Walk in Hell (14 page)

Got no guts,
Moss thought with weary anger. But for himself and Dudley and Innis, the sky was clear of aircraft. He turned the nose of his Martin toward the aerodrome.
Wonder what they’ll find us to fill the fourth cot in the tent
. With Whitby dead, he knew he should have felt more, but for the life of him that was all his weary brain would muster.

Rain drummed down on the big canvas refugee tent. Here and there, it came through the canvas and made little puddles on the cold ground. One of the puddles was right in front of Anne Colleton’s cot. Unless she thought about it, she stepped right into the puddle when she got down.

A couple of little wood-burning stoves in the open space in the middle of the tent glowed red, holding the worst of the chill at bay. One of the women who made the dreary place her home looked at a watch and said, “Five minutes to twelve.”

A couple of women and girls murmured excitedly. Anne knew her own face remained stony. Who cared whether 1916 was only five minutes away? The one thing for which she could hope from the year to come was that it would be better than the one that was dying. She did not see how it could possibly be worse, but what did that prove? She was no longer so confident as she had been that she had such a good grasp on what might lie ahead.

“Come on,” said the woman with the watch—her name was Melissa. “Let’s sing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”

Some of the women did begin to sing: softly, so as not to disturb those who had gone to sleep instead of staying up to see in the new year. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled, throwing shells at the territory still proclaimed to be the Congaree Socialist Republic, the territory that, shrunken though it was in the fighting of late, still included Marshlands.

Before the Red revolt, Anne could not have told that distant artillery from distant thunder, nor the crack of a Springfield from that of a Tredegar. She’d learned a lot, these past few weeks, and would have given a lot to unlearn it.

Melissa looked across the tent at her. “You’re not singing, Miss Colleton,” she said, her voice full of shrill complaint. She was plump and homely, and her hair must have stolen its golden sheen from a bottle, because the part of it closest to her head had grown out mouse-brown.

“That’s right. I’m not singing,” Anne replied.
Take it or leave it,
her tone said. She did not feel like being sociable. Unlike most of the women in the tent, unlike their male kin in other tents, she could have escaped the refugee camp any time she chose. But she could not make herself move any farther from Marshlands than she had to. She had food of a sort, shelter of a sort, clothing of a sort. Yes, she’d been used to better, but she was discovering
better
, while pleasant, was less than necessary. Here she would stay, till the rebellion collapsed—or till she strangled Melissa, which might come first.

The pale, pudgy woman with the two-tone hair certainly seemed to be trying to promote her own untimely demise. Glaring at Anne, she remarked, “Some people don’t seem to care about anyone but themselves.”

“Some people,” Anne said, relishing the chance to release the bile that had been gathering inside her ever since the Negro uprising began, “
some
people don’t care about anything except stuffing their faces full of sowbelly till they turn the same color as the meat and the same size as the hog it came from.”

She heard the sharp intakes of breath from all around the tent. “
Here
we go,” one woman said in a low voice to another. So they’d been expecting a fight, had they? They’d been looking forward to one? Anne had thought only of entertaining herself. But if she entertained other people, too…She showed her teeth in what was more nearly snarl than smile. If she entertained other people, too…that was all right.

Melissa’s mouth opened and closed several times, as if she were a fish out of water. “Weren’t for you damn rich folks, the niggers never would have riz up,” she said at last.

Two or three women nodded at that. Anne Colleton laughed out loud. Melissa couldn’t have looked more astonished had Anne flung a pail of water in her face. For about two cents, Anne would have, and enjoyed it, too.

“It’s the truth,” Melissa insisted.

“In a pig’s eye,” Anne replied sweetly. “It’s you who—”

“Liar!” Melissa squealed, her voice shrill. “If you’d have been born on a little farm like me, nobody would’ve ever heard of you.”

“Maybe,” Anne replied. “And if you’d been born at Marshlands, nobody would ever have heard of you, either.” A classical education came in handy in all sorts of unexpected ways. The jibe was so subtle, the eager listeners needed a moment to take it in. When they did, though, their hum of appreciation made the wait worthwhile.

Melissa needed longer than most of the women around her to understand she’d been punctured. When she did, she sent Anne a look full of hate. That look also had fear in it, as if she’d only now realized she might have picked a dangerous target.
Proves you’re a fool, for not seeing it sooner,
Anne thought, not that she’d been in any great doubt of that.

But Melissa did not back away from the argument. “Go ahead, make all the smart cracks you want,” she said, “but you rich folks, you—”

“Stop that,” Anne said coldly. “You talk like the Negroes with their red flags, pitting rich against poor. Are you a Red yourself?” Melissa didn’t have the brains to be a Red, and Anne knew it full well. But she also calculated the other woman would need some little while to find a comeback.

That calculation proved accurate. Melissa looked around the tent for support. When she saw she wasn’t getting any—no one there, for good and sufficient reasons, wanted anything to do with either Reds or even ideas possibly Red—she resumed her attack, though she had only one string on her fiddle: “Weren’t for you rich folks, niggers’d just stay in their place and—”

“What a pile of horseshit,” Anne said, drawing gasps on account of the language as she’d known she would. She’d also shocked Melissa into shutting up, as she’d hoped would happen. Into that sudden and welcome silence, she went on, “Yes, I’m rich. So what? If you ask me, it’s the way the po’ buckra”—she dropped into the Negro dialect of the Congaree for those two scornful words—“like you treat the Negroes that—”

Melissa surged to her feet. “Po’ buckra? Who are you calling white trash?”

“You,” Anne told her. “And I don’t need to give you the name, because you give it to yourself by the way you act. You’re the sort of person who treats a Negro like an animal, because if you treated him any different, he might think—and you might think—he was as good as you.”

She rose, too, as she spoke, and just as well, for Melissa rushed over to her, aiming a roundhouse slap at her face. As her brothers had taught her in long-ago rough-and-tumble, Anne blocked the blow with her left hand while delivering one of her own with her right. She didn’t slap, but landed a solid uppercut with a closed fist square on the point of Melissa’s chin.

The other woman staggered back and sat down hard. She’d almost stumbled into one of the stoves, which would have given her even worse hurt than Anne had intended. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She stared up at Anne like a dog that rolls over onto its back to present its belly and throat to a stronger rival.

“Before they sent me to this camp,” Anne said, “I asked them to give me a rifle and let me fight alongside our soldiers and militiamen. They wouldn’t let me—
men—
but I could have done it. And anyone who thinks I can’t take care of myself without a gun is making a mistake, too.”

Nobody argued with her, not now. She’d not only flayed Melissa with words but also thrashed her. The plump woman slowly stood up and went back to her own cot, one hand clutched to her jaw. She sat down on the canvas and blankets and didn’t say a thing.

Anne spoke into vast silence: “Happy New Year.” Before the war, people had celebrated the hour by shooting guns in the air. These past two New Years, they’d shot with intent to kill, not only on the hour but all day long, all week long, all month…

Convinced the trouble in the tent was over for the time being, Anne sat down again. As she did so, the irony of one of the arguments she’d used to discomfit Melissa suddenly occurred to her. She hadn’t been wrong when she’d said that poor whites in the Confederacy were more concerned about keeping blacks down than were the rich, who would stay on top no matter what the relationship between the races happened to be.

A few miles to the north, though, the agitators of the Congaree Socialist Republic were using similar arguments to spur their followers to fresh effort against their white foes. Did that mean the Negroes had been right to rebel?

She shook her head. That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all. They weren’t building anything up there, just tearing down. She wondered if anything would be left of Marshlands by the time she was finally able to return to it. One way or another, though, she figured she would get along. She wasn’t Melissa, to fall into obscurity. No. Melissa hadn’t fallen into obscurity. She’d never been anything but obscure. Many fates might yet befall Anne Colleton, but not, she vowed, that one.

“Look at that bastard burn,” Ben Carlton said, his voice as full of joy as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful than the flaming factory in Clearfield, Utah.

Watching the Utah Canning Plant go up in smoke felt pretty good to Paul Mantarakis, too. As they had a habit of doing, the Mormons had used the big, strongly built building to anchor their line. Now that it was a blazing wreck, they’d have to abandon it, which meant the United States Army could take one more grinding step on the road toward the last rebel stronghold in Ogden.

“Three quarters of the way there,” Mantarakis muttered under his breath. They were only nine miles from Ogden now. He could see the town from here—or he could have seen it, had the smoke from the great burning here in Clearfield not obscured the northern horizon.

“Soon all the misbelievers shall be cast into the fiery furnace and receive the punishment they deserve,” Gordon McSweeney said. He had the drum and hose of the flamethrower strapped onto his back. He hadn’t been the one who’d set the canning plant on fire, though; artillery had managed that. Had the big guns failed, Paul could easily imagine the other sergeant going out there and starting the blaze.

Pop! Pop-pop!
Short, sharp explosions began sounding, deep within the bowels of the Utah Canning Plant. “Some poor dead son of a bitch’s ammo cooking off,” Ben Carlton said.

Paul shook his head. “Doesn’t sound quite right for that.”

Thump!
Something slammed into the ground, hard, not ten feet from where he stood. Almost a year and a half of war had honed his reflexes razor-sharp. He was flat on his belly before he had the slightest conscious notion of what that thump was. Better by far to duck and not need to than to need to and not duck. Another thump came, this one from farther away.

Thump!
A foot soldier nearby started to laugh. “What the hell’s so funny, Stonebreaker?” Paul demanded. “We’re under bombardment.”

“Yeah, I know, Sarge.” But Dan Stonebreaker was still laughing. He went on, “I damn near got killed by a can of string beans.”

“Huh?” Mantarakis looked at the missile that had landed close to him. Sure as hell, it was a tin can that must have exploded in the fire inside the plant. He examined the goop inside the can. “This one wasn’t beans. Looks more like apricots, something like that.”

In short order, the soldiers also identified beets and peas. Whenever some more cans exploded inside the factory, the men would sing out, “Vegetable attack!” and take cover more melodramatically than they did against artillery or machine-gun fire.

They took casualties from the superheated produce, too. One fellow who wasn’t wearing his helmet got a fractured skull when a one-pound can of peas landed right on his luckless, foolish head. Hot bits of metal, almost as dangerous as shrapnel or shell fragments, burned several more.

Then the U.S. guns opened up with another barrage. When it eased, the soldiers went up and over the top and drove the Mormons out of Clearfield. The men—and women—who fought under the beehive banner and the motto
DESERET
fought as hard as ever, but there were fewer of them in these trenches than there had been farther south.

“I think we’ve finally got them on the run,” Captain Schneider said. He looked like a Negro with a bad paint job—his face was black with soot, but smeared here and there just enough to suggest he might be a white man after all. Paul Mantarakis looked down at himself. He couldn’t see his own face, but his hands and uniform were as filthy as those of the company commander.

“Come on!” Gordon McSweeney shouted, his voice ringing over the field like a trumpet. “We have the heretics on the run. The more we push them, the greater the punishment we give. Forward!”

Mantarakis’ opinion was that McSweeney was a hell of a lot crazier than the Mormons. He didn’t say so; McSweeney was, after all, on his side. And the shouts were doing some good, pulling U.S. soldiers after the Scotsman as he singlehandedly advanced against the enemy. He would have advanced, though, had not a single man followed.

Crazy,
Mantarakis thought again, and tramped north himself.

For the next mile, maybe two, the going was easy. The Mormons had no real line of solid fortifications here. Men retreating before the American advance traded shots with their pursuers, but it was hardly counted as a rear-guard action. “Maybe we do have ’em on the run,” Paul said to nobody in particular. Even the fanaticism of the Mormons had to have limits…didn’t it?

Before long, he was doubting that again. U.S. troops ran up against yet another defensive line prepared in advance and manned by still more determined warriors. Such a line called for spadework in return, and the Americans began turning shell holes into a trench line of their own.

Captain Schneider pointed west, toward some ruins not far from the horizon. “We want to be careful the enemy doesn’t pull a fast one on us. Those buildings, or what’s left of them, are the Ogden Ordnance Depot. It’d be just like the Mormons to pack ’em full of powder and touch ’em off as our forces were moving up to ’em.”