American War

by Omar El Akkad

  “Just be careful.”

  “We got one of theirs, Sarat,” said Simon. “Every day they get a hundred of ours, but this time we got one of theirs.”

  SARAT RETURNED to the center of the camp. She entered the administrative building through the side door that led to Albert Gaines’s office.

  On this night she found him leaning over the table, placing delicate spoonfuls of something black and glistening on a plate. He was dressed as she’d always seen him dressed: his single-breasted suit unblemished by wrinkles. He wore a double-Windsored tie of matte gray decorated with a crest of three stars atop an armored knight’s head and a red-striped shield. His hat lay on the table.

  “Come in, come in!” he said, smiling. “I have something special for you.”

  Sarat inspected the small flat canister on the table. Its tin lid had been pried open and inside lay a clump of small black balls. The writing on the side of the canister was foreign: letters similar to English but oddly misshapen, as though mutated somehow. The logo on the label was of a fish and a king’s crown.

  “In Columbus the Northerners pay more than you would ever believe for pale imitations of this,” Gaines said. “Tonight you get the real thing for free.”

  Sarat poked it with her pinky finger. The amount on her plate seemed impossibly small for a meal, and she wondered if it wasn’t some kind of vitamin pill, like the ones that came in the aid shipments.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Try it first. I don’t want you to be disgusted beforehand.”

  “I won’t be.”

  “It’s caviar,” Gaines said. “Fish eggs.”

  “Hmm.”

  Sarat tasted the caviar. It whispered to her tongue an awful, briny secret. It spoke of something very far away, fruit of alien trees. Instantly she loved it.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “The Russian Union,” Gaines said. “The other side of the world. A present from our friend Joe.”

  He walked to the office’s small kitchenette. Sarat heard the tick-tick-tick of the toaster oven, and soon he returned with her favorite, honey on toast. He sat beside her and watched her eat. He seemed to have an endless capacity for watching.

  “I have a new book for you,” he said. He went to the bookshelves and returned with a hardback. Sarat inspected the book. It was brand new, as though it had been published that day. The book was called A Northern Soldier’s Education in War and Peace. It had a picture of a handsome man on the cover. Most of the books Gaines had given her to read until then had nothing on their covers but the names of the authors and the names of the books. But on this one, the image of the man dominated the cover, as though his face itself were the subject of the book. The portrait of the man was cropped at his chest; Sarat saw the medals and marks of a military uniform on him.

  “The man who wrote this book is named Joseph Weiland Jr.,” said Gaines. “He’s the son of the Blues’ most senior general.”

  “What do I have to read a Northerner’s book for?” asked Sarat. “It’s all lies, anyway.”

  Gaines pointed at the picture on the cover. “This man, quite recently, decided to run for office. And it’s customary that when a man like him runs for office, he puts a whole lot of words on a whole lot of pages and stamps his picture on the cover and sends it out into the world. That way, by the time election day comes around, a very well-manicured version of himself has already been foisted onto the people who do the electing.

  “But that’s not why we read it. We read it because he’s our enemy. And half that book that’s supposed to be about him, it’s really about us, because we’re his enemy. We read it to read beneath it, and in doing so, find out what it is about us that scares him.”

  Sarat watched Gaines intently. She loved to hear him speak, loved the cadence of his voice and the vast unseen world of which his diatribes so often hinted. Even when she lost track of what he meant, even when she failed entirely to understand him, she smiled and listened and wished only for more.

  Gaines rose from the table. “I have one more thing for you,” he said.

  He retrieved something from his briefcase. And then he was behind her, his hands and what they held brushing against her neck.

  It was a hemp necklace, made of black and white and red threads purled tight. He clasped it around her neck and gave her a small hand mirror. She looked at her reflection; the necklace felt rough and worn against her skin.

  “What’s it mean?” she asked.

  “It used to belong to my daughter,” Gaines said. “I want you to have it.”

  “Thank you.”

  The girl looked in the mirror a while and for a moment she no longer saw the necklace, only the old man’s hands on her shoulders: the knuckles weathered and cracked, the fingernails cut down to the nub. His palms seemed to radiate and the heat slowly filled the space between Sarat’s shoulder blades and spilled down her back.

  Before he let her leave, Gaines gave Sarat more envelopes to distribute among the refugees. He paid her in advance for the errands. She slipped the crisp Northerners’ currency into her messenger bag and bid her teacher goodbye. At night she made her rounds. By dawn she was back in her tent. There, for the last time in her life, she slept soundly.

  WHEN SHE WOKE in the afternoon, Sarat saw her tent was empty, her mother and sister gone. She sat up and reached under her bed for the box of rations. She retrieved the tube of apricot gel from her bedside drawer and squeezed some of the saccharine paste into her mouth. A few minutes later the grogginess disappeared.

  She changed into her jeans and an Orascom T-shirt and left the tent. Outside, the refugees were busy fixing their homes, assisted now by a few of the rebels. The smell of mildew hovered in the air but also the smell of steak and the sound of singing and pleasant, drunken conversation. All the acrimony of a day earlier seemed now to have melted away.

  Men and women sat on chairs and tables made from sandbags, drinking Joyful and eating meat with their bare hands, the juice running down their chins. Sarat joined them for a few hours, and for a few hours she was well-fed and happy and a little drunk.

  In the evening, after the alcohol had worn off, she walked north to check on her pet. When she arrived she saw the same empty tents of northern Alabama, but beyond them something was different.

  The massive floodlights of the Blue checkpoint to the north were alight, their beams blanketing a million shadowed outlines in the ground ahead. Sarat hid behind one of the tents and peered out, watching.

  She saw the men at the gate. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, clad in black, their faces covered. They arrived in a sloppy formation of old trucks, carrying rifles and pistols and machetes. In the floodlight the men appeared as shifting inkblots, black limbs on black torsos. In their totality their movement was of a single squirming organism, writhing under and through the gashes in the fence. She saw them and at once she knew.

  As the men approached, Sarat sneaked out from behind the tent and sprinted back into the heart of the camp. She ran in the shadow of the tents, faster than she’d ever run before, the air a maelstrom in her lungs. Where she saw men and women she screamed at them to run, to hide. She said the militias were coming, but no one seemed to listen.

  As she approached her tent, Sarat heard the first crack of gunfire—not the distant rifle shots she’d become acquainted with over the years, but a close burst, a deafening metal rattle. And then she heard shouting; a high-pitched scream; more shots, this time closer.

  Sarat burst through the door to find her sister sitting on the bed, tablet in hand. She was watching footage of a charity concert in Kennesaw to benefit the Mothers of the Southern Republic. The old country star Cherylene Cee sang her hit song. Dana sat on the bed, eating Virginia oranges and singing along.

  “You remember how we used to go nuts for her, back when we were little?” Dana said. Then she saw her sister’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “The militias are here,” said Sarat. “The
y broke through the northern gate.”

  “How many?” asked Dana.

  “Hundreds. Get up, quickly. Where’s Mama?”

  “I don’t know. Playing cards at Erica Yarber’s tent, maybe. Maybe out with Lara. I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Sarat grabbed her sister by the arm and together they ran from the tent. Outside, the sound of gunfire echoed, its source ever closer. Some of the refugees stepped out of their tents and asked about the commotion, but this time Sarat said nothing.

  She led her sister to the administrative building’s side door, and unlocked it with Albert Gaines’s key. She locked the door behind them and they ran down the stairs to the office in the basement, turning the hallway lights off as they went.

  When they were inside the office, Sarat and Dana pushed one of the large bookshelves against the office’s front door, and then the table against the bookshelf. Sarat turned off the lights in the room. She led her sister to the closet, and then made to leave.

  “No, no, you can’t go out there,” Dana said, holding on to her sister’s arm.

  “I gotta go find Mama,” Sarat replied. “I’ll nudge the shelf and the table enough to open the door a little, and then you push it closed behind me.”

  “Please, please,” Dana begged. “You know you won’t find her before they find you. They’ll kill you out there. I can’t lose my whole family, I can’t lose everyone I love. Please don’t go out there.”

  Sarat looked at her sister, astounded not by the black-glistened tears on her face or the panic in her voice, but at the dark calculation she’d already made. Sarat led her sister into the closet; they huddled together on the floor.

  The gunfire grew closer, screams drowned in its echo. It came at times in a rapid back-and-forth. Sometimes there were only single shots, or a parade of single shots, short silences between them.

  The sounds continued into the night. Then in the earliest morning hours came a brief pause. And in that silence Dana, exhausted and delirious with fear, slept.

  Sarat remained by her sister’s side. In the blackness the twins were only the hushed sigh of their breathing, the rise and fall of their chests. Outside, the sound of gunfire had faded but there were still other sounds.

  Sarat listened: boots against dirt; a militiaman asking something unintelligible and his superior responding: you know exactly what to do; the sounds of pleading, of cursing; a line of feet shuffling in unison, drawn closer, closer, ordered to kneel; more pleading, a man saying: I’m not with them, I swear, I swear. His voice coming through the walls of the building in which Sarat hid, clear as though he were pressed against it. Then nothing. Then a line of single gunshots, one after the other. Then nothing.

  The shots were closer than any that had come before, and for a moment Sarat believed the men had entered the building.

  If it’s going to happen, then let it happen, she thought, but I won’t die crouching.

  She eased quietly away from her sleeping sister. She pulled her folding knife from her pocket and stood up. She eased the office door open just enough to slide through, then she closed it behind her.

  The corridor that led from the office to the stairs was dark and the walk seemed endless. As she approached the door, she tried to imagine what the killers looked like. She pictured them as the Northerners she’d seen on television, who always appeared tall and muscular, their complexions ghostly. In her mind they were of a different breed, a different species.

  She climbed the stairs to the building’s side door and she put her ear to the door and listened. There was no sound. She opened the door and peered outside.

  For a moment she believed she’d mistimed the day. She had thought it was two or three in the morning, the slaughter closing in on its twenty-fourth hour. But the sky above was midday bright.

  Then the light began to fade, quickly, giving way to a black sky. It stayed dark until, from somewhere far to the north, she heard the whistling arc of another flare, and soon the fraudulent daytime illuminated the camp once more.

  Sarat walked slowly, keeping near the wall. There were sounds of men cursing in the distance to the southeast and southwest, in Georgia and South Carolina. There were sounds of chaos too: of tents being torn apart, of women muffled mid-scream. Sounds of gunfire, but not as rapid or sustained as it was a day earlier.

  A great fire burned in the gut of the Alabama slice. The flames curled around plumes of black smoke. There were men in the distance, burning bodies. They brought kindling in the form of tent covers and clothes and mattresses. The fire skipped and cracked and traced higher and higher into the sky.

  Sarat turned the corner to find a line of bound corpses near the wall. They were men, young and old. They’d been lined up against the wall on their knees, and where the bullets had gone through them there were splatters of dull red on the wall.

  Sarat stood frozen. She looked at the bodies. Most lay flat on their fronts or on their sides facing away from her, but those she could see had grotesque, unrecognizable faces, cracked open at the forehead, contorted in silent agony.

  The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground. There was a heat to them. Sarat felt it against her skin, damp and real as steam from a boiling pot. She knew what it was. It was the heat of life extinguished. The heat of something leaving.

  In the mass of crumpled bodies she saw a face she recognized. It was Eli, the Virginia Cavalier she’d seen when she went to talk to her brother. Quickly, the faces surrounding him began to register in her memory: they were rebels from her brother’s clan.

  Suddenly all her courage disappeared. She stood paralyzed with terror, incapable of unseeing the pile of corpses at her feet, among whom she was now certain her dead brother lay. The sounds of burning and of screaming and of killing continued relentless around her, the sky overhead beating dark and light like God’s great heart itself.

  The sound of men approaching from behind the far corner of the wall shook her from her paralysis. She knew from the soft thud of their boots and from their voices that they were militiamen. She heard one of them say: “They said there’s no rules before sunrise. It’s all ours till then.”

  She knew that when they turned the corner they’d see her. Without thinking, she fell to the ground. She wriggled into the mass of dead men, camouflaged herself within it. The heat that had touched her body now wrapped itself around her, sunk into her pores. She lay among the blood and sweat and shit and piss of the murdered. She thought nothing of the fluid that seeped into her clothes, or of the odor or of anything except her small desperate prayer: Please God, don’t let them see me. Don’t let them kill me.

  She held her breath. The boot steps grew nearer.

  She waited, unmoving as the dead that surrounded her. The men passed.

  In the stillness that followed she heard another sound, close by in the tents across the road. It was the sound of guttural heaving, the crack of bone on bone. When that sound subsided there was another scream cut in half.

  From a sliver of sight between the limbs of the dead, Sarat saw a man leave the tent across the road. He wore black jeans and a black shirt untucked. His balaclava hung limp from his pants pocket.

  She saw his face. He looked no different than the men who lived in the camp. He looked no different than anyone Sarat had ever seen. He was of the same species, the same breed.

  She lay frozen in place and watched the man walk in the direction of Georgia, where there was now another pyre aflame. When he was gone and she heard no more boot steps, Sarat rose and ran in the direction of the tent from which the man had just emerged.

  Inside she saw a woman named Sabrina, a refugee from Mississippi, a survivor of the firebombing of Hopewell. She recognized her despite the bloody, swollen pulp of her face. The woman’s jaw had been shifted violently to the right, the skin around her eyes made puffy and purple. She lay on the floor of her tent with her skirt hiked high and her stomach butterflied open. Her chest moved.

  When the woman caught sight of
Sarat she raised her hand and beckoned her to come close. Sarat took the woman’s hand and sat beside her. The canvas beneath her was soaked. The woman moaned and said a word Sarat could not understand. She took it as a pleading for comfort and, not knowing what else to do, Sarat reached for a nearby charity blanket and covered the woman’s gaping stomach. The woman muttered the same word a few more times and then fell silent.

  Sarat remained inside the tent. She held the woman’s hand but the hand was now simply weight. She listened as the men returned north toward the gate from which they’d first entered. They passed close to her tent. It seemed an endless procession, thousands strong. She imagined them not as men, not even as human, but as a dark, daylong season: a primal winter.

  When the boot steps had passed and there was only the distant crackling of fires, Sarat peered out the tent’s front door. She saw the wall where the pile of bodies lay.

  Then came a straggler, a young militiaman with his rifle slung loose over his shoulder. As he passed the dead men he stopped and faced the wall and unzipped his pants and began to urinate.

  Sarat watched. She pulled her knife from her pocket and unfolded it. She walked outside, toward the man, who had his back to her. She was no longer afraid. She moved as a wraith, a cold conflagration in the skin of a girl. She approached the man and when she was upon him she reached around his neck and slashed open his throat.

  The man reached for her arm and caught it. She pushed him against the wall. They both fell, she on top of him, he on top of the corpses. A cascade of blood erupted from where she’d cut him open. She pinned him down and kept slashing, the neck slippery now with blood. Soon the man stopped fighting, but she kept moving the knife back and forth, back and forth, until she hit something deep within the body she could not sever. She screamed. She stabbed at the back of his head and when the knife hit the hard bone of the skull it held. Sarat’s left hand slipped from the bloody handle and slid down the blade, cutting a deep gash across her palm. The pain was anesthetic. The heat of life left the man but this time Sarat did not feel it.