Thunder Run

by Daniel José Older

  Which, she realized, hopping over a little stream, was exhausting. “What happened?” She didn’t want to know. She needed to know. But she definitely didn’t want to know.

  Montez made the same shrugging motion he’d done since he was a kid and didn’t have a good answer for something. Then he looked away.

  Mapper slid his small hand around Magdalys’s and squeezed once, then let go.

  “General Banks had us stationed at Milliken’s Bend to support General Grant’s siege of Vicksburg,” Wolfgang said. “General Banks is … ah …”

  “Dull,” Montez suggested.

  “Duller than a rock,” Tom added.

  “A political general, is what I was going to say,” Wolfgang insisted. “But it is said that General Banks was once having a conversation with a piece of wood, and the wood died of boredom.”

  Mapper sputtered on the water he’d been drinking. “Dang!”

  “He’s no General Grant, let’s put it like that,” Wolfgang said. “If someone gives him an order, he might get around to it one day.”

  “If there’s an election coming up,” Tom put in.

  “Which, fortunately, there is,” Wolfgang said. “Next year, in fact. So maybe something will actually happen around here for once. Anyway, they’d mostly been tasking us with nonsense labor jobs, on account of us being the Negro units and them still being on the fence about whether or not we were ‘civilized’ enough to be commanded to kill people.”

  Tom and Montez scoffed and shook their heads.

  “When we weren’t digging ditches and drilling combat maneuvers,” Tom said, “we spent most of the time playing cards.”

  “And on target practice,” Montez put in.

  “Turned out, it wasn’t up to the folks whether to throw us into combat,” Wolfgang said. “Combat found us.”

  “The Rebs sent a raptor rider unit up from Texas to try and break the general’s siege and bring relief to Vicksburg,” Tom explained.

  Montez smiled grimly. “But to break the siege, they had to get to the siege. And we were between them and the rest of the Union Army.”

  “They threw everything they had at us,” Wolfgang said. “Came streaming over the flimsy defenses around our camp one morning before sunrise. It was hand-to-hand combat almost from the get-go.”

  The three men looked at each other, then back at Magdalys and Mapper.

  Hand-to-hand combat. That meant none of that shooting from far away and wondering whether you’d hit anyone. No sending dinos off to do the nasty work. You had to look your enemy right in the face and either take their life or let them take yours. She shuddered. No wonder Montez had been so ready to get that head shot on Drek.

  “And one thing about being a black soldier in this fight,” Wolfgang said. “There ain’t no prisoner of war, being treated humanely, no treaty, no exchanges like it is with the white soldiers. Cuz we ain’t human to them, see. I mean, we ain’t even human to some of the ones on our own side. If the Confederates catch you, they’ll probably kill you straightaway, right then and there.”

  “That’s why,” Tom said, “when your brother took a rifle butt to the back of the head, I threw him over my shoulder and pulled back toward the river.”

  Magdalys looked at Montez. His face was blank; he just trudged on beside her, looking straight ahead.

  “He’d already saved my life a couple times, so we ain’t really even, not yet,” Tom said.

  “Did not,” Montez muttered. “Just made sure you had the medicine you needed when you caught that fever, that’s all.”

  Wolfgang made a grunting noise. “Had to steal it from the medical tent since they wouldn’t give it to us, so that is saving his life, son.” He looked at Magdalys. “More of us die from disease than anything else out here. There’s a whole lot of ways of being a hero. Especially these days.”

  “Anyway,” Tom went on, “when I made it to the river, the armored aquatic units were rolling up. Man, I never seen anything like it. Sauropods all covered in metal plates from neck to tail, and cannons mounted on either flank letting loose, mortar after mortar crashing up into the air like thunder from below.”

  “If it wasn’t for them and those boys in the Louisiana Native Guard, we’da been toast,” Wolfgang said.

  “We met them!” Mapper yelled. “They were at Chickamauga!”

  Montez’s eyes were wide. “You’ve had quite an adventure, huh, sis?”

  “Alright, everyone, hold march,” Wolfgang said, stopping and glancing out at the darkening forest around them. Everyone else stopped too. They stood in a small clearing amidst a grove of pine and cypress trees. “Save it for a bedtime story. We bivouac here.”

  “HEY, MAGS,” PRIVATE Briggs said while she and Mapper tried and failed to set up the military-issued tent the others had given them.

  “What’s up? No, Mapper! That peg goes over here!”

  “That’s where I put it last time, and the whole thing fell apart.”

  “That’s cuz you put it in upside down!”

  “Did not!”

  “Hey, Mags,” Briggs said again. “And Map Kid.”

  “Mapper,” Mapper said.

  “Yeah?” Magdalys said.

  “You know why Toussaint and I were in the front when we were marching earlier?”

  “Oh, here we go,” Toussaint groaned from inside the tent he and Briggs had already set up.

  Magdalys stopped what she was doing and cocked her head at the tall, stocky soldier. “Uh … to make sure —”

  “Reeee —” Briggs started to announce.

  “RECONNAISSANCE!!” the others all yelled at once.

  “That’s right!” Briggs said. “That’s why they call me Reconnaissance Briggs.”

  Magdalys and Mapper blinked at him. “Okay,” she said.

  “No one calls him that,” Toussaint said, crawling out of the tent and shaking his head. “Literally no one has ever called you that, man.” He looked at Magdalys and Mapper, who had both shrugged and gone back to messing with the tent. “He been trying to get himself a nickname since he mustered in. Pay no mind. And anyway, that wasn’t reconnaissance.”

  “Was too!” Briggs insisted.

  “Not really. We were just the front guard. We weren’t scouting out enemy positions or nothin’.”

  “But we would’ve been if we’da stumbled on ’em.”

  “Feel like if it’s gonna be part of your nickname,” Mapper pointed out, “you oughta know what it is pretty well.”

  “He does,” Corporal Hands assured them, walking up with a steamy tin cup of coffee. “He just really wants whatever it is we’re doing to be that, so he tries to make it work. All he’s ever wanted to do is be a spy, but when he tried to join the intelligence divisions, they said they weren’t taking Negroes so … here we are.”

  “Reconnaissance,” Briggs muttered, taking the tent pegs from Magdalys and plugging them into the soft dirt.

  “Oh, uh, thanks,” she said. Toussaint helped Mapper spread the tarp out and get it in position.

  “Now, Razorclaw Jones,” Private Bijoux said, walking up next to Wolfgang. He was tall and lanky, probably about seventeen, and had a jagged scar running down the center of his face. “That’s a nickn — a nickn — a nickn-ni-ni-ni …”

  His wide eyes linked with Magdalys’s. A nickname, she almost said but didn’t. Bijoux looked scared, like a train was zooming toward him. He closed his eyes, shook his head.

  Wolfgang signaled her and Mapper to wait. Briggs and Toussaint just kept working away on the tent.

  “A nickn — a nickn — a nickn —” Bijoux said, then: “A nickname!”

  “I mean, the boy can shoot,” Wolfgang acknowledged without missing a beat.

  Magdalys still wasn’t used to the idea that her brother was a crack-shot sniper. Still … there were worse things to be known for. And she was proud of him, she had to admit.

  “F-fire’s li-li-li-li-lit,” Bijoux reported. Then he nodded at Magdalys and Mapper, s
aluted Wolfgang, and headed off.

  “He was on the front when the raptor raiders breached our lines,” Wolfgang said, saving Magdalys the trouble of asking. “Got jumped by one right as they came through. Pinned and slashed right across the face.” He frowned. “It’s a miracle he didn’t go blind, to be honest.”

  “Miracle he survived at all,” Toussaint said. “I was there.”

  “Wow,” Mapper said.

  “The beast nearly took his head off.” Toussaint tapped the saber scabbard hanging from his belt. Grinned. “Then I took its head off.”

  Even with all she’d been through, Magdalys couldn’t imagine the level of combat these men had survived. How could Bijoux face dinos again, let alone ride them into battle, after what had happened? Still — he hadn’t seemed to be afraid of the dactyls or the toads. “And that’s when he started … ?” She wasn’t sure what to say. It seemed rude somehow, to talk about it.

  “To stutter? No,” Toussaint said. “The stuttering is normal for him. After the attack, he stopped talking completely. I don’t think he said another word until — till we got to the mansion, right, Corp?”

  Wolfgang nodded. “That’s right.”

  “He actually used to stutter when we were kids back in the Lower 9th. Everyone in the neighborhood kinda helped him out and he got past it, but it comes back now and then. Guess the raptor attack knocked out his speech entirely for a while though.”

  “Best thing to do is just let him finish his sentence,” Wolfgang said. “Don’t try to do it for him.”

  “Gotya,” Mapper and Magdalys said at the same time.

  That crisp smoky scent wafted through the air. The last time Magdalys had been around a campfire, it was amidst a huge division of the Army of the Cumberland, hundreds and hundreds of Union soldiers, and sure, they hadn’t all seemed too friendly, but at least they were more or less on her side.

  Now the forest had grown very dark around them; they were about as deep into enemy territory as you could get; and a whole army of Confederates was camped out between them and the only safe haven around. She glanced over at Mapper and could tell from his gloomy expression that he was probably thinking pretty much the same thing. She put a hand on his shoulder.

  “C’mon, y’all,” Wolfgang Hands said. “These kids owe us some stories.”

  THE SMALL FIRE crackled and popped as Magdalys told the tale — how she’d been at the Zanzibar Savannah Theater with Mapper, Two Step, Amaya, and Sabeen to see Halsey and Cymbeline Crunk perform The Tempest when the Draft Riots broke out in Manhattan, and when they’d finally made it back to the Colored Orphan Asylum, they found it burned to the ground and old Mr. Calloway murdered by the rioters.

  “No,” Montez gasped. He put his face in his hands and let out a low sob.

  Magdalys got up and sat next to him, one arm draped over his shoulders. In a weird way, she was relieved. He’d gotten so stony when they were talking about how he’d been injured, she’d wondered if he had started blocking off all emotions just to cope. It was hard to see him so sad, but at least he could still feel something.

  “He worked at the orphanage … always looked out for us,” Montez told the others. “His son is with the Massachusetts 54th. I wonder if he knows.” He shook his head. “All this death we seen but … this hurts.”

  Magdalys just nodded, rubbing his back. She still felt that wretched recoil in the pit of her stomach when she thought about it, and the old man’s face still came to her sometimes when she was trying to go to sleep. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s something different when it’s folks back home,” Bijoux said. “My pops died a —” He paused, mouth open as if gasping for air, and Magdalys wasn’t sure if it was his stutter or that he was overcome with emotion. “— few months ago, just up and died and … I was over here, trying to stay alive. I still got my moms and sis but … nothing’s felt the same since.”

  Montez shook his head. “I didn’t know, man …”

  “Sorry for your loss, Roca,” Wolfgang said. “And you, Bijoux.” The other soldiers muttered their condolences.

  “Go on,” Montez said, wiping his eyes. “What happened next?”

  Mapper told the next part of the saga, with occasional tidbits from Magdalys: escaping to Brooklyn with the Crunks; finding a home on Dactyl Hill, even if it was just for a few days; hanging out at the Bochinche with David Ballantine and Louis Napoleon and Miss Bernice; and meeting Redd, the cutlass-wielding pirate who helped the Vigilance Committee sometimes and went with them on a mission out into New York Harbor to stop Magistrate Richard Riker and his Kidnapping Club from sending the other orphans off to slavery.

  The soldiers listened in awe as Magdalys told them about finding Stella the giant pteranodon, who got them out of more than a few jams, including an epic shoot-out at the Dactyl Hill Penitentiary, and how they’d all flown south to find Montez and fallen in with General Sheridan’s division of the Army of the Cumberland, where they’d met Hannibal and the Native Guard and gotten caught up in the Battle of Chickamauga along the way, and then finally made it to New Orleans but had to leave Two Step and Sabeen trapped in Chattanooga and how Amaya had run off to find her dad.

  Montez blinked at his sister. “Wow.”

  “There’s something else though,” Wolfgang said, searching her with his eyes. “Your mission.”

  She nodded. “General Grant, he …” None of it felt real, somehow. The conversation at the Saint Charles Hotel had been just that morning at dawn, but it seemed like years ago. She pulled the general’s letter out of her jacket pocket; already it was wrinkled and soggy from everything she’d been through. She handed it to the corporal.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Wolfgang said, squinting at it in the firelight. “The US Army has given your sister here the authority to create her own special dinowarriors unit.”

  “What?” Montez and Tom said at the same time.

  “Tasked,” Wolfgang read, “with rooting out and apprehending the agents of the covert organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, in particular their dinomasters and the upper ranks of their leadership.”

  “How?” Montez gasped.

  Wolfgang lowered the letter, stared at Magdalys. “How indeed?”

  As she always did in these moments, Magdalys thought about her friend Redd. Besides being a swashbuckler and freedom fighter, he was neck and neck with Cymbeline for being the coolest person Magdalys had ever met. I wasn’t born in a body most people would call a boy’s, he’d told her right before they’d stormed the penitentiary back in Dactyl Hill. I had to, you know, learn not to let what other folks thought of me determine how I thought about myself. He had put that huge grin of his away when he said it, and Magdalys had tried to imagine how hard it must’ve been growing up being called the wrong gender all the time. The matrons back at the Colored Orphan Asylum used to insist on calling her Margaret, which made Magdalys bristle, but that didn’t even compare, not really. Redd told her she couldn’t mumble about her magic: That ain’t how power works. And since then, she’d done her best to own what she had, what she was.

  But it was still hard. Even though now she’d met at least three other people who could connect to dinos with their minds (two of them Confederates, unfortunately) and had already announced to this new squad that she was the best dinowrangler in the world, it was still hard to actually say what her special magic was out loud.

  “Here’s how,” she said, and closed her eyes, reached out with her mind like she always did. She had figured she’d stretch her thoughts toward the forest — there were sure to be some lizards crawling around nearby. Instead, a quiet muttering caught her attention much closer to where she sat. Right on the other side of the fire, in fact.

  “M-Milo!” Bijoux yelped as his jacket pocket began to wriggle.

  “Milo?” Wolfgang said, raising an eyebrow. “Who in the —”

  Breeka breeka breeka, the muttering resolved into. A tiny lizard head poked its way out of Bijoux’s col
lar, then it yawned, revealing razor-sharp teeth.

  On either side of Bijoux, Toussaint and Briggs leapt up and took a step away. “It’s a raptor, man!” Briggs yelled.

  Breeka breeka breeka! Milo chortled on within Magdalys. It wasn’t just a tiny dino, she realized, it was a newly hatched.

  “I know — know — know what h-h-h-he is,” Bijoux said indignantly.

  “Oh boy,” Montez said.

  Wolfgang shook his head. “How did you — Where did you?”

  Milo crawled all the way out of the jacket and slid smoothly into the crook of Bijoux’s elbow. He had a long tail and tiny little front claws, and Magdalys could already tell those powerful hind legs were going to be a force to be reckoned with. The raptor stretched, then curled up, muttered breeka once, and went back to sleep.

  “It was that f-first night at the m-m-mansion,” Bijoux explained. He looked at Magdalys and Mapper. “I was in the attic room. T-top floor. I heard a, like a, a scratching noise. Just barely. It was so quiet. Looked under the b-b-b-bed and that’s where I found them.”

  “Them?” Toussaint demanded. “You got more of ’em?”

  Bijoux shook his head. “Annnnnnnn …” He paused, took a breath, looking vexed with himself. “Nnnnnnnneot.”

  “Whoa,” Mapper said.

  Magdalys had read in Dr. Barlow Sloan’s Dinoguide that raptors would sometimes keep their eggs safe by making their nests high up in the branches of live oaks. A deserted mansion would probably be like the best kind of protection, she figured.

  “At f-f-first I was ssssss-s-scared of them,” Bijoux admitted. “Even though they were just eggs. I mean, the m-m-m-m-mom could come b-back anyt-t-t-time. But then I remembered that raptors really don’t like people; they’re sh-sh-sh-shy.”

  “Didn’t seem shy at Milliken’s Bend,” Briggs grumbled.

  “They are shy,” Magdalys said. She’d practically memorized the lengthy chapter Dr. Sloan had written on them. She hadn’t ridden one yet, but they both fascinated and frightened her. And Redd’s busted old raptor, Reba, was one of Magdalys’s favorite dinos. “That’s why they make such fierce fighting mounts. They hate people, so they feel threatened when you ride ’em into a crowd, and that’s why they lash out. Nothing more dangerous than a threatened dino.”