The Disunited States

by Harry Turtledove

  "Flanking attacks. Armored fighting vehicles. All this stuff," Justin said. "How come you talk like a general?"

  The mild-mannered, bald coin and stamp dealer looked at him over the tops of his glasses. "When I was just a little older than you are now, I did a hitch near Qom in the Second Iranian Intervention. When something can mean you keep breathing, it sticks with you."

  "Oh," Justin said again, this time hardly above a whisper. For him, the Second Iranian Intervention was like the first one: something he had to remember for an AP test. The books said it hadn't worked out the way the U.S.A. and the European Union wished it would have. He tried to imagine Mr. Brooks in a camouflage uniform with a gas mask and an assault rifle. It wasn't easy.

  Then the armored vehicles rumbled past the motel, and he was too busy staring at them to imagine much of anything. "They're Virginian, all right," Mr. Brooks said.

  "How do you know?" Justin answered his own question: "Oh—because they're heading west, toward Parkersburg."

  "Well, that, too," Mr. Brooks allowed. Justin must have made a questioning noise, because the older man—the veteran—explained, "They've all got Sic semper tyrannis painted on their sides, and that's Virginia's motto. Thus always to tyrants, you know."

  "Right." To Justin, it was what John Wilkes Booth yelled after he shot Abraham Lincoln—one more bit of trivia from an AP class. But was Sic semper tyrannis Virginia's motto in the home timeline, too? Probably. Was that why Booth shouted it? Till this moment, Justin had never thought about why.

  He could figure out which machines were the armored personnel carriers: the ones with soldiers sitting in them. Brilliant, Justin—brilliant, he thought sourly. As for the rest of the large, snorting, purposeful machines, he would have thought of all of them as tanks. And he would have been wrong. By Mr. Brooks' expression, he knew each one for what it was. As a—mobile antiaircraft gun?—clanked past, the coin and stamp dealer murmured, "That's a good design—as good as we've got, except maybe the radar."

  "What makes it good?" Justin asked. "How can you tell?"

  He found out. "It's got a strong engine, well-shaped armor, and hard-hitting guns," Mr. Brooks answered.

  When Justin thought of well-shaped things, he thought of girls and maybe cars. "How can armor be well-shaped?"

  "See how it's sloped?" Mr. Brooks seemed eager to explain. "If a shell or a missile hits it, it's liable to bounce off instead of going through. The guys inside appreciate that, believe me."

  "I guess they would," Justin said. They're glad they aren't getting killed—that was what he meant.

  The tail end of the column rumbled past. Mr. Brooks went on, "They'd better get under cover pretty darn quick, that's all I've got to say. Ohio's aerial recon is bound to have picked them up by now."

  So many things Justin hadn't thought about. He wasn't sorry to be ignorant of them, either. The home timeline had stayed fairly peaceful the past hundred years, not least because so many countries could create so much havoc that most of them were afraid of starting trouble with their neighbors.

  A few minutes later, artillery started booming, close enough to make windows rattle. After a pause, the guns started up again somewhere else. Mr. Brooks nodded approval. "Shoot and scoot," he murmured, like someone reciting a lesson he hadn't thought about for a long time.

  The only trouble was, the lesson didn't mean anything to Justin. "Huh?" he said.

  "Shoot and scoot," Mr. Brooks repeated, louder this time.

  "They fire. The guys they're shooting at pick up the incoming rounds on radar and shoot back. You don't want to be there when the other fellow's shells come down. Trust me—you don't, even if you've got armor around you. So as soon as you fire, you scoot away and send off your next barrage from somewhere else."

  Like any other game, this one had rules. Justin had never had to learn them. Mr. Brooks had never given any sign of knowing them. In civilian life, he could put them away because he didn't need them. But when he found himself in the middle of a war, he knew what was going on. Justin wouldn't have worried that he didn't—except that his ignorance might get him killed.

  He heard high-pitched whines in the air. They swiftly got louder, and were followed by more window-rattling explosions. Mr. Brooks nodded to himself once more. "The Ohioans are plastering the place where the gun bunnies were. I'm pretty sure the guys from Virginia were gone before that stuff came down." He cocked his head to one side and nodded yet again. "Sounds that way. I don't hear any secondary explosions."

  Justin knew what those were. He'd run into the term on the news. If something blowing up made something else blow up, that was a secondary explosion. "What happens if shells start coming down in town?" he asked.

  "Get flat," Mr. Brooks answered. "If you can find a hole, jump in it. If you've got anything to dig a hole with, dig one. Keep your head down. Pray."

  That all sounded practical, even the praying. Just the same, Justin almost wished he hadn't asked the question.

  On the TV screen, talking heads blathered about Virginia's brilliant counterattack. Beckie watched Mr. Snodgrass watching as much as she watched the TV herself. He looked much less happy than she'd thought he would. Then an announcer said, "Damage to Parkersburg is believed to be minimal," and she understood. He didn't care about Parkersburg for its own sake. He just didn't want the fighting to hurt Mrs. Snodgrass.

  The phone rang. Mr. Snodgrass jumped. He took it off his belt. "Hello?" he said, and then he jumped again. "Oh, hello, Doctor! How is she?" The Ohioans were jamming cell-phone calls, but evidently not all of them. And then Mr. Snodgrass' shoulders slumped. He looked as if he'd been kicked in the face. "Thank you ... Thank you for letting me know, sir. You stay safe now, you hear?" He clicked off. He didn't really need to say what he said next, but he did anyway: "She's ... gone." He didn't sound as if he believed it.

  "I'm so sorry," Beckie said.

  "God will take care of her," Gran said. She got to her feet and pointed at Ted Snodgrass. "You stay there." She went into the kitchen with a more determined stride than Beckie could remember seeing from her.

  Where would he go? Beckie wondered. He took off his glasses and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to wipe his streaming eyes. "What am I going to do without her?" he asked, which was a question without an answer. Then he said, "How can I even bury her? I'm on the wrong side of a stinking battle line." That was probably another question without a good answer—maybe without any answer at all.

  "I'm sorry," Beckie repeated, feeling how useless words were. "She was a nice lady," she added, which was also true and also inadequate.

  "She was . . . everything to me," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Now I've got nothing, and nothing left to live for."

  "Here." Gran came back, carrying a glass half full of amber liquid. Ice cubes clinked inside. She thrust it at Mr. Snodgrass. "Drink this, Ted."

  "What is it?" Beckie asked.

  "A double," Gran answered briskly. Beckie's jaw dropped. Gran didn't usually approve of drinking. Her husband had drunk a lot when he was alive. (Beckie thought she would have drunk, too, if she were married to Gran.) But she went on, "Go on, Ted. It won't make you feel much better, but it'll put up a kind of a wall for a little while." She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.

  And if she'd told Mr. Snodgrass to go up on the roof and flap his arms and crow like a rooster right then, chances were he would have done that, too. He finished the drink sooner than Beckie thought he could. She'd tasted whiskey before, and didn't like it. But when he got to the bottom of the glass, he said, "Thank you kindly, Myrtle. Most of the time, people who say they need a drink just want one. That one, I really needed."

  "Drinks are for bad times more than they're for good ones, I think," Gran said.

  "Wouldn't be surprised." Mr. Snodgrass blinked a couple of times. He still didn't look happy, or anything close to happy. But he didn't quite look as if he'd walked in front of a truck any more, either. He nodded to Gran. "I hope you stay well, yo
u and Rebecca."

  "And you," Beckie said before Gran could stick her foot in her mouth and spoil the moment. She didn't know Gran would do something like that, but it was the way to bet.

  "Me?" Mr. Snodgrass shrugged. "Who cares about me at a time like this? I don't even care about me right now."

  "Well, you should. You have to watch out for yourself," Beckie said.

  "Nobody'll do it for you," Gran put in.

  Sure as the devil, that was the wrong thing to say. Mr. Snod-grass clouded up. "Not now, anyway," he said.

  Beckie gave her grandmother a look that Gran didn't even notice. Of course she doesn't, Beckie thought. She couldn't even come right out and say Gran was a jerk. Gran wouldn't listen. And even the truth got you a name for disrespecting your elders. You couldn't win.

  More artillery boomed—off in the distance, yes, but not nearly far enough away. That was especially true because these were incoming rounds, not ones fired by the Virginians. Beckie could tell the difference now. There was one bit of knowledge she'd never imagined she would have. She wouldn't have been sorry to give it back, but life didn't work that way. Too bad.

  Then she heard the rumble of diesel engines and the clatter of tracks. Route 14 was only about half a kilometer from the house, and the noise was easy to make out. "What's going on?" she said. "They just went through here a couple of days ago. Now it sounds like they're coming back."

  "It does, doesn't it?" Mr. Snodgrass seemed eager to think about anything except what had just happened to him.

  "Something will have gone wrong," Gran said. That was just about her favorite prophecy. And here it was much too likely to be true.

  Watching the—the armored fighting vehicles, that was what Mr. Brooks called them—fall back through Elizabeth made Justin scratch his head. "Something's gone wrong," he said. "It must have."

  "Pretty good bet," Mr. Brooks agreed. "But what? They weren't under what you'd call heavy pressure or anything. Why pull back?"

  "Beats me," Justin said. "What do you want to do, ask them?"

  To his amazement, the coin and stamp dealer headed for the door. "Why not? Maybe they'll tell us."

  "Maybe they'll shoot us, you mean," Justin said. But he followed. He didn't want Mr. Brooks to think he was afraid, even if he was.

  "Why should they?" the older man said as he walked outside. "We're just ordinary citizens of Virginia, going about our lawful business and trying to find out what our very own soldiers are doing. It's a free state, isn't it? Except for the sales tax, I mean."

  "Funny," Justin said. "Funny."

  Mr. Brooks ignored him. He waved to somebody standing up in the cupola of a tank—and yes, by now Justin recognized tanks and could tell them from the other armored behemoths that clanked through Elizabeth. "Where are you guys going?" Mr. Brooks yelled, pitching his voice to carry through the racket. "Y'all just got here." If he laid the accent on a little thicker than he might have, well, so what?

  "We've got to pull back," the real Virginian said—sure enough, he didn't mind talking to a civilian.

  "How come?" Mr. Brooks asked in a civilian-sounding way.

  The soldier in the tank—they called them trackforts or mobile pillboxes in this alternate—cussed. He swears like a trooper, Justin thought. Then the fellow said, "Blacks went and rose up back in the cities. We've got to go and squash them before we can give those Ohio rats what they deserve."

  Mr. Brooks swore, too, the way a real Virginian would have when he got news like that. Justin was very impressed. "What are we supposed to do here?" Mr. Brooks asked.

  "Best you can till we get back," the tankman answered.

  Justin and Mr. Brooks trotted down the street to keep up with him. "What's going on in Charleston?" Justin called. If Mr. Brooks could do it, he could, too. "My mother's down there," he added, in case the soldier thought he was a spy. It was even true.

  "Don't know much. There's some shooting—I've heard that," the soldier said. "Like I told you, just hang on. We'll be back." He waved as the tank clattered away. The pavement on Route 14 was taking a devil of a beating.

  "Well, we might have known they'd play that card," Mr. Brooks said.

  Justin hardly paid any attention to him. "There's fighting in Charleston!" he exclaimed.

  Mr. Brooks nodded. "I heard what he said." He set a hand on Justin's shoulder. "Your mom's a smart woman. She'll know how to stay out of trouble."

  "Sure she will—if she has the chance," Justin said. "But what if she was out shopping somewhere or something when the shooting started? She wouldn't have a chance then." Seeing everything that could go wrong was much too easy.

  "Even when bullets start flying, they miss most of the time," Mr. Brooks said. "If that weren't so, I'd've been holding a lily for a long time now." He looked past Justin, probably looking back into another timeline a long time before.

  "Can we get back to Charleston?" Justin asked.

  The older man returned to here and now in a hurry. "We can try," he said, and Justin brightened—till he went on, "if you don't mind getting arrested somewhere south of Palestine or along whatever other highway we use. They're serious about not letting people move around."

  Justin pointed to the armored vehicles pulling out of Elizabeth. "What about them?"

  "They're soldiers. Soldiers always break the rules," Mr. Brooks said with a shrug. "I know what the consul was thinking when he ordered them to move, though. Maybe they're not infected. E they are, maybe they'll go someplace where other people are infected, too. But whether they're infected or not, he needs them to fight the uprising. And so—they're moving."

  "If they're infected, they won't keep fighting long," Justin said.

  "Mm, maybe not," the coin and stamp dealer allowed. "But if they're that sick, chances are they'll infect the Negroes they're shooting at. Do you think the consul's heart would break if they did? I sure don't."

  "You've got a nasty way of looking at things, don't you?" Justin said.

  "Thank you," Mr. Brooks answered, which left him with no comeback at all.

  Explosions blossomed with a terrible beauty, there on the TV screen. The rattle and bang of small-arms fire blasted from the speakers. Bodies lay in the street, some white, some black. A white man and woman supported a reeling teenage boy. Blood ran down his face. "Why?" he said as he staggered past the camera. A box in the corner of the screen said this was Charleston. But it might have been Richmond or Newport News or Alexandria or Roanoke. Uprisings crackled through the whole state— blacks murdering whites, whites savagely striking back.

  Beckie watched with a special kind of horror. Every time somebody—who didn't matter—fired a burst from an automatic rifle, she flinched. Finally, she couldn't stand it any more. She put her hands up in front of her eyes. "Oh, my God!" she moaned. "Oh, my God!"

  "See how bad it is?" Gran didn't mind when it was bad. If anything, she liked it that way—then everybody was complaining along with her. "Those people are getting what they deserve."

  She hadn't talked about Negroes that way when she lived in California. Coming back to Virginia was bringing out all sorts of nasty things Beckie didn't know about and didn't want to know about.

  But that wasn't why she couldn't bear to watch the TV right now. "Uncle Luke!" she said. By the way it came out, she couldn't have found anything nastier if she tried for a year.

  "What about him?" Mr. Snodgrass asked. "He's the fellow who drove you here, isn't he?"

  "My sister's husband," Gran said with a grimace that declared it wasn't her fault.

  That would have been funny if the TV were showing something else. The way things were ... "He was running guns," Beckie said.

  "What?" Mr. Snodgrass and Gran said at the same time. No, her grandmother hadn't believed her when she said it before. She might have known Gran wouldn't.

  "He was," Beckie said. "He dropped us off here, and then he went on to wherever he went to deliver them."

  "I never heard anything so ridiculous in
all my born days," Gran said. "Lord knows I don't love Luke, but—"

  "Why do you say that, Rebecca?" Mr. Snodgrass broke in.

  "Because I was in the back seat, and there was this blanket so I couldn't put my feet all the way down on the floor," Beckie said. "And I moved it back to see why I couldn't, and I found all these rifles."

  "Why didn't you say something then?" Gran asked, which had to be in the running for dumbest question of all time.

  "What was she supposed to say?" Mr. Snodgrass asked. " 'Got any ammunition for these?'"

  "I was just scared the customs people would find them when we crossed the bridge," Beckie said, remembering how scared she'd been and wishing she could forget it. "Wouldn't that have been great?"

  A millimeter at a time, Gran got the idea that she wasn't crazy and she wasn't blowing smoke. She should have known that since they got out of Uncle Luke's Honda here in Elizabeth, but... As the realization sank in, her grandmother started to get angry. "Why, that low-down, no-good, trifling skunk!" she exclaimed. "I told my sister when she wanted to marry that man, I told her he was . . ."

  She went on. Beckie stopped listening to her. Maybe she had told Great-Aunt Louise what a so-and-so Uncle Luke was. Or maybe she'd had a good time at the wedding and kept her mouth shut. That didn't seem like Gran, but it was possible. Either way, what difference did it make now? But Beckie knew the answer to that. Gran had to prove, to herself and to the world, that she was right all along.

  "Maybe he wasn't sending the guns—selling the guns—to the Negroes," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Maybe they went. . . somewhere else, anyway." When you had to go that far to look for a bright side to things, weren't you better off leaving them dark? It looked that way to her.

  On the television, meanwhile, planes dropped bombs on what was probably the Negro district in Roanoke. Virginia soldiers were herding prisoners—black men, most of them in jeans and undershirts—along a highway. "These fighters will receive the punishment they so richly deserve," the announcer said. He sounded happy about it.