by J. R. Rain
“I’ll be fine,” I say. And for some reason, I know I speak the truth. I’d fed—at last. I felt like I could “lick all them nimrods, lady,” as one of the dying soldiers whispered to me earlier. And Elizabeth and her need for human blood be damned.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of deafening booms punctuated by the constant fusillade of gunfire over the screams of the wounded and dying. The trickle of injured to the grove where we set up soon becomes a flood. Most are suffering from diarrhea on top of everything else, so you can guess who winds up stuck with bedpan duty between amputations. Right… the woman. It’s a good thing I have experience being a mom, or I would have been useless.
The dying moan or pray, the lightly wounded full of stories of battle, mostly about how when all seemed lost, General Jackson’s men had held against the Yankee advance. “Like a stone wall,” General Bee called it, seconds before a bullet struck him down, and the name stuck.
“Ol’ Stonewall’ll chase ’em all the ways back to Washington,” says one bugler excitedly as I stitch up where a bayonet had torn half his scalp off. “You’ll see, ma’am.”
“You need to keep this clean now,” I say when I finished, then task him to wave the flies off General Bee, who’d gone unconscious from morphine and the effects of his wound.
James’ commander, Roberson Wheat, on the other hand, sat up to play cards with an enlisted man despite being shot through both lungs. Odds are about fifty-fifty they would all be dead of gangrene by end of the week. I shake my head despairingly at the thought. The bugle-boy with the head wound really was a boy, maybe halfway through fifteen.
The day continues to darken, and several of the men talk about Judgment Day descending on us for their sins in killing their brothers. At some point after four o’clock, an overwhelming wave of cheering breaks out, and minutes later, a courier gallops down Henry House Hill shouting that the enemy had been routed. “Yee-haw, we won the day!” he yells as he races by, and from all around us rises the piercing sound of the Rebel yell, even from the dying.
Seeing the appalled expression on my face, James Bell leans closer and whispers, “We’ve only seen a fraction of the thousands of cases to come, I fear. Samantha, what is needed now is an experienced eye to survey the field as soon as it’s safe, and triage the wounded. None of the surgeons can be spared for the duty and the orderlies are not sufficiently trained. Will you take a few stretcher-bearers with you on the ambulance wagons and act as my eyes and ears in this? I know it’s a great deal to ask…”
He leaves “of a woman” unspoken, but his eyes say it clear enough. Well, it’s a lot to ask of anybody, but I take a deep breath and nod.
“I warn you, I’ll bring in Union wounded, too, James,” I say. “And black as well as white. I won’t discriminate.”
Being a Scot and a great liberal for his time, he shares my beliefs as passionately as I do. James nods and pats my arm. “Understood.”
A horse ambles over to the tent carrying a tall, thin, heavily bearded man in a grey general’s uniform with a bandaged hand. If he seemed surprised to see me—a woman—there, he didn’t show it. “Dr. McGuire around, ma’am?” he asks, removing his campaign hat with his good hand.
“I’ll get him.”
Dr. McGuire is busy with other patients, but he looks up when I speak his name and recognizes the general as Stonewall Jackson, his commanding officer and, I guess, the hero of the hour. He steps over, wiping his hands with a rag. “General… are you seriously injured?”
“Not a fraction as bad as many here, and I will wait. Merely a bullet striking the middle finger.” Jackson had a careful, almost pompous way of speaking, like the self-taught preacher he is. “I’ll be over yonder there, awaiting my turn.”
He wanders off and sits on the bank of the stream until Dr. McGuire and I finish up the wounded man we’re dressing. When we finally make it over to him, he smiles. “The first army surgeon I came across had wanted to cut the finger off.”
Dr. McGuire cringes.
“I figured you might do a better job,” adds the general.
“I think we can at least try to save it for you, sir,” says Dr. McGuire.
We splint the finger with plaster and linen, and I advise him to keep it soaking in cold water as long as possible to prevent swelling. Meanwhile, my ambulance crew has gotten ready to go. So, I leave the injured to the doctors and head off to hunt around the battlefield for men in need of help.
All the horse and foot traffic has turned the cart track into a muddy quagmire, and we spend more time pushing than riding. As we crest the hill, the trees thin out, many reduced to stumps by the bombardment. The ruins of the big brick farmhouse smolders to our left. I feel like I’m riding straight into Armageddon.
I’m really here. A thought I have perhaps for the thousandth time. The Civil friggin’ War.
A black pall of clouds hangs low over the battlefield; here and there, shafts of sunlight break through to glint on bayonets and bright blood staining the green grass. In the distance, the Stars and Bars chase the Stars and Stripes, two brother flags so alike I can barely tell them apart. God only knows how the soldiers do.
A brightly dressed rabble of several hundred wives, day-trippers, and journalists who’d come by carriage from Washington with picnic lunches to watch the battle had scattered in a panic when the fighting grew too intense. They’d dashed off in the direction of the river.
The rest of Beauregard’s army stays where they are or drops to the ground in sheer exhaustion. Many had been fighting for twelve hours in the heat with no food and little water. Bull Run Creek is too stirred up with muck and corpses to be sanitary, yet men from both sides crawl there to drink from it. Tattered splashes of butternut and Union blue litter the muddy ground everywhere I look. There has to be over a thousand dead I can count from this vantage point. Who knows how many more lay in hollows and behind fences and hedges in the miles of fields and meadows around us? And how many aren’t yet dead but are only wounded and can still be saved?
I grind my teeth in frustration. And all I have to save them with are my two wagons and a half-dozen ambulance men.
In the time it takes us to arrive at Jackson’s lines, however, about twenty other wagons join us, mostly cannon caissons and the quartermaster corps delivering what food they had to “the boys.” Which is precious little, it turns out. Occasionally, a bullet still whizzes by, shot by God knows who, and everybody ducks instinctively as if from rain. Or a rain of fire and brimstone. Jackson’s and Wade Hampton’s soldiers, however, who have been fighting all day, ignore them like mosquitoes.
I reach Ground Zero with my little army and walk into an argument between soldiers.
“We should be supporting Jubal and Beauty Stuart!” one shouts in a loud but sullen voice. “We could be supping in the White House by morning!”
“Dunno about you boys, but I’m too plum pooped to move,” says another.
“Little Napoleon ain’t having none of it, anyways,” says a third. “Just what’s the point of us fightin’ and dyin’ all day to win us a few acres of farmland? We could be winnin’ the damn war! Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am,” he adds hastily upon catching sight of me.
All the men around him shut up. I swear, I’ll never understand 1862. Except for a few occasions, I feel as safe as a Sunday church meeting most of the time—even in the middle of a conquering army of filthy, blood-crazed men who hadn’t seen a woman or a hot meal in days. There is a price to pay for all this tongue-tied politeness, though, and that comes in the form of a fire-breathing captain who shows up to demand what a woman is doing here.
“The Lord’s work, sir,” says someone else, who I guess must have technically outranked him, because the fire-breather slams his saber scabbard against his thigh and marches off angrily. The man who spoke up tips his hat to me—another old-fashioned habit I’m getting pretty addicted to—and says apologetically, “Sergeant-Major Barfoot, Quartermaster Corps. I’m afraid I can’t take
your orders, ma’am, since I’m in charge of evacuating the wounded here. But I can sure as shootin’ take your suggestions.”
The first raindrop strikes my head. Overhead, the mass of roiling gun-smoke had hidden the sky’s increasing gloom. Remarkably, it had turned a thunderous black, as if the heavens themselves would weep at the carnage below.
“Let’s get these wounded men somewhere out of the rain, Sergeant-Major,” I say.
General Beauregard’s headquarters had been set up a short distance away in a farmhouse owned by a local man named Wilmer Maclean.
The house suffered cannon fire, reducing it to a collapsing ruin, but the big barn nearby remains intact, the perfect place for me to escort the wagons full of wounded we’d helped off the battlefield. I had to do more than a little mental tinkering to silence protests at assisting Union wounded and blacks, but dammit, I’m not going to let them die if I can help it.
After we get everyone unloaded, and I’ve made sure to ‘program’ everyone with any command authority to see to it that the enemy is treated humanely, I resume helping out with surgery and bandaging.
By the time the rest of the field hospital staff shows up with their “convalescents,” a full-blown storm rages outside with blinding bolts of lightning, hail, and wind gusts so strong they blow over half the tents in camp. This doesn’t make our job any easier, especially because with nearly a thousand stretcher cases, the barn doesn’t have enough room inside for the ambulatory wounded. And let’s face it, barns leak—and the assorted animal dung underfoot doesn’t exactly make for the most sanitary post-op conditions. When I say this is a shitty place for a hospital, I’m being literal.
And for “operate,” that means “amputation” about half the time. As the night goes on, the surgeons are more and more exhausted and make more and more mistakes. Working from dim lamplight doesn’t help either. I’m standing in a scene out of a cheap horror movie. The only thing missing is the Confederate dead getting back up as zombies or werewolves.
“I fear I can do no more for them,” James says to me a few hours later. He looks gaunt. Sweat and blood bathes his face. He’s so exhausted that he’s slumped down onto a feed barrel. He’d saved a few swallows from a wine bottle someone had rescued from the ruined house, and drinks it down in a single gulp, his eyes glazing over. “The president is here,” he mutters.
“What? You mean Lincoln?”
He hushes me. “President Davis,” he hisses, keeping his voice low. “Jefferson Davis. You remember meeting him in New Orleans when he was a senator. At Pelagie’s and my wedding reception—in the St. Charles Hotel ballroom?”
“Oh, right.”
“He’d rushed up from Richmond on a chartered train, then came riding up to our tents. The man looks in poor health to me, pale and trembling, perhaps because he thought we’d lost the battle. He stood up tall in his stirrups and began haranguing the wounded to follow him back into battle. Stonewall Jackson, who is deaf in one ear, didn’t know who Davis was. When I told him, he said, ‘We have them whipped—they ran like dogs. Give me ten thousand men, Mr. President, and I will take Washington City tomorrow.’”
“That won’t happen,” I say.
“You speak like you know this somehow, Samantha.”
Half the men in the barn are dying, moaning, weeping, softly crying out for their mothers and to Jesus. Some won’t even last the night let alone a few hours. And what had they given up their lives for? A cause I know to be doomed in spite of the elation of the survivors over the day’s victory. But, hey, what can I say? Nobody would believe me if I tell them the truth, so why bother? So, I say nothing.
True, James already knows I’m a vampire, but now isn’t the time to tell him I’m also from the future. Then again, he had seen me transform into a monstrous flying creature with fangs and claws—so maybe he also assumed I had other magic powers, because he mutters, “And yet, I find I believe you” before he falls asleep sitting straight up.
The rain still pounds on the barn’s leaky roof. One of my self-appointed jobs is to go around emptying the buckets and washtubs of rainwater. Buckets of blood, too. The floor of the barn, so big that at least a hundred unwounded Union prisoners had been herded into some of the larger livestock stalls as a makeshift jail, was basically just hard clay and hay pressed underfoot. So when the surgeons amputated, orderlies had to hold pails underneath to catch the flow. I carry them outside into the night to empty into the flooded ditches. It’s tempting to drink, but I can’t let Elizabeth win. Just my luck I get turned into a vampire and I can’t enjoy it.
It doesn’t have to be thisss way, Sssamantha.
Sure it does, I think. I’ve got a big problem with that whole ‘destroy the world’ business you’re fixated on.
Once I’ve got the blood dumped, much to her dismay, I decide to play angel of mercy in another way. I saunter over to the two Confederate soldiers guarding the jail.
“Can’t let you in there, ma’am. Union prisoners,” says the one on the left, a huge guy with a ruddy complexion and ginger beard.
I stare deep into his eyes and relieve him of his saber. “There are no Union prisoners. They all died. Why don’t you go get some food and sleep? You look exhausted.”
He blinks at me once and walks off muttering about food. The other man opens his mouth to object, but I zap him with the same mental command. Once he’s out of sight, I grab the padlock securing the barn door and snap it off, then toss it aside into the grass with a soft thump.
After looking around to make sure no one has eyes on me, I ease the door open and poke my head in. Three dozen or more Union soldiers sit around, some bound with ropes. All look up at me with a mixture of apprehension, hostility, and resignation. I slip in, approach a handsome officer in his early twenties, and slice his bindings with the saber.
“The way is clear straight from here to the water. Take your men and go, follow the creek north.” I hand him the sword. “Be quick.”
The mood in the room shifts in an instant to silent elation. Leaving the man to cut his men free, I duck out of the barn and make my way back over to the camp. While I might be altering the course of the future, I can’t let them rot in there.
Chapter Seven
Right. Now that I’ve done as much as I believe I possibly can for the wounded and even the Union prisoners, I hurry back over to the train area where the passengers have all gone back inside the cars to get out of the storm.
My worst fears are realized when I return to my seat and find Delacroix missing.
Shit.
I rush to the end of the car, searching seat by seat, and continue from one car to the next. By the time I make it to the boxcars full of African Americans, it’s clear that Delacroix has vanished. Grr! Emotion wells up inside me, a storm every bit as powerful as the one raging overhead. Grief, anger, hopelessness, and frustration collide in a burst of fury that puts my fist through the train car wall.
Fortunately, everyone near enough to have witnessed that had been more or less asleep. A few sit up at the loud bang, but evidently dismiss it as a gunshot or something. I block the hole with my body until no one’s looking, then hurry off, grumbling to myself.
Oh, sure, I had to get all sappy and sentimental and worry about the wounded instead of keeping myself focused on my needs. I shouldn’t be here at all. These soldiers would’ve suffered the same without me here. Most are still likely to die despite my effort, and now I’ve gone and lost Delacroix for my futile efforts.
Once outside, I start searching around for other passengers. Maybe some hadn’t gone back on the train. A few shelter in the trees under an open-walled structure full of spare railroad ties. No sign of Delacroix among them.
A stray shot wings me in the left shoulder.
On top of my current mood, the flash of pain fills me with the urge to break a musket over someone’s head for that. I storm into the forest heading in the direction the shot came from. Not far from the railroad crossing, three Union soldiers
have cornered a young Confederate who can’t be much older than fourteen. The boy’s left leg is bleeding and bandaged, and he doesn’t appear to be armed, yet the men surround him with bayonets, jabbing at him and laughing as he cringes back.
I’ll give the boy credit, although he’s crying, he doesn’t beg for his life.
“Hey,” I say, not quite shouting, and rush over.
“Stay back, ma’am,” says a thick-bearded soldier. “This ain’t no place for a woman.”
“It’s no place for a young boy either. You should be ashamed of yourselves. He’s injured and unarmed. Are you soldiers or common thugs?”
“We don’t take kindly to rebel-lovers.” The second Union solder, a reedy man barely past eighteen, waves his bayonet at me.
I grab the rifle and yank it out of his grip so fast he barely reacts before it’s in my hands. “You three should get out of here before you get captured. Or did you not realize you’re behind the Confederate line?”
The other two start to aim their weapons at me while the reedy man lunges. He grabs the rifle I’m holding, but I twist it around and club him across the face with the butt, knocking him over.
“His isn’t loaded,” says the burly, bearded one. “But mine is. Now drop it before I need to fire on a woman.”
“Oh, you’re the one who shot me?” Ignoring the other two guns trained on me, I step and kick the bearded guy in the gut, sending him rolling a few feet. “That’s for ruining my dress.”
He scrambles to his feet, bringing up his gun too. “You’re really pushing―”
I stare at Mr. Beard. “Go away.”
My mental compulsion washes over the men. Without another word, they hurry off into the woods, heading north. I toss the useless bayoneted rifle like a spear, sticking it into a tree well out of reach.
“Thankee kindly, missus,” says the boy.
“You’re hurt,” I say, crouching beside him to examine his leg.
