American War

by Omar El Akkad

“I suspect right now you’re thinking, What can I do? I’m stuck here in this camp that may as well be a prison. What can I do against a whole army full of grown men with guns? Maybe there’s nothing I can do, nothing at all.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sarat replied.

  Gaines laughed. “Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t! And that’s my first inkling, Sarat, that maybe you’re one of the special ones. So let me tell you what it is I do. I seek out special people—people who, if given the chance and the necessary tools, would stand up and face the enemy on behalf of those who can’t. I seek out people who would do this even if they knew for certain that it would cost them dearly, maybe even cost them their lives. And then I do everything in my power to give them the tools, to give them their chance.”

  Sarat waited for him to say more, but he sat quietly watching her. She struggled to think of a reply, some means of convincing him she understood exactly what he had said, even though she did not, even though she was mystified by almost all of it. The silence grew leaden around her; she blushed.

  “Ah! Never mind all that,” Gaines said suddenly. “We’ll have plenty of time for that sort of talk later. For now, what say you we listen to some music?”

  “All right,” Sarat said.

  Gaines stood and walked to a set of bookshelves on the other side of the room. The shelves were full of old paper books. Some were impossibly thick, others bound in leather and inscribed with delicate golden script. While his back was turned Sarat ate another spoonful of honey.

  At the bottom of the middle shelf there was a small, flat contraption Sarat had never seen before, and two small speakers connected to it. Gaines ran his finger along a row of thin plastic cases lining one of the shelves. He pulled one case out and opened it. Inside was a round disk whose underside turned the light to rainbows. He pushed a button on the contraption and its top sprang open. He set the disk inside, closed the lid, and pushed a button. A faint whirring sound followed.

  “Does your family still have many old things?” he asked Sarat. “Things from before the war?”

  “Not really,” Sarat said. “We used to have a few of my grandparents’ things back home, photos and a wristwatch and a couple of letters, but we left most of them behind when we came here.”

  “That’s a shame, isn’t it? The first thing they try to take from you is your history.”

  A soft stringed lament silenced their conversation. The room filled with music.

  At its heart was an instrument Sarat had only heard once or twice before. Low, earthen strings, dampened as though filtered through the bones of deathbed oaks.

  “This was my grandmother’s favorite song,” Gaines said. “Listen.”

  A woman’s voice emerged from behind the waning strings. It was a voice unlike anything Sarat had ever heard before, full and deep and ciphered in a language she did not understand.

  “ ‘Son qual stanco pellegrino,’ ” Gaines said. The words meant nothing to Sarat but their phonetic echoes clung to the walls of her mind.

  She listened, enchanted. And afterward, when Gaines said he would like her and him to become friends, and that he would like to teach her about music and art and many other things from the vast and varied world beyond the gates of Patience, she nodded without thinking. Gaines smiled.

  “I think you’ll find a place for yourself in this world, Sarat,” he said. “I think you’ll make a place for yourself in this world.”

  Excerpted from:

  A NORTHERN SOLDIER’S EDUCATION IN WAR AND PEACE: THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND JR.

  I was only 29 years old when President Daniel Ki was assassinated. At the time I was a Compensation Claims Officer in Columbus, working in a small department within the War Office. The war of Southern secession had only just begun.

  Not coincidentally, the earliest days of the war were also some of the most prolific lawmaking and nation-building years in American history, rivaling only the years during which the capital was relocated inland from storm-ravaged Washington, D.C.

  It was during those early wartime years when the federal government succeeded in passing the Clean Fission Act, restarted the Eastern and Western Seaboard Decommissioning Initiatives, laid down the first thousand miles of the Sunbelt Transit System, and greatly expanded the overfill suburbs around Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Lexington. War is movement, my father likes to say.

  At the time, the department I worked at was located about two miles east of the Executive Building, where my father worked in an office down the hall from President Martin Henley’s briefing room. He used to call me up from time to time, usually to discuss some compensation claim I had recently approved. I remember one such meeting, early on in the war.

  On my way to see him that day, I passed the Threat Map in the lobby of the Executive Building. On that morning, a portion of the southern fortification was pulsing the black-and-red color that indicated an attack had taken place. By my count it was the third such attack in three weeks. I learned later that it was another homicide bomb, aimed at the more vulnerable defenses of the capital’s outer wire. No insurrectionist has ever managed to penetrate the Blue Square itself, but it is an unfortunate reality that there have been many cowardly attacks against the outer wire, attacks that have taken the lives of many brave guards. We lost four guards that day.

  When I reached my father’s office, I saw that he had been reading my latest compensation decision, regarding an Alabama claimant who alleged Incidental Property Damage from an Un-Oriented Drone.

  I watched him skim the pages of my report, looking over the assessment of facts, the reasons for judgment, and the compensation amount. His face was, as always, unreadable, serene. He asked if there had been any collaterals. I said there were none, but that the man had lost all his belongings, and was forced to seek shelter in the camps near Atlanta, which were known to be poorly managed by the insurrectionist government.

  “I thought we had a policy on Un-Oriented Drone damage,” my father said.

  “We do, but I made an exception in this case,” I replied. “It’s the second time his house has been hit.”

  “Struck twice by lightning? So either he’s a liar or he’s got terrible luck. Seems like either one shouldn’t be enough to prompt a violation of policy.”

  I came to reply, but he’d foreseen my argument, and preempted me. “The amount doesn’t matter,” he said. “Every compensation claim is a statement. When you compensate a UOD strike claim, you take responsibility for a crime committed by your enemy. It was the insurrectionists who destroyed the server farms. They’re the reason we have no more control over the drones. Do you see them handing out compensation claims for UOD strikes?”

  I argued that the claimant’s residence was in a strategically important area near the Tennessee line, and that by paying his claim we could help shift the perception among some Southerners that the federal government was unsympathetic to the plight of those living under corrupt insurrectionist rule. My father smiled.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Do you have an opinion about whose cause is right in this war?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And how much would I have to pay you to get you to change your mind?”

  Eventually I came to accept my father’s reasoning. I knew, despite how many soldiers he had lost in the war, he held no grudges against the people of the South. Let us not forget that it was his decision, made against the fierce objections of many federal politicians, to assign refugee Southern patriots to guard the Blue Zone’s outer wire, a job they perform with supreme courage.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A faint evening rain fell over Camp Patience. Back in Sarat’s childhood home the rain used to make a sharp sound as it hit the shipping container’s roof. But here in the camp it was a whispered admonition, a soft shh against the tattered tents.

  Sarat listened. She lay in her cot, her mother and sister asleep nearby. Through the window flap a soft line of silver moon
light illuminated her sleeping sister’s face.

  Their mother once said they were two birds hatched from the same egg, the same bones and blood inside them. And although Sarat had read one of Gaines’s books on genetics and now knew that wasn’t entirely true, she still liked to believe it. Whenever she got to thinking about why Dana’s skin was light and hers dark, or why Dana’s hair fell straight and bright and hers, before she shaved it, was fuzzy, she told herself that these things didn’t matter. What mattered was bones and blood.

  She watched Dana sleeping, her face cast in alabaster light. She did a thing she’d done since they were little children: she held her breath, manipulated it until it synchronized with her sister’s, until their chests rose and fell in time. She lay still and breathed as her sister breathed and listened to the whispering rain.

  At around four in the morning Simon stumbled through the door. He tried to move quietly but he was drunk and in the dark he stubbed his foot against his bedside locker. At the sound of his muffled cursing, a light went on in the back of the tent. Martina got out of her bed, as did Sarat and Dana.

  “Go back to sleep, for Christ’s sake,” said Simon, struggling to get his boots off.

  “Where were you?” asked Martina. “You haven’t been home in four days.”

  “The hell it matters where I was? There a sign-in sheet I didn’t know about?”

  Sarat could smell the reek of Joyful on him, could see he was that aggravated kind of drunk where even your own skin feels itchy as wool. She’d seen a lot of men at Patience get that kind of drunk.

  Martina walked to the front of the tent. She reached for her son and grabbed the pendant she saw hanging around his neck. It was a bullet casing pierced near its top with an iron nail—the symbol of the Virginia Cavaliers. In the South every rebel group had its own symbol: coiled snakes or Texas oil drills or words drawn in barbed wire. The Virginia Cavaliers had a bullet with a nail through it.

  Everyone already knew. For months Simon had been out with the rebels along the Tennessee line, sneaking in and out of Patience through the inlets near the northeastern border. And for months both he and his mother had simply pretended it wasn’t so. But on this night there was no use pretending.

  “How can you go and do the one thing you promised me you wouldn’t do?” Martina said, looking Simon over like he was someone else’s son.

  “Do I look like I blew myself up?” Simon replied. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”

  “You’ve gone and joined them,” she said. “Joined the same ones who blew up that permit office in Baton Rouge, the ones who killed your father.”

  At the mention of his father Simon’s face crumpled. He snatched the necklace from his mother’s hand. “You killed him,” he screamed. “You killed him with all your nagging about going north, going north. He was happy where he was, happy in his home, but you pushed him to do it. It was you who killed him, nobody else.”

  She slapped him across the face and at the sight and sound of it Sarat and Dana were jolted but Simon did not move.

  “What kind of child says something so cruel to his own mother?” Martina said.

  “I’m not a child,” Simon replied. “I’m a man.” His voice was louder than his mother and sisters had ever heard before, as though the louder he said it the more true it became. “I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man.”

  He tore the front door open and stumbled back out of the tent and when he was gone his mother sat on his bed and wept. Instinctively Sarat and Dana sat by her side to comfort her and in that moment Sarat had never hated anyone more than she hated her only brother. In the weeks and months to come both mother and son would dismiss what happened that night; both would say that it was just one of those fights every family has, that they didn’t really mean what they said. But Sarat knew each had meant every word.

  Soon that old hardness set in and Martina was herself again. That night she stayed up well into the morning talking with her daughters. She told them about that day when Benjamin Chestnut went up to Baton Rouge and never came back. She told them about the night she went to see the rebel commander about refuge, and the night the falling bombs chased them from their home.

  SARAT WOKE AROUND NOON, drenched in sweat from the midday heat, to the sound of Marcus at the door.

  “You been sleeping this whole time?” he asked, handing her a juice cup he’d smuggled from the old cafeteria building.

  “Long night. What’s up?”

  “I was out by Chalk Hollow looking for turtle food for Cherylene and I saw a whole bunch of rebels out by that island across the lake,” Marcus said. “They had a ton of stuff with them, boxes and boxes.”

  “They’re out earlier than normal,” Sarat said. “Can’t be coming into the camp in the daylight. People will see.”

  “That’s right. I heard one of them say they’ll come back for their stuff after sundown.”

  It took Sarat a moment before she realized what her friend meant. “So, you wanna go see what they got in those boxes?”

  Marcus smiled.

  They walked to the eastern edge of the camp. They passed Marcus’s tent, where his father sat on a plastic garden chair, a sweat-soaked rag over his balding head. With a pair of binoculars he was watching the Blue soldiers who lay hidden among the trees beyond the northern fence. Every few minutes he’d mark something down in an old notebook, like a birdwatcher deep in observation.

  Marcus entered the tent and returned with a small Donald Duck backpack, into which he’d stuffed a couple of water bottles and apricot gel sandwiches. He walked briskly, a step ahead of Sarat. She was a full foot taller than he was, and the manner in which he walked—almost hunched, his eyes focused on the ground—only exacerbated the difference in height between them.

  When he was with her he was a little more confident, but otherwise he seemed perpetually hobbled by shyness and anxiety. Some of the boys in the camp had started a rumor that, because of his size, he was forced to wear hand-me-downs from some of the girls in Patience. To Sarat, this kind of drive-by cruelty was a normal part of camp life (and even if it were true he wore younger kids’ clothes, what did it matter? Who cared?), but Marcus seemed especially distraught by it—so much so that she’d seen him walking around a few times dressed in jeans and shirts that were entirely too large for his frame, a decision that prompted a whole new round of ridicule from the boys.

  But when he was with her he was himself. She enjoyed the feeling it gave her to know it, to be his protector, his confidante.

  But there was something else, a comfort he unwittingly afforded her. It was the comfort of his smallness. The meekness and harmlessness of him allowed her to explore without fear her fluid feelings on attraction and companionship and boys, the hormonal gauntlet of adolescence. Other than him, she had almost no friends her own age, but she wondered if the thing he gave her wasn’t friendship’s only useful purpose—a testing site for new and unfamiliar emotions, free of hazard, free of judgment.

  When they reached Chalk Hollow they climbed over the fallen trees and down to the bank. Marcus pointed to the small uninhabited island north of Smith Branch, about a quarter-mile ahead of them in the water.

  “You see it?” he asked.

  Sarat squinted. Barely visible beyond the shore was the edge of a raised tarp, although the things it covered were hidden.

  “They said they wouldn’t be back till after sunset?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “I don’t know how we get over there, though.”

  Sarat shrugged. “We swim.”

  Marcus’s courage seemed suddenly to abandon him. With trepidation he looked out at the water, thick and murky, its surface the color of the soil.

  “Well, how did you think we’d get out there?” asked Sarat.

  “I don’t know,” Marcus replied. “I thought we’d get a boat or something.”

  Sarat laughed. “What boat you ever see round here didn’t have a man with a gun on it?” She stripped down to her unde
rwear and stepped onto the remains of a small dock, whose planks teetered unevenly into the water. “C’mon,” she said. “It’s not so far.”

  “But my bag will get wet.”

  “Give it here, then.” Sarat held the bag high over her head like a sacrificial offering. She stepped off the edge of the plank and into the water. Marcus took off his clothes until he too was only in his underwear, and then he followed.

  The water was as warm as the children’s bodies and so thick with soil and mud that it hardly felt like water at all. With Sarat leading and Marcus struggling to follow, they shuffled along like paddling dogs. Marcus’s arms flailed wildly as he swam, but Sarat appeared to move with little effort, the backpack held high above her head, her legs doing all the work beneath the surface.

  When they finally arrived at the island’s shore they collapsed on a small stretch of beach. Marcus lay as though crucified, breathing heavily. Sarat lay beside him, her legs burning.

  The island had no name. It was small and had never seen much use. Once it was covered end to end with thick foliage, but now only the detritus of trees remained: browning stalks of deadwood, waist-high weeds, and ancient leaves, brittle as crackers. Near the middle of the island some of the tree trunks were still thick and tall, but nearer the shoreline they were short and sickly.

  The children walked inland, following footprints in the soil. The trail led them along a jut of land that curled around the island’s western shore like a comma, partially hiding a small parcel of beach from the sightline of anyone standing on the other side of the water.

  There they found the large blue tarp, held up with branches and planks of wood. The tarp covered about a half-dozen wooden crates. Most of the crates were nailed shut but one sat on the ground with its lid slightly askew.

  The children approached carefully, listening for the sound of nearing boats. Sarat eased the crate’s lid aside, and peered at its contents. Marcus stood behind her, his attention split between the crate and the path leading inland.