Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (27 page)

Captain Glasswood made no protest as we stretched him out on the cold forest floor under a canopy of creaking pines. The Captain's gaze was distant, and the pupil of one eye had grown as large as a Comstock dollar. He looked at me solemnly as I cradled him down to the ground. "Oh, now, Maria, don't cry," he said in a petulant voice. "I haven't been to Lucille's since Tuesday."

"What's the matter with him?" I asked.

Sam, who had been holding the Captain's head, lifted up his palm and showed me streaks of clotted red. "Apparently he was shot," he said with disgust.

"Shot where?"

"In the skull. Through the ear, by the look of it."

That was a dreadful thing, I thought, to be shot in the ear. The idea of it made me shudder, despite all I had seen today. "I didn't hear any rifle fire."

"It must have happened during the battle, or just after. Perhaps one of those sharpshooters got him."

"That long ago! Didn't he notice?"

"The wound didn't bleed much, externally. And he has a bullet in his brain, Adam. People with bullets in their brains lose all kinds of sensibility, and sometimes they don't even know they're hurt. I expect he still doesn't know he's wounded. And never will. He's dying. That's a certainty."

I was afraid that Captain Glasswood might overhear this unhappy diag-nosis and be upset by it, but Sam was right; the news, if he understood it, didn't trouble him at all. The Captain just closed his eyes and curled on his side like a man making himself comfortable on a feather bed. "Can't you get a blanket from the cedar chest?" he asked wistfully. "I'm cold, Lucille."

Then he screamed once and stopped breathing.

There were not quite twenty of us left in the company, and we had lost our only commanding officer. There was Lampret, of course, who was accompanying us. But Lampret was a Dominion man, not a seasoned combatant.

And at the moment he was no more useful than a stick of wood, staring at Captain Glasswood's corpse as if it had popped up from the ground like a poisonous mushroom. The men of the company, by some unspoken mutual instinct, looked to Julian for leadership. And Julian looked to Sam, and by so doing bequeathed on him the respect and obedience of the common soldiers.

"Post a guard," Sam said, when he realized the burden of command had fallen on him. "But I guess we're far enough from the battle that we can bury Captain Glasswood without attracting enemy fire. We can't carry him back, at any rate, and it doesn't seem right to abandon him."

It was, of course, impossible to truly bury him in the frozen ground; so we scraped a shallow trench out of pine-needle duff, and rolled Captain Glasswood into it, and covered him over. This would not protect his body from wild animals for very long, but it was a Christian gesture; and after a little prodding we even got a funeral prayer out of Major Lampret, though he delivered it in a small and quaking voice. Julian seemed moved by the death, and he did not make any disparaging remarks about God. All of us were badly taken by the Captain's death—as peculiar as that might seem, given how much death we had already witnessed and absorbed today. It might have been the loneliness of the woods that made the difference, or the clouds leaking frigid grains of snow, or the conspicuous absence of banners and bugle-calls.

The problem we confronted now, though Sam did not say so explicitly, was that Captain Glasswood had led us, according to what we all imagined was some clever strategy, deep into the wilderness, and away from the field of battle.

But the only
strategy
 at work had sprung from the Captain's damaged mind, and it was no longer available to us, if it ever existed.

In other words—words I was reluctant to pronounce even in the privacy of my own thoughts—we were lost in the wilds of the upper Saguenay.

The sound of battle had faded behind us long ago. Either the Dutch had been chased from their trenches, stragglers and all, and the war had entered another pause, or we had simply passed out of hearing of it. The latter possibility was undeniable, for we had crossed many wooded ridges, which baffle or amplify sounds in unpredictable ways. The best plan now, Sam told the company after we had finished prayers for Captain Glasswood, would be to return to our own lines. But that return might not be direct, he said, "until we get firm bearings," and in the meantime we must act as a scouting party, and note the position and defenses of the Dutch, should we stumble across any. Sam said he would try to backtrack us. Whether he truly possessed this skill or was only saying so to buoy our spirits, I couldn't tell.

We walked for hours more, and by nightfall we seemed to be no closer to our lines. Sam remained mute on the subject. We dared not make a fire. We carried only minimal rations, and we ate sparingly, and made what shelter we could, and wrapped ourselves in blankets in order to sleep ... which I suppose some of us were able to do, though the bare limbs of the trees creaked like the timbers of a ghostly ship, and the wind made a sound like the sea.

"It seems to me," Lymon Pugh said, "that we're sunk pretty deep in a vinegar brine of trouble," and that truth was impossible to deny.

Lymon Pugh was as emaciated as the rest of us after all our time in the trenches, but his muscular forearms, sliced by flensing knives and tattooed by beef blood, were still impressive, even buried under the sleeves of his thick woolen jacket; and he made a reassuring companion. We walked behind Sam, who was scouting a path. We had come a good distance up a wooded hill, all of us sweating despite the frosty air.

The day, though cold, was fortunately not overcast, and the position of the sun gave us some clue as to the cardinal points of the compass. We knew we were east of the Saguenay, and probably well north of our own lines. It was fortunate for us that this part of the country was not much inhabited, or we might have been taken captive long ago. But we could not avoid civilization for long, unless we set up house keeping in the woods, and that would have been a tall order, since there was nothing much to eat—even small game had been chased away by warfare or scoured up by hungry Dutch soldiers. So we continued to climb this increasingly steep bluff until, as we reached the top, Sam held up a hand, signaling us to stop, and whispered that we should not make any noise.

We came up singly or in twos, crouching.

From the height of this ridge we could see a long declining counterslope, gentle enough that a railroad (of the narrow gauge the Dutch prefer) ascended it at an angle, passing close to where we stood. This was presumably the line between Chicoutimi to the Mitteleuropan estates at Lake St. John, or perhaps it ran all the way to the rocky Atlantic—the Dutch had built skeins of railroads across occupied Labrador in the de cades during which they controlled this land.

The most important fact about this railroad was its connection to the town of Chicoutimi, which we could also see, though dimly, across a misty expanse of winter wilderness, attached like a smudged appendix to the blue ribbon of the Saguenay. And that meant we were no longer lost—though we were still a great distance from where we wanted to be. The way ahead was clear and obvious: we need only follow the railroad until we could veer off toward more friendly territory. And our hearts were light, for that did not appear to be an insurmountable task. We might even be back with our old regiment in time for a hot meal before bed.

But the journey had to be postponed a few moments more. Sam urged us to keep silent. He had seen a train approaching from the east—he pointed out a trail of smoke hovering over the eastern passes. "Stay hidden until it goes by, every one of you."

We were only a few yards from the track where it crossed the peak of the ridge to begin its descent into Chicoutimi, and soon the train would be just adjacent to us. "Shouldn't we fire on it, or do something soldierly such as that?" asked Lymon Pugh.

"It may not be a military train," said Sam. "I don't see any great advantage in shooting unarmed civilians, even among the Dutch. And gunfire would draw attention on us, in any case, and probably get us killed."

No one was inclined to argue the point. We were low on ammunition, anyhow, for we had wasted some of it shooting unproductively into empty squirrels' nests in hopes of bringing down a little fresh meat. We sat tight among the rocks and spindly winter bushes until we could hear the train's Dutch engine straining against the slope, and feel the rumble of it. I had not seen a Mitteleuropan train before, and I wondered what it would look like.

It hove into view, finally, and it was not much different from an American train, in so far as
function
 dictates
form
 in these matters, though it did look very smoothly- built, and the engine was painted an unusual blue-gray color.

What was alarming was not the design of the train but its speed, which was slow, and, worse, slowing. In fact it seemed as if the train was coming to a stop.

We raised our heads despite Sam's warning. The train was a military one.

That much was patently obvious. The engine was drawing only a pair of cars, both of which bore the sinister cross-and-laurel insigne of the Mitteleuropan army. "We ought to have pulled up the track," Lymon Pugh whispered to me,

"to keep that thing from reaching Chicoutimi with what ever it's carry ing."

"There wasn't time," I said, "even if we had thought of it. Perhaps we can tear up the tracks later; but keep your wits about you, Lymon, I believe that train isn't going any farther than right here."

We had no plan for this unexpected contingency. Sam hastily motioned at us to move a little ways up along the ridge, though still keeping the mysterious Dutch train within sight. Why had it come to this hilltop near Chicoutimi, and why had it paused right near us? No simple explanation sprang to mind.

Sam halted us in a stand of naked birches where the hummocky ground made it easy to disguise ourselves against accidental discovery. We watched the train in breathless anticipation. Someone wondered aloud whether the train might not have been sent explicitly to hunt for us; but one misplaced American infantry company was not significant to the Dutch, Sam said.

Major Lampret stirred from his funk and said, "We ought to get as far from that thing as possible. We endanger ourselves by sitting here—why don't we retreat?"

"We're as safe here as anywhere," Sam said coolly, "as long as we're not seen. Stay put."

"Don't presume to give me orders," said Lampret.

Evidently Major Lampret had regrown his spine; but he had chosen a poor time to enter into an argument over rank, I thought. The men of the company thought so, too, for they hissed at him to keep quiet. "I suppose we could all
fly
 home, if we had Angel's Wings," one man muttered.

Lampret gave way, fearing mutiny; but he said to Sam, in a low tone,

"We'll talk about insubordination when we get back to camp."

"That would be a more con ve nient time to discuss it," Sam agreed; and Lampret lapsed back into his sullen silence.

In the meantime the Dutch train had halted altogether, noisily bleeding steam from its valves, and a few Mitteleuropan soldiers clambered off the rear car. What appeared to interest them was a little clearing just at the western side of the train—a granite shoulder covered with pebbles and tufts of brittle weeds. The Dutch soldiers scouted out that flat space meticulously, and shaded their eyes, and peered off toward the distant Saguenay, and spoke their unintelligible language to one another. Then they returned to the train, and rolled back the door on one of the twin boxcars.

The open door admitted a shaft of sunlight and revealed the car's contents, at which we all gasped: for the train was carry ing a Chinese Cannon.

Sam detailed a pair of men to count the enemy soldiers as they disembarked and prepared to assemble the Cannon. I asked Julian what he thought was going on.

"Isn't it obvious, Adam? They mean to set up an artillery battery."

"What—here? It's a long way from the fight."

"You forget the extraordinary range of the Chinese Cannon. That's the advantage of it: it can be placed far from the active lines, and still be an effective weapon. The drawback is that it's bulky and has to be carried by a whole convoy of wagons, or by a train, for instance in those two cars."

Both boxcars had been opened now, and we could see that the assembly and activation of the Cannon would not be a simple task for the gunners. Its great Rotary Base occupied one car, and the Barrel of the thing, broken into telescoping pieces, occupied the other. The cargo of the train also included a couple of mules, to assist in haulage and enstationment, and winches and levers and other necessary tools.
There was also a number of crates marked BOMBE, a word even Lymon Pugh was able to translate from the Dutch.
⁴¹

We counted fifteen artillerymen, give or take, plus what ever crew remained aboard the engine.

"We outnumber them," Julian remarked.

"Perhaps," Sam said. "But they're conspicuously better-armed."

"But we have the element of surprise."

"Are you suggesting we engage the Dutch artillery?"

"I'm suggesting we have a duty not to let those shells fall on American soldiers, if we can help it."

That was a bold but bracing declaration, and it pleased some in our company who were anxious to make the Dutch pay a price for inconveniencing us with their war, and for the cowardly act of shooting Captain Glasswood through the ear. Sam smiled. "Well said. But we have to be clever about it, Julian, not just belligerent. What would you do, if it was your command?"

"Capture the train," Julian said.

The company of us had all gathered around, and some grinned at this, though Major Lampret scowled and shook his head.

"That's an objective," Sam said patiently, "not a plan. Tell me your plan."

Julian took a moment to assess the situation, peering at the train and the surrounding landscape. "Post most of our company on that lip overlooking the ridge where the tall trees are—do you see? We can conceal ourselves and make every shot count, which is important, given our limited munitions; and from there we can range in on anyone who hasn't deliberately taken cover."