The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  The soldiers he and Mollie helped Strange collect belonged to several different regiments; advance was as likely as retreat to break up an army’s neat ranks. When they’d rounded up about a company’s worth, the major said,” All right, Bean, get us around them.”

  “Do my best, sir.” Mollie led the impromptu force east, saying, “We’ll go most of the way to the railroad tracks before I try and bring us north. There’s a little path runs alongside ‘em, about half a mile this way.”

  “Good enough,” Strange said. “The line of the railroad itself is sure to be strongly held, but a path…” His features were not nearly so mobile as those of his commander, but anticipation sparked in his eyes.

  The detachment had not been moving long when firing erupted up ahead. After a few minutes, mortar bombs began falling, crump, crump, crump, back around where Major Strange had chosen his men. Caudell said, “I’m not usually what you’d call fond of marching, but right this second, it looks pretty fine to me.” Major Strange, who tramped along in front of him, bobbed his head up and down in emphatic agreement.

  The din of gunfire faded behind the Confederates. Caudell took that as a good sign, hoping it meant the Rivington men hadn’t the men to extend their wired line all the way from the position they’d been defending to the Wilmington and Weldon tracks. If they had—He took a deep breath which had nothing to do with how tired he was. If they had enough men for that, this detachment was going to get chewed up.

  Mollie recognized the path when she came to it. Nate would have marched right by; it was so narrow and overgrown that he wondered if it went back to Indian days. That made it harder to follow north, but also raised his spirits: newcomers like the Rivington men might never have discovered it.

  No wire with teeth reached out to trap him for enemy guns. The soldiers who marched with him had seen too much war to make a lot of unnecessary noise, but they grinned and checked their rifles. They knew what they were gaining here.

  “How close to the town do the woods grow?” Strange asked Mollie.

  “Inside half a mile, sir,” she answered. The major beamed like a cherub.

  As it turned out, they didn’t do quite as well as Mollie expected. They came to a new clearing with a half-built big house in the middle of it. On the far side were four or five Rivington men hurrying toward the fighting. They stopped in comic dismay as the Confederates began coming out of the woods. Then one of them raised his repeater to his shoulder and started shooting.

  The fierce little fire fight lasted only a few minutes: even with body armor, four or five were no match for a company. Major Strange was rubbing his chin as he trotted north. He waved the detachment to a halt, told off about a quarter of his little force and pointed them westward. “I know the general told me to drive for the town, but the Rivington men have to know we’re here now after the racket we just made,” he said. “I don’t aim to be hit from the side when I ‘m supposed to be doing the hitting myself.”

  The men he’d split off from his main command went regretfully, but they went: Strange’s order made too much military sense to be disobeyed, even by soldiers who wanted to be in at the kill. They’d all been outflanked at one time or another and didn’t fancy ending up on the receiving end of that punishment ever again.

  Strange waved once more. “Let’s go! Skirmish order.” The Confederates formed two lines, the men well separated from one another, and rolled forward. A few shots came from in front of them, but only a few. Nate let loose with a rebel yell as the whitewashed bulk of the Notahilton began playing peekaboo through the trees.

  Gunfire crackled, not far off to the left. Mollie pointed toward J. P. Strange, nodded approvingly. So did Caudell: sure enough, the Rivington men had tried to swing back on the detachment. Always nice to have an officer who can see past the end of his beard, Caudell thought.

  Something went pop under Strange. The noise was loud enough to make Caudell, who trotted along perhaps fifty yards to the right of the major, look his way. He saw a black cylinder bounce out of the ground, about to the level of Strange’s waist. A split second later came another, much louder blast. The major collapsed with gruesome bonelessness, almost torn in two. A couple of men closest to him on either side also went down. Small, deadly pieces of metal buzzed past Caudell like angry bees.

  “Torpedo!” The cry rose from half a dozen throats.

  Caudell wished he could glide through the air or, like Jesus, walk on water. But there was no help for it but to run on. “Once we take Rivington, we don’t have to worry about torpedoes again as long as we live!” he shouted, as much for his own spirit’s sake as for the men around him. He blinked when they raised a cheer.

  And there, all at once, lay the town whose name had become a curse all through the Confederacy. Only a handful of men in mottled green were on the street. Caudell fired at one of them. Several other Confederates opened up at the same time, so even though the man fell, he was not sure his bullet had brought him down.

  The other Rivington men scrambled for cover. Remembering Nathan Bedford Forrest’s orders to poor Major Strange, Caudell yelled, “Watch where they retreat to. That’ll be what the general wants us to take out.”

  Following his own advice wasn’t easy. The Rivington men were far from the only people dashing this way and that: a great many shrieking slaves, some white men in ordinary clothes—the true Rivington men, Caudell thought—and a handful of women scattered in panic at the sound of gunfire.

  “The railroad station!” Mollie said, and that did indeed seem to be where the Rivington men were retreating. One corner of Caudell’s mouth twisted down. He’d had a small taste of house-to-house fighting when the Army of Northern Virginia took Washington City, and he didn’t care for it of course, nobody ever bothered to ask a soldier whether he cared for the job he was doing.

  He crawled down to the end of the horse trough behind which he and Mollie lay, looking for the next piece of cover he’d run to. As he did so, he saw two men in splotched green dart over the tracks. “It ain’t the station!” he said, forgetting all his carefully cultivated grammar. “They’re making for that shed across the way.”

  He remembered the shed, and the armed guard who’d prowled around it, from his train trip through Rivington on the way home after the war. But for four years’ weathering, it looked the same now as it had then.

  “They crazy?” Mollie said. “They can’t fight from the shed.”

  She was right—the only thing that made the shed different from a big wooden box was its door. A determined squad in the train station could have held out for a long time, maybe even until the Confederates brought up artillery. But another Rivington man abandoned the station for the shed. A bullet knocked him sprawling before he got there. He crawled on, leaving a trail of blood behind him, until he made it through the doorway.

  Crazy to go from the station to the shed, unless… “They must keep their time engine in there!” Caudell said. The men of America Will Break were losing their fight for Rivington, but if they’d come out of a distant time, they might be able to go back again. The idea angered Caudell—it seemed like an unfair escape hatch.

  “Time engine?” Mollie said.

  “Not now,” he answered absently. The tactics the Rivington men were using made him sure he’d guessed their game. The fighters in the train station were a rear guard, holding back the Confederates while their fellows, one by one, dashed for the shed. A couple of them stopped bullets and fell, but most ran the gauntlet of fire.

  They knew their business. Even when but one man was left in the station, he kept firing now from this window, now from that, so his foes took a little while to realize he was alone. And he let go a long, sprayed burst before he sprinted across the tracks, forcing enough of the Confederates to duck that he made it to the shed safe. The door swung closed behind him.

  Only when silence lengthened did some of the Confederates warily emerge from cover. A lieutenant—in the confusion, Caudell never had caught his n
ame—trotted up to the shed. If any Rivington men remained inside, he was a dead man. But no one fired from in there. He waved his hat, signaling it was safe to approach.

  Caudell came up slowly, wondering if things could be as peaceful as they seemed. The young lieutenant started to pull the door open, then thought better of it. He sent several rounds through the rough pine boards. When all stayed silent, he grinned and yanked on the iron handle.

  A blast of yellow flame, a roar—The mine literally blew him out of his shoes. But for those shoes, all that was left of him was a great red smear on the ground and the train tracks. The three men behind him also went down as if scythed. So did the facing wall of the station.

  “Another torpedo!” Half deafened by the explosion, Caudell could hardly hear himself scream.

  Mollie saw something he had not. Pointing, she said,” All the blast came out in one direction. I wonder how they did that.” When Nate, head still ringing, helplessly spread his hands, she stepped close and bawled in his ear till he understood.

  However the Rivington men managed their hellish tricks, he was just glad he hadn’t been right in front of the shed. Along with the four men instantly killed, several others were down, badly wounded. Their cries pierced the thick wool that still seemed to swaddle Caudell’s ears.

  But the door to the shed was open—open for good now. Caudell glanced at Mollie. She nodded, though her face mirrored the dread he felt. They ran for the doorway together, shouting for all they were worth and firing as they went.

  The air inside smelled hot and burnt. Caudell dove and rolled. He bumped up against a stack of crates, neatly stenciled MEALS, READY TO EAT. Mollie crouched beside him. He blinked again and again to make his eyes adapt to the sudden gloom. The shed wasn’t as dark as it should have been. Over in one corner, hidden behind more crates, a bright white light shone off the cobwebby ceiling.

  Mollie pointed to it with the muzzle of her AK-47. “That’s the same kind of light Benny Lang had in his house, ‘cept he had ‘em all over, not just the one.”

  “To hell with Benny Lang.” But Caudell was already scuttling forward on hands and knees. “Reckon we’ve got to find out what that is.” Mollie went right behind him, and several other soldiers, too. He waved them to a halt when he came to a turn in the maze of crates. “If I touch off another torpedo, no need for us all to go up.”

  He rounded corners one by one, each time by himself. He didn’t think about bravery till long afterwards; at the time, the only thing in his mind was the luckless lieutenant’s empty shoes. If he did touch off a torpedo, he’d never know what hit him. Oddly, that helped steady him. He’d seen too many worse ways of dying.

  Then he came to the last: turn. Ahead of him, the light spilled out bright as day, maybe brighter. One of the men in back of Mollie said, “Where the hell’d all them Rivington bastards get to?”

  Caudell turned the corner. Since he had no idea what a time engine was supposed to look like, he couldn’t have honestly said the machine took him by surprise. It had a small platform, perhaps three feet square, that glowed almost like the sun. His first quick thought when he saw it was relief that it was no larger—who could say what deviltry the Rivington men might have brought from the future through a big time engine?

  He blinked so he could squint through the glare, and to make sure he could trust his eyes. On that platform stood a Rivington man, but Caudell could see right through him, as if he were one of the ghosts old Negroes talked about incessantly. While one part of him chewed on that, another brought up his repeater. Before he truly thought about what he was doing, he squeezed off half a dozen rounds.

  The bullets passed right through the Rivington man. He did not crumple—he disappeared. The glowing platform went dark, plunging the shed into blackness. The Confederates behind Caudell shouted in alarm; for that matter, so did he. The time engine spat sparks like a railroad car going forty miles an hour with its brakes locked. The wall behind it and the crates to either side caught fire almost at once.

  “Let’s get out of here!” three people yelled together. The soldiers scrambled and stumbled and cursed their way back through the maze toward the light from the shed’s blasted doorway. Caudell, who brought up the rear, was coughing and choking on smoke by the time he made it to the blessed fresh air.

  But even as he rubbed his streaming eyes, he wondered what had happened to the Rivington man on the platform when he shot up the time engine. Had the man made it back—or rather forward—to his own year? When the engine smashed to bits, was he rudely dumped into 1882, or 1923, or 1979? Or had he vanished into a limbo of no time at all? Caudell knew he would never find out—or stop wondering.

  A brisk crackle of gunfire from the south made him quit speculating in a hurry. Here were the outflanked Rivington men, come too late to save their link to whatever year had spawned them. But they still carried rifles in their hands, and they’d proved themselves fighters as tough as any Caudell had ever run into. If they wanted revenge, they could take a fair-sized chunk of it.

  Caudell ran south, away from the burning shed. He flopped down by the horse trough from which he’d fired at the train station, only now on the opposite side. Where was Mollie? There, shooting from behind the steps of the general store. A big knot of fear eased inside him when he saw her.

  The shed and the supplies inside blazed fiercely now; he could feel the heat on the back of his neck from a hundred yards away. He looked over his shoulder. The thick column of black, black smoke mounting to the sky came from the funeral pyre of the Rivington men’s hopes.

  He peeked round the edge of the horse trough for a muzzle flash at which to shoot. He fired twice. Then the AK-47 clicked uselessly—another clip empty. He clicked in his last one, chambered a round. As he did so, he remembered how nearly impossible it was to load a rifle musket while lying down. He crawled along, peeked round the other edge of the trough—maybe someone in mottled green was waiting for him to show up in the same place twice in a row. He hadn’t lived through the Second American Revolution by being stupid.

  No muzzle flashes—but what was that, flapping from behind a pokeberry bush? “A white flag,” he said, doubting his own words while he spoke them aloud. But a white flag it was. A Rivington man stepped out from cover to wave it back and forth. Slowly, firing on both sides died away. The men of America Will Break emerged, one by one, hands raised in surrender.

  Even after a couple of dozen fighters in mottled green, all of them rifleless, came out into the open, Caudell stayed low behind the horse trough. He had trouble believing the Rivington men, after battling so long and hard against everything the Confederacy could throw at them, would give up now. Nor was he alone. Hardly any Confederate soldiers left hiding places to take charge of their enemies.

  So the Rivington men kept walking, hands up, heads down. That more than anything else at last convinced Caudell they really were giving up: they looked like beaten troops. He got to his feet, ready to dive back to safety in an instant at the least hint of danger. When Mollie made as if to join him, he waved her back, saying, “Keep me covered.”

  Some of the other Confederates moved with him. Others stayed in place to support them: how many he was not sure, for when he turned around to look, he could see only a couple of them. He also saw the blacks and native whites of Rivington coming out of their hiding places now that the shooting had stopped. A few of them also started toward the men of America Will Break, the men who had ruled their town, ruled their lives, for the past four years and more.

  The man with the white flag was the same big fellow who had parleyed with Nathan Bedford Forrest. Caudell searched for his name, found it: Andries Rhoodie. Rhoodie turned his head from one of the approaching Confederates to the next. Finally he made straight for Nate, hailing him with: “You seem to be the ranking soldier here, sir.”

  “Me?” Caudell’s voice was a startled squeak. He looked quickly to either side. Sure enough, Rhoodie was right; no Confederate officers had broken c
over—he wondered if any of the detachment’s officers were still alive—and no other first sergeants. He gathered himself. “Yes, sir, I guess I am at that. I’m First Sergeant Nate Caudell, 47th North Carolina.”

  “Then you are the man to whom we must surrender.” Rhoodie sounded as if he would sooner have faced red Indians, scalping knives. He wore no sword, but took off a belt that held a holstered pistol, thrust it at Caudell. “Here.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Though no connoisseur of surrender ceremonies, Caudell suspected they could be handled with more grace. Awkwardly, not wanting to let go of his AK-47, he belted the pistol round his own waist. Then he blurted, “What made you just up and quit like that?”

  “What the bleeding hell d’you think?” Rhoodie stabbed a finger toward the burning shed. “With our time machine gone, how are we supposed to fight a whole country?” He did not even try to hide his bitterness.

  Caudell forbore to mention that he was the one who’d ruined the time machine, Rhoodie had called it. But, nettled by the Rivington man’s tone, he said, “Even when you had it, we were whipping you—otherwise how did we get here?”

  Rhoodie glared, then seemed to crumple. His shoulders sagged, the iron went out of his backbone, he stared down at his heavy boots. Behind Caudell, sudden shouts rang out: “Hey, what’s that crazy nigger doin’?” “Where’s he goin’?” “Look out!” “Somebody stop him!”

  As Caudell turned, a short, scrawny black man wearing only a pair of tattered trousers shot past him. The Negro clenched a broken whiskey bottle. With a wordless shriek of hate, he drove the jagged end into Andries Rhoodie’s throat.