "Bring back the United States!"
"Oh, I know it wouldn't work," Beckie said. "None of the consuls and presidents and governors and what have you would want their power cut. No state would want people from any other state telling it what to do, or soldiers from another state on its land. But if things didn't break down in the first place, maybe we'd all be Americans now, not Virginians or Californians or what all else. Maybe we wouldn't fight these stupid little wars all the time. One's always bubbling somewhere."
She studied the expression on his wrinkled, lived-in face. It was the strangest blend of amusement and sorrow she'd ever seen. He knew much better than she did how dead the United States were. But if by some miracle they weren't. . . then what? His wife would still be alive. There wouldn't be shell holes down the street. He wouldn't have healing blisters on his hands from digging trenches. Beckie wouldn't, either.
"It would be nice," he said slowly, his voice—wistful? "Or it might be, if you could make states get along with each other like you say. I don't know how you'd do that, though. They couldn't figure it out three hundred years ago, and we are what we are now on account of they couldn't. Maybe you ought to write a book about what things would be like if we still had united states here."
Had he said that in a different tone of voice—and not a very different tone, either—he would have been mocking her. But he meant it. She could tell. "I never thought about writing anything longer than e-mail and school papers," she said.
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