The Disunited States of America

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay. Don’t foul it up, then,” the noncom said, or words to that effect. The truck stopped—stopped short, so that Justin got heaved against the guy in front of him. “Out!” the sergeant screamed. “Out! Out! Out! Move! Move! Move!”

  Justin jumped out. So did the other soldiers. They all started running as soon as their boots hit the asphalt. The crackle of gunfire was a lot closer now, and didn’t sound nearly so cheerful. Those are real bullets, Justin thought as he pounded after Eddie and Smitty. If one of them hits me, it’ ll really mess me up.

  The African Americans firing those bullets had a genuine grievance against Virginia. The state did treat them badly. Were Justin an African American from this Virginia himself, chances were he would have been shooting at the white men in camouflage uniforms himself. He understood the fury and desperation that sparked the uprising.

  All of which meant zilch to him now. However good their reasons for picking up a gun might be, those African Americans were trying to maim him or kill him. He didn’t want them to do that.

  Some of the other Virginia soldiers fired back. Most of them squeezed off a few rounds from the hip as they ran. They couldn’t have expected to hit anybody, except by luck. But if they made the rebels keep their heads down, the ammunition wouldn’t go to waste.

  “Aii!” A soldier toppled, clutching at his leg.

  Two of his buddies grabbed him and dragged him into a sheltered doorway. He howled and cursed all the way there. He left a trail of blood all the way there, too. It shone in the sun, red as red could be.

  Something cracked past Justin’s face. Automatically, he ducked. Then he looked around. Would Eddie and Smitty and the other soldiers think he was a coward because he flinched? He didn’t need long to figure out that they wouldn’t. They were ducking, too.

  He saw a muzzle flash up ahead. Somebody there is trying to kill me. It wasn’t a thought, not really. He felt it in his bones as much as anything else. He flopped down behind a trash can and fired a few shots at … at what? He tried to think of it as shooting at the flash. That way, it seemed like a video game. If those flashes stopped, he wouldn’t be in danger any more—from there, anyhow.

  But part of him knew this was no game, and he wasn’t shooting just at a flash. A man held that assault rifle, a living, breathing, sweating man. What was that living, breathing, sweating man thinking as bullets cracked past him? What would he think if bullets slammed into him?

  Justin wondered if he really wanted to know. All he wanted was to stay alive. If that meant he had to kill somebody else … He wished he’d done more thinking about that before he decided to put on Adrian’s uniform.

  Much too late to worry about it now.

  “Come on!” Smitty yelled. Justin couldn’t stay behind the trash can forever, even if it would have been nice. He scrambled to his feet and ran on.

  He wasn’t more than a few blocks from Mr. Brooks’ shop. That meant he wasn’t more than a few blocks from Mom. If he could slip away … But he couldn’t. He was caught in the middle of something much bigger than he was. People were watching him to make sure he stayed caught in it, too. What would they do if he tried to duck out? Arrest him if he was lucky, he supposed. Shoot him if he wasn’t.

  Down toward the river for a few blocks. Then turn left and swing in on the Negro rebels. It all sounded easy when the sergeant laid it out in the truck. But the sergeant went down with a worse leg wound than the first one Justin had seen.

  Another soldier went down, too, shot through the face. The back of his head exploded, blown to red mist. He couldn’t have known what hit him—he had to be dead before he finished crumpling to the pavement. That didn’t make watching it any easier.

  And when the Virginia soldiers turned in, they found black rebels banging away at them from behind a barricade of rubble. Several Virginians fell then. Eddie went down, clutching at his arm. Justin dragged him into a doorway before he really thought about what he was doing. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “I’ll live.” Eddie’s face was gray. “Right now, I’m not so sure I want to. Give me a pain shot, will you?”

  “Sure.” But Justin didn’t know where to find the syringe, not till Eddie groped for it with his good hand. Then, awkwardly, he stuck the soldier. Even more awkwardly, he dusted antibiotic powder onto the wound and bandaged it. Eddie would need more work than that—Justin could see as much. He was no doc himself, though. All he could do was all he could do.

  “Thanks, man. You did good.” Eddie sounded much better than he had a few minutes earlier. The pain shot—morphine? something like it, anyway—kicked in fast. The wounded man went on, “You were on the ball, getting me out of the line of fire.”

  “You would have done the same for me.” And Justin didn’t just say it—he believed it. You didn’t show you were scared so you wouldn’t look bad in front of your buddies. And you didn’t let them down so they wouldn’t let you down, either. He hadn’t needed long to figure out some of what made soldiers tick.

  “Get moving!” somebody yelled from the street. “We’ll do pickup on the wounded pretty soon.”

  Justin didn’t want to get moving, any more than he’d wanted to get up from behind the trash can. But Eddie was watching him, and so was the soldier—officer?—with the loud voice, and Smitty would be. This wasn’t good, but what could he do? He ran out and got moving.

  The first thing he ran past was a body. His ill-fitting boots splashed in the blood. Soldiers were scrambling over the barricade. Someone got hit climbing over it and fell back. That didn’t make Justin enthusiastic about trying it himself. He couldn’t stay here, though—again, too many people were watching him. Up he went, and thudded down on the other side. Bullets cracked past him. The blacks might have been driven from the barricade, but they hadn’t given up.

  He found out how true that was a few seconds later. A skinny African American kid who didn’t look more than fourteen leaned out of a second-story window and aimed an assault rifle at him. Justin fired first, more because his finger was on the trigger and the gun pointed in the right direction than for any other reason. The kid dropped the rifle and fell out of the window, splat! on the sidewalk. Half his head was blown away.

  Justin stopped and stared and threw up. How he missed his own shoes he never knew, but he did. He would have killed me, he thought as he spat and retched and spat some more. He would have killed me if I didn’t shoot him. It was true. He knew it was true. And it did not a dollar’s worth of good.

  Somebody thumped him on the back—Smitty. “First one you know you scragged yourself?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Justin choked out.

  Smitty thumped him again. “That’s never easy. You reckon he would have cared a rat’s patootie if he nailed you?”

  “No,” Justin managed. The Negro kid was doing everything he could to kill him. He’d never had any doubts about that.

  “Well, come on, then, before somebody else is luckier than that guy was,” Smitty said. “It gets easier, believe me. After a while, you don’t hardly feel a thing.”

  “Terrific,” Justin said. Smitty smacked him on the back one more time, as if he really meant it. Maybe the genuine Virginia soldier thought he did. After a while, you don’t hardly feel a thing. The scary part was, it was likely to be true. And he was liable to get shot if he just stood here.

  Mr. Brooks hadn’t talked about this. You probably couldn’t talk about this, not unless you were talking to somebody else who already knew what you were talking about. Now Justin did, even if he wished he didn’t. Wishing did him as much good as it usually does—none at all. He ran on, past the corpse of the kid he’d killed. He felt as if it were the corpse of his own childhood lying there in a spreading pool of blood.

  Without Justin around, Elizabeth felt even more like Nowhere to Beckie than it had before. She had nothing to do except read and watch TV. Virginia TV mostly wasn’t worth watching. She got into a screaming fight with Gran over nothing in particular. The two o
f them sulked around each other for the next several days.

  She didn’t realize till much, much later that her grandmother was worried about her. Seeing that Gran showed worry by snapping at people, Beckie’s not noticing wasn’t the hottest headline in the world.

  She was sorry afterwards, but not sorry enough to apologize. Gran wouldn’t have said she was sorry if torturers started pulling her toenails out with rusty pliers. The next time Gran admitted a mistake would be the first.

  Beckie almost hoped … She shook her head, appalled at herself. How could she wish—almost wish—the disease on somebody she was supposed to love? Never mind that her grandmother was maybe the least lovable human being she’d ever known. She hoped it just meant she was stir-crazy, not that she was some kind of monster.

  She wished she could talk it over with Justin. He would have understood. But he was down in Charleston, doing … what? Whatever a soldier had to do. Whatever they told a soldier to do. What would that be? Beckie didn’t know, not exactly, and she was glad she didn’t. Whatever it was, she suspected it wouldn’t be so easy to get out from under as Justin had thought.

  I should have told him. She sighed and scowled and shook her head. Would he have listened? She laughed, not that it was funny. Justin was the sort of person who listened only to himself. He sure hadn’t paid any attention to his uncle, and Mr. Brooks had more sense in his big toe than Justin did all over.

  Of course, who didn’t think he had sense? Or she, for that matter? Gran was convinced she knew what was what and Beckie was the one who needed to rent a clue if she couldn’t buy one. And if that wasn’t crazy, Beckie had never run into anything that was.

  What about me? Beckie wondered. Am I sure I’m right when I really don’t have any idea what’s going on? It didn’t look that way to her, anyhow. Here they were in Elizabeth, and here they were, stuck. You didn’t need to be Sir Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin to figure that out.

  What did Franklin say about the United States? We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately—that was it. Actually, he was talking about the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, but these days people remembered the quote as a kind of early epitaph for the country that couldn’t stay united. Now all the states were separate, and all of them positive they were better off because of it.

  “Penny for ’em, Rebecca,” Mr. Snodgrass said from behind her.

  She jumped. She hadn’t known he was there. When somebody asked her something like that, she felt obliged to tell the truth. “You’ll laugh at me,” she said, and spelled it out.

  He didn’t laugh, but he did smile. “You ought to start a movement,” he said. “Bring back the United States!”

  “Oh, I know it wouldn’t work,” Beckie said. “None of the consuls and presidents and governors and what have you would want their power cut. No state would want people from any other state telling it what to do, or soldiers from another state on its land. But if things didn’t break down in the first place, maybe we’d all be Americans now, not Virginians or Californians or what all else. Maybe we wouldn’t fight these stupid little wars all the time. One’s always bubbling somewhere.”

  She studied the expression on his wrinkled, lived-in face. It was the strangest blend of amusement and sorrow she’d ever seen. He knew much better than she did how dead the United States were. But if by some miracle they weren’t … then what? His wife would still be alive. There wouldn’t be shell holes down the street. He wouldn’t have healing blisters on his hands from digging trenches. Beckie wouldn’t, either.

  “It would be nice,” he said slowly, his voice—wistful? “Or it might be, if you could make states get along with each other like you say. I don’t know how you’d do that, though. They couldn’t figure it out three hundred years ago, and we are what we are now on account of they couldn’t. Maybe you ought to write a book about what things would be like if we still had united states here.”

  Had he said that in a different tone of voice—and not a very different tone, either—he would have been mocking her. But he meant it. She could tell. “I never thought about writing anything longer than e-mail and school papers,” she said.

  “I bet you could if you set your mind to it,” he said, and he still sounded serious. “You’ve got a way with words.”

  Beckie suspected a way with words wasn’t enough to get her a book. The idea might be worth thinking about, though. Writing was a better job than plenty of others she could think of.

  “I don’t reckon we want any writers in the family,” Gran said. Beckie didn’t know she’d been listening. Her grandmother went on, “We go in for things that are a lot more ordinary, a lot more reputable.”

  If anything could make Beckie bound and determined to try to write a book, a crack like that was it. But before she could give Gran the hot answer she deserved, somebody rang the doorbell. “Who’s that?” Mr. Snodgrass said. He went off to take a look. Beckie followed him so she wouldn’t have to talk to Gran. Her grandmother followed, too, so she could go on giving Beckie what she imagined was good advice.

  “Hello, Ted,” Mr. Brooks said when Mr. Snodgrass opened the door. “And good-bye, too, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s up?” Mr. Snodgrass asked. “Why do you think you can get out of here? Why do you want to try?”

  “Because Ohio soldiers are coming up the road from Parkersburg,” Mr. Brooks answered. “They’re not coming very fast. I think the Virginians mined the road before they pulled out. But I don’t want to get occupied, thank you very much. I’m going to try to get back to Charleston. I have a chance, I think.”

  “Take me with you,” Gran said.

  “What? Why? I can’t do that!” Mr. Brooks yelped.

  “Because I’m not about to let my sister lord it over me on account of her state’s stolen the part of my state where I’m staying,” Gran said. That probably made perfect sense to her. It didn’t make much to Beckie, and she would have bet it didn’t make any to Mr. Brooks.

  She would have won her bet, too. He said, “I’m sorry, Mrs., uh, Bentley, but I don’t see how I can take you.”

  But then Beckie said, “Maybe you’ll need help finding Justin.”

  Mr. Brooks looked at Mr. Snodgrass. “Will you tell them they’re crazy, Ted? I don’t think they’re paying any attention to me.”

  “Well, maybe they are and maybe they aren’t,” Mr. Snodgrass said. Mr. Brooks looked as if he’d been stabbed. Mr. Snodgrass went on, “When the Virginians come back—and they will—there’s liable to be a big old fight around these parts. Can’t blame a couple of furriners ’cause they don’t care to get stuck in the gears.”

  “I’m no furriner!” Gran said indignantly. Beckie stepped on her foot. Gran was too dumb to see Mr. Snodgrass was doing their work for them.

  “I suppose you want to come along, too,” Mr. Brooks said sarcastically.

  “Nope—not me. Don’t want anything to do with the big city,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “If a fight rolls by here, I’ll take my chances. Don’t mind a bit.”

  That flummoxed Mr. Brooks. He looked at Gran and Beckie. “You sure? I’ll find you a hotel or something when we get there. With Justin and his mother in town, my place is crowded like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Did he think that would stop Gran? “My credit card still works, I expect,” she said. And if she ever ran low, Mom and Dad back home would pump more money into her account. Maybe cell phones in Charleston weren’t jammed. If they aren’t, Beckie thought, I can talk to California again. My folks must be going out of their minds. Then something else occurred to her. Maybe they’re worried about Gran, too. That wasn’t kind, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  Mr. Brooks opened and closed his mouth several times. He looked like a freshly caught fish. He didn’t want to take them—that was as plain as the nose on his face. But he wasn’t rude enough to say no. “How soon can you be ready?” he asked. “I want to get out of here, and I’m not kidding.”

/>   “Twenty minutes?” Gran said.

  “Be at my motel at”—Mr. Brooks looked at his watch—“half past, then.”

  Most of the time, you could count on Gran to take too long to get ready to go wherever she was going—and to complain that everyone else was making her late. Here, she seemed to see that Mr. Brooks wasn’t kidding and would leave if she didn’t show up on time. She threw things into her suitcase as fast as she could. Beckie didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to her, because she was busy doing the same thing.

  “Thank you for taking care of us and putting up with us for so long,” she told Mr. Snodgrass. Gran might have waltzed out the door without saying good-bye.

  “I was glad to have you here, especially after … .” He didn’t finish that, but Beckie knew what he meant. He went on, “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” He answered the question himself before she could: “But you want to find out about your young man, don’t you?”

  “He’s not exactly mine,” Beckie said, which wasn’t exactly a denial. She added, “Besides, I’ve got to keep an eye on Gran.” That was all too true. Mr. Snodgrass nodded, understanding as much.

  Gran had already started trudging up the walk to the street. Pulling her wheeled suitcase along by the handle, Beckie hurried after her. Mr. Snodgrass closed the door behind them. It seemed very final, like the end of a chapter. What lay ahead?

  Eleven

  Justin wore a dead man’s uniform. He ate from a dead man’s ration cans, plus whatever else he could scrounge. The real soldiers called it liberating or foraging, depending on whether they smiled when they said it or not. A lot of it was just plain stealing. They didn’t seem to care. Once Justin’s belly started growling, neither did he.

  The real soldiers … Justin grimaced. If he wasn’t a real soldier himself by now, he never would be. He’d helped a wounded buddy. He’d shot somebody. He’d killed somebody. He might have killed other people, too, but he was sure of that one kid. He expected to have nightmares about it, maybe for the rest of his life. The only thing he’d missed was getting shot himself. Even if the Negro rebels had a better cause than the Commonwealth of Virginia, he couldn’t make himself sorry about that.