Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  The Englishman, eyes burning, knocked the liquor back, and grinned, almost in defiance. He should have been dead before the firewater hit his stomach, but he was asking for a refill.

  Nick saw Tom spasming in panic, thinking he had got the cups mixed and poisoned himself. But he was alive too.

  "I see you are making a mistake," Crowley said. He looked more alive than anyone Nick had ever seen.

  Tom's nerve broke, and he pulled a revolver out from under his letter sweater. Crowley did not seem perturbed. Tom struggled to thumb-cock the gun.

  Mrs. Parsons came into the room just as Tom shot her employer in the chest. She put her hands over her mouth, willing him to fall before he saw her treachery. Crowley kept smiling, a trickle of blood on his shirtfront. Tom shot Crowley again, low, blasting a hand resting just above the hip. One of his fingers came off. Vance had the poker in his hands, and brought it down upon the egg-like dome of the astrologer's head, denting it, striking him to the floor. They all stood back, standing over the man who was sprawled before his fire, his dressing gown twisted around him.

  Slowly, Aleister Crowley stood up. His face showed no trace of pain. He examined his hand, a small spurt of blood fountaining from the stump of his missing finger.

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  With a cry of rage which Nick had heard on the football field, Tom tackled the astrologer, getting a bearhug around his chest and shoving him against the wall. Vance got in a few more blows with the poker, and Nick stepped back to the windows, elbowing out a pane of glass. They were ceiling-to-floor windows, opening onto a balcony six storeys from the street. Nick unfastened the windows, and the wind blew in. Outside, Reds were shouting slogans into the night.

  Mrs. Parsons was frozen with horror. Tom was grappling with Crowley. There were shouts from the street, and the clip-clop of horses' hooves. Many people were being killed tonight in New York.

  Vance and Nick helped Tom get Crowley onto the balcony, then stood back as he heaved him over the side. They all watched him fall, limbs loose, and smash against the sidewalk, red spilling into the gutter from his broken head.

  "That's done," Vance said, brushing dust off his dinner jacket.

  Tom looked as if he did not believe it. They left Mrs. Parsons peering over the balcony and went down to the lobby by the stairs. Vance bribed the doorman while Nick and Tom went out into the street. Crowley had crawled a few feet in the gutter. Tom kicked the Great Beast in the head until he wasn't moving any more. Breathing heavily, blood and tears on his face, the football hero stood away from the dead astrologer. A group of Reds ran past, wheezing police horses on their tails. A Red paused to fire a revolver at a cop, missing wildly, and ran off.

  "Assassination has become our national sport," Vance said, shivering.

  Nick had left his coat upstairs. For a young man of wealth and breeding, it was a cold night in the city.

  Tuesday, May 1, 1917.

  Union Station, Chicago, Illinois.

  "The Red Special's a-comin'," shouted the coloured porter as he emerged from the telegraph office. The old black man was greeted with a cheer the like of which he had obviously never heard, and his face split with a grin like a slice of watermelon. To Reed, this was the face of the Movement.

  Overnight, the fighting in the city had peaked and dwindled to mopping-up skirmishes, with mass defections from the police and army swelling the Red ranks. The Mayor had surrendered to Joe Hill, and was

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  Back in the USSA

  locked up in the drunk tank of the nearest police station. The city's plutocrats had fled, leaving empty mansions and bewildered servants. At some point, an overenthusiastic committee of workers had burned to the ground the Municipal Opera House, President Kane's gift to the city. A regrettable waste of revolutionary energy, Reed thought, but perhaps a necessary blowing-off of steam.

  At lot of people, good and bad, had died in Chicago over the years. Father O'Shaughnessy, Roosevelt, Wilson. There would be more killing, Reed knew, but it would be over soon. Then, for the second time in its history, the United States would have to go through the painful, healthy process of Reconstruction.

  "Out of my way, nigger," said a fat, scar-faced Italian youth as he pushed past the porter. Reed felt someone walk over his grave, but let it pass. The Movement was uniting so many creeds and colours, empowering the masses. The frictions would eventually ease: this, he believed with a fierce certainty. Reed had fought alongside black and white and yellow on picket lines for the last ten years, and he knew everyone bled the same colour. Red.

  Still, he would watch the kid whose gang had been passing out firebrands all night. A lot of opportunists would be trying to board the Red Special without paying their fare.

  The crowds here were excited, enthused, agitated. The Special had been coming for a long time. Many had given up hope of it ever arriving. Joe Hill was pacing the platform alone, looking older.

  Reed had spent the night by the telegraph office, collating the words that came in from all over the country, turning terse dispatches into pointed articles. The Masses had managed three editions throughout the night, each the thickness of three handbills folded together. He had to catch the spirit of the moment in words, set them down for posterity. At Ossining, the Reds had taken over the prison, liberating Eddie Bartlett, the most befuddled hero of the Movement, from Death Row. In Texas, the Rangers and the last of the federal forces were fighting a scrappy guerilla war with Villa's raiders. In Europe, there was a downing-of-tools at the front, an unprecedented uprising of the Brothers of Eddie Bartlett.

  In desperation, Vice-President Bryan had tried to deal with long-time "slowcialist" Samuel Gompers, asking the union moderate to form a provisional government, offering higher wages and shorter hours as a sop to strikers, immediate withdrawal from the War, and restitution of all

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  property to the plutocrats. After two days of frantic activity, the Gompers Government fell apart before it was even established.

  There was a pitched battle on the floor of the New York stock exchange. J.P. Morgan had been detained by patriots at the Canadian border, and clapped in chains. In Alabama, armed union men supported by black soldiers who had overthrown their officers, had routed the Ku Klux Klan outside Birmingham. Workers' Revolutionary Committees had sprung up like mushrooms in every city, in most small towns, in army bases, firehouses, prisons. Telegrams were coming in faster than the operators could hand them out. New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Kansas City. The whole map of the country was dyeing itself Red.

  For the man on the Special it must have been a gruelling journey in a sealed railroad carriage. From Nicaragua to Chicago, passing through a theoretical battlefield on the Tex-Mex border, Eugene Debs had been guarded every foot of the way by the comrades of the Railmen's Union. History would hail them as the finest of the Movement, socialist heroes who worked the points, engineered the locomotives, set the signals, provided fuel and water, evaded the Pinkertons. At every junction, men wearing the white ribbon of the Great Pullman Strike had put themselves at risk to speed Debs to the Windy City, each as dedicated as the members of the relay team carrying the Olympic torch. Only this flame, carefully fanned and preserved, was to be set to a powderkeg that would blow up a great nation.

  Reed saw London in the crowds, the bandages off at last. The writer shouldered his way through celebrating men and women, and raised a clenched fist in a boxer's salute.

  "Looks like we've given the Iron Heel a Hot Foot," he said, grinning.

  Like a lot of the crowd, London was intoxicated. Many were drunk on the giddy exhilaration of change, but Reed guessed London had taken other stimulants, a supposition confirmed when he passed over a bottle.

  "Go on, there'll never be another day like this." Reed tipped a mouthful of whisky into his throat. The fiery gulp made him cough and blink tears. London clapped his back. "We'll make a drinker of you yet, John."
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  Outside on the track, a piercing steam whistle let out a lengthy blast. Reed expected the crowds to cheer and throw their hats in the air, strangers to embrace and kiss, clapping to fill the cavernous interior of the station. But instead everyone fell as silent. The railroad terminal suddenly became a cathedral.

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  The train, an unimpressive black engine with a string of battered cattle-cars behind it, pulled in slowly, belching steam. Everyone looked at it. Reed realised he was holding his breath, the liquor burning in his stomach.

  The Special nudged the buffers, and the steam died down. Armed men, some wearing red sashes or armbands, swarmed out of the cars.

  A uniformed guard, clinging to the outside of one car, unloosed bolts, and a section of the side clanged down onto the platform like a drawbridge. People stood away as if the wooden slats, dyed brown with generations of hooves and trodden-in dung, were a red velvet carpet.

  Debs emerged, shielding his eyes, chin stubbled, face tanned. He wore a soiled white tropical suit that ill-fit the climate, a blanket draped around him like a cloak. He was tall and thin, bald and forceful.

  "Comrades," he said, small voice filling the vaulted arches of Union Station, ultimately filling the whole of the country, "it looks as if what we have here..."

  Debs looked around, unable to contain his grin.

  "...is a REVOLUTION!"

  Then, the cheering began. Reed thought it would never end.

  Tuesday, June 5th, 1917.

  The Alamo, San Antonio, Republica de Mexico.

  Presidente Villa was in his palace in Mexico City, poring over maps and ignoring his European advisers, and General Huerta was putting El Paso, the centre of the fiercest Texan resistance, to the sword. That left Emiliano Zapata for the purely symbolic retaking of the ruined mission in San Antonio, overrun eighty-one years earlier by Santa Anna, then taken back by the Yanquis in the First Mexican-American War. The one Mexico had lost, Zapata reminded himself.

  He had hoped the Europeans would keep out of the way, and let him get this over without bloodshed. Of course, the die-hards of San Antonio were holed up in the mission with their grandfathers' guns, intent on being nobly massacred. A few smoke grenades would have been enough to flush them out, but the Flying Circus had to put on a show.

  Faintly embarrassed at the comic opera melodrama of it all, Zapata crouched behind the low wall at the edge of the square, his detachment cradling their carbines, ready to fire. Up in the clear blue sky, the buzzing

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  biplanes circled. Both the von Richthofen brothers were up there, jousting like the last of the Teutonic Knights, and so was their fat friend Goring. The brightly-painted airplanes swooped low over the Alamo, guns chattering, and dropped smoking incendiaries.

  Zapata looked behind him, to the post office where Venustiano Carranza, the Europeans' liaison, was huddled with the Russian expert, Beria. Neither would want to be too near the scuffle, just in case one of the aspiring Davy Crocketts had a clear eye and a clean rifle. Carranza was a Huerta man, wagering his gold braid epaulettes that the Europeans would eventually prod his patron into Villa's presidential seat.

  Gunshots crackled from inside the mission, and one wall was on fire. A bullet grooved across the stone top of the wall, and spanged into the shoulder of young Angel, drawing a blurt of blood and pain. The planes were up high now, executing showoff stunts, and doing something useful by drawing the meagre fire of the men inside the Alamo. The Flying Circus were playing a game of dare, seeing which man could get nearest to the range of the groundfire. For these Germans, war was a sport of landowners, not a way of keeping bellies filled and men free.

  He judged that the defenders were being choosy about their shots, and gave the order. An armoured Model T Ford, formerly the pride of the late General Mapache's army, trundled into the square, the machine gun mounted on its steel windshield raking the walls of the mission, kicking out clouds of red dust. Grenades exploded against the make-shift barricade of the main doors, and Zapata could see into the roofless church. First over the wall, he was first at the gates, hurdling the fires with his men close behind him.

  Nobody shot him.

  Later, they found only seven dead men, all ancient and feeble. The soldiers who would have defended Texas were all dead in Europe, or fighting their own Revolution to the North. It was this Revolution the Europeans were so concerned with thwarting, concerned enough to send arms and advisors. With Russia out of the War in Europe and the new America on the point of withdrawal, an unacknowledged alliance existed between the Tsar, the Kaiser and the remnants of the former rulers of the United States. Their man in Mexico was Huerta, and Huerta had influenced Villa into pursuing the gnawing attack at the frayed Southern edges of the US.

  Up in the bell-tower was a sniper who could barely get a grip on his antique Winchester .73, his arthritic knuckle too knotted to slip into the

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  trigger guard. A couple of soldiers helped him down the ladder fairly gently, and presented him to Zapata.

  The American saw Beria and Carranza coming, and commented to Zapata, "looks like you have friends willing to defend democracy in the States to the last Mexican."

  "This man," Beria said, "we should have him shot."

  Zapata looked at the young Russian's cold eyes. Lavrenti Beria's English was not good, and he had no Spanish at all, but he could order an execution in a terse sentence in any language in the world. Not a soldier, he was eager to shoot anyone who did not have the power of shooting back.

  Zapata looked again at the American. "I know you," he said, finally, "you were at Chihuahua City in '15, when Madero and Villa made their pact. You are the writer, Bierce."

  "Am I?" said the old man, spitting bitterly.

  The Germans strode into the Alamo now, in their leather flying jackets and helmets, ignoring the dust on their white britches and polished boots. Theirs was a landowners' gait, somewhere between marching and sauntering. The Baron was at the head of his party, wearing the oily grime of battle on his cheeks like duelling scars. This von Richthofen was very like the men Zapata had spent his early life fighting.

  A dog darted out from a nook in one collapsed wall, and yapped at the Baron's boots. It was a beagle, the pet of one of the defenders. The Baron took out his automatic pistol, and pumped a shot into the animal's head, kicking it dead in an instant.

  "Absurd American dog," he said.

  Fat Hermann laughed, and slapped his comrade on the back, raising a cloud of dust. " Gut Essen fur unsere Mexikanische Freunde, nicht wahr?" he commented. A nice meal for our Mexican friends.

  Beria and Carranza had maps out, and were scrawling their crosses and arrows.

  Bierce, the old American, could hardly stand up. His leg was broken, Zapata realised, just below the knee, and he was hopping painfully, his last teeth grit into bare gums. Only anger was keeping him alive.

  "How is your friend Mr. Reed? The one who was so amusing about our President."

  Bierce glared. "Red Johnny's done well for himself. Picked the right side in the Revolution."

  "Which Revolution? Yours or ours?"

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  Bierce smiled, an expression which, on him, suggested more wrath than an outright scowl.

  "Of course, a revolution is merely an abrupt change in mismanagement. Even so, I don't think yours counts, General or Field Marshal or whatever. Red Johnny and his pack are doing their best to kick out men like my former employer, Mr. Hearst. Your crew said they'd reform the land, then threw in with...well, with these foreign gentlemen."

  Bierce looked at the Russian and the Germans and at Carranza, a Mexican in a uniform a Hapsburg would have recognised.

  "You know what a peasant is, General? A man with a bootprint for a face and a bullet in his back."

  Von Richthofen and Goring were saluting each other with schnapps doled out from silver flas
ks, heels clicking smartly. The dead dog had exploded shit over the flagstones.

  He gave orders for Bierce to be penned with the other resisters in the town jail. Zapata had had to shoot too many of these die-hards. He hoped the War would wind down like a clockwork toy, with no more unnecessary bloodshed.

  Outside in the sun, the smoke was clearing away. The fires were out. Worried-looking Texan women and children had gathered in a crowd. Some of his men were trying to make time with the pretty girls. They had mutton-chop sleeves and pink ribbons in their strawberry blonde hair, and they were patriotically resisting, flinching away from smiles and snarling "greaser"

  A photographer was setting up outside the Alamo. He had come with the Europeans. The Flying Circus came out, with Beria and Carranza, and they posed, guns brandished, moustaches fierce. The photographer insisted Zapata take his place in the centre. As he held still, a grin plastered to his face, he heard Manfred von Richthofen snarling in German to his brother. Zapata knew enough of the hawking and spitting language to realise that the Baron was complaining again, about the heat, the food, the filth and the smell. The Baron did what his Kaiser told him, but he disliked fighting alongside peasants.

  Zapata could almost feel the German or Russian bullet in his back. And he had always had the bootprint on his face. Once, it had been the landowners and Porfirio Diaz wearing the boot. Now, it was his fellow peasant, Pancho Villa, and Diaz's pet killer, Victoriano Huerta, and the crowned heads Villa and Huerta chose for allies.

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  The flashpowder exploded, and Zapata felt his heart jump. The Baron made it a point of honour not to be fazed, but Zapata knew a true soldier couldn't hear an explosion and see a puff of smoke without trembling in his boots. A soldier without fear was a dangerous fool.