Walk in Hell (81 page)

Even in the mild climate hereabouts, a nighttime trip to the privy was a chilly business. She shut the door behind her to keep the cold out of the cottage. Going to the privy was also a smelly, disgusting business. And spiders and bugs and occasional lizards and mice visited the place, too.

Almost absentmindedly, she scooped up the pistol and carried it along with her when she went out into the darkness. She was halfway to the outhouse before she consciously recalled the warning the postman had given her. When she got to the privy, she set the little handgun down beside her before she hiked up her gown.

She spent longer in the noisome place than she’d expected. She had just risen from the pierced wooden seat when she heard voices outside. They were all familiar voices, though she hadn’t heard a couple of them in more than a year. “She in dere?” Cassius asked. The hunter—the Red revolutionary leader—wasn’t talking loud, but he wasn’t making any special effort to keep his voice down, either.

“She in dere,” Julia answered more quietly. “You don’ wan’ to wake she up, Cass. She gots a gun. She come out shootin’.”

“Den we shoots she, and dat de end o’ one capitalist ’pressor,” Cassius said. “We gots dis cottage surrounded. Ain’t no way out we ain’t got covered. I oughts to know—de place was mine.”

“Shootin’ too good fo’ dat white debbil bitch.” Another woman’s voice: Cherry’s, Anne realized after a moment.

“Oh, is you right about dat!” Julia agreed enthusiastically. “I wants to watch she burn. She use me like I’s an animal, she do. Ever since she come back, I wants to see she dead.”

See if I give
you
a Christmas present this year, Julia,
Anne thought. She’d got the idea Julia didn’t much care for her, but this venomous hatred…no. She shook her head. She’d thought she’d known what the Negroes on Marshlands were thinking. She’d been fatally wrong about Cassius, and now almost as misled about Julia. She wondered if she understood at all what went on inside blacks’ minds.

Cherry said, “Her brudder done use me. He have hisself a high old time, right till de end.” Her laugh was low and throaty and triumphant. “He don’ find out till too late dat I usin’ he, too.”

So Scipio told me the truth about that
. Thinking about what had happened kept Anne from worrying unduly about the predicament she was in now. She’d seen some of it for herself; Cherry had put on airs, even around her, on account of what she did in the bedroom with Jacob.

Cassius said, “Don’ matter how she die, so long as she dead. Top o’all de other crimes she do, I hear tell she behin’dat bill dat mystify de niggers to fight fo’ de white folks’ gummint. We strikes a blow fo’ revolutionary justice when we ends de backers o’ dat wicked scheme.”

“So light de matches, den,” Cherry said impatiently.

Through the tiny window cut in the outhouse door, light flared, brilliantly bright. Cassius and the other Reds must have doused the doorway to the cottage—and maybe the walls as well—with kerosene or perhaps even gasoline. Had Anne been inside there, she wouldn’t have had a chance in the world to get free. The most she could have hoped for would have been to blow out her own brains before the flames took her.

“How you like it now, Miss Anne?” Julia shouted, exultation in her voice. “How you like it, you cold-eyed debbil?”

Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds howled abuse at the cabin, too. After a moment, so did a rising chorus of Marshlands field hands, roused from their beds by shouts and by flames.

Anne realized that, if she was going to escape, she would have to do it now, while everyone’s attention was on the burning cottage and nowhere else. She opened the privy door and stepped outside, holding up a hand to shield her face from the fierce glare of the fire. She started to step away from the outhouse, but then stopped and shut the door behind her—no use giving her foes (which seemed to mean everyone on the Marshlands plantation) a clue as to where she’d been. Maybe the Reds would think smoke and fire had overcome her before she woke up.

She wished her nightgown were any color but white. It made her too easy to spot in the darkness. Putting the privy between her and the fire, she made for the closest trees. Those couple of hundred yards seemed ten miles long.

No sooner had Anne reached the trees than the harsh, flat crack of gunfire came from behind her. Remembering everything Tom and Jacob had said about combat, she threw herself flat. That took care of her worries about the white nightgown, because she landed in cold, clammy mud. Shouts of alarm from the Negroes behind her told her what the gunfire was: rounds in the box of revolver ammunition in the cottage cooking off.

Deliberately, she rolled in the mud, so her back was as dark as her belly. Then she set out for St. Matthews, four or five miles away. A couple of plantations between Marshlands and the town had a sort of spectral half-life, but, after what had just happened to her, she was not inclined to trust her fate to any place where the field hands vastly outnumbered the whites. “I kept the government off them,” she said through clenched teeth, “and this is the thanks I got? They’ll pay. Oh yes, they’ll pay.”

After Scipio had visited Marshlands, she’d taken him off her list. When she was in Columbia, she’d learned he’d quit his job and didn’t seem to be in town any more. That had been wise of him. She bared her teeth. In the end, it would do him no good. She’d have her revenge on him as on all the others now.

She stayed in the undergrowth alongside the road instead of going straight down it. That slowed her and wounded her bare feet, but left her less visible. As far as she was concerned, the latter was more important.

Every so often, she stopped in the best shelter she could find and listened to try to find out if anyone was pursuing her. She heard nothing. That made her feel only a little safer. She knew how good a hunter Cassius was. But every painful step she took brought her closer to safety.

She was, she thought, more than halfway to St. Matthews when a horse-drawn fire engine, lanterns blazing in the night, came clattering up the road toward Marshlands. A couple of armed guards on horseback trotted along beside it.

Anne stepped out into the roadway, waving her arms. She was so muddy, the fire engine almost rolled over her instead of stopping. “Jesus Christ!” one of the firemen exclaimed. “It’s Anne Colleton.”

“Don’t go any farther,” she said. “You haven’t got enough firepower. Cassius and his Reds will be waiting to bushwhack you. And besides”—her mouth twisted—“the fire will have done whatever it can do.”

The fireman who’d recognized her helped her up onto the engine. It stank of coal smoke from the steam engine that powered the pump. From a long way away, a rifle barked. The fireman grunted and crumpled, shot through the head. Another shot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off the engine before the sound of the report reached her.

“Get the hell out of here, Claude!” one of the guards shouted to the driver. The other guard started shooting in the direction from which the shots had come.

Claude could handle horses. He turned the six-animal team and headed back toward St. Matthews faster than Anne would have thought possible—but not before another fireman got hit in the foot. He cursed furiously, pausing every so often to apologize to Anne for his language.

Cassius,
she thought.
It has to be Cassius
. The iron bulk of the pump shielded her from any more bullets. All she had to do, all the way back to town, was think about how the hunter, the Red, had ruined her twice. But she was still alive, still fighting—and so, in spite of the Negro uprising and everything else, were the Confederate States.

We’ll whip the Yankees yet,
she thought.
And you, Cassius, I’ll whip you
.

Books by Harry Turtledove

THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH

THE WORLDWAR SAGA

WORLDWAR: IN THE BALANCE

WORLDWAR: TILTING THE BALANCE

WORLDWAR: UPSETTING THE BALANCE

WORLDWAR: STRIKING THE BALANCE

COLONIZATION

COLONIZATION: SECOND CONTACT

COLONIZATION: DOWN TO EARTH

COLONIZATION: AFTERSHOCKS

HOMEWARD BOUND

THE VIDESSOS CYCLE

THE MISPLACED LEGION

AN EMPEROR FOR THE LEGION

THE LEGION OF VIDESSOS

SWORDS OF THE LEGION

THE TALE OF KRISPOS

KRISPOS RISING

KRISPOS OF VIDESSOS

KRISPOS THE EMPEROR

NONINTERFERENCE

KALEIDOSCOPE

A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

EARTHGRIP

DEPARTURES

COUNTING UP, COUNTING DOWN

HOW FEW REMAIN

THE GREAT WAR

THE GREAT WAR: AMERICAN FRONT

THE GREAT WAR: WALK IN HELL

THE GREAT WAR: BREAKTHROUGHS

AMERICAN EMPIRE

AMERICAN EMPIRE: BLOOD AND IRON

AMERICAN EMPIRE: THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

AMERICAN EMPIRE: THE VICTORIOUS OPPOSITION

SETTLING ACCOUNTS

SETTLING ACCOUNTS: RETURN ENGAGEMENT

SETTLING ACCOUNTS: DRIVE TO THE EAST

THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY STORIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
(editor)

THE BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY STORIES OF THE 2OTH CENTURY

Don’t miss the next explosive chapter in the War to End All Wars, THE GREAT WAR: BREAKTHROUGHS by Harry Turtledove, The Master of Alternative History

Klaxons hooted the call to battle stations. George Enos sprinted along the deck of the USS
Ericsson
toward the one-pounder gun near the stern. The destroyer was rolling and pitching in the heavy swells of an Atlantic winter storm. Freezing rain made the metal deck slick as a Boston Common ice-skating rink.

Enos ran as confidently as a mountain goat bounding from crag to crag. Ice and heavy seas were second nature to him. Before the war sucked him into the Navy, he’d put to sea in fishing boats from Boston’s T Wharf at every season of the year, and gone through worse weather in craft a lot smaller than this one. The thick peacoat was warmer than a civilian slicker, too.

Petty Officer Carl Sturtevant and most of his crew were already at the depth-charge launcher near the one-pounder. The other sailors came rushing up only moments after Enos took his place at the antiaircraft gun.

He stared every which way, though with the weather so bad he would have been hard pressed to spot an aeroplane before it crashed on the
Ericsson
’s deck. A frigid gust of wind tried to yank off his cap. He grabbed it and jammed it back in place. Navy barbers kept his brown hair trimmed too close for it to hold in any heat on its own.

“What’s up?” he shouted to Sturtevant through the wind. “Somebody spot a periscope, or think he did?” British, French, and Confederate submersibles all prowled the Atlantic. For that matter, so did U.S. and German boats. If a friendly skipper made a mistake and launched a spread of fish at the
Ericsson
, her crew would be in just as much trouble as if the Rebs or limeys had attacked.

“Don’t know.” The petty officer scratched at his dark Kaiser Bill mustache. “Shit, you expect ’em to go and tell us stuff? All I know is, I heard the hooter and I ran like hell.” He scratched his mustache again. “Long as we’re standing next to each other, George, happy New Year.”

“Same to you,” Enos answered in surprised tones. “It is today, isn’t it? I hadn’t even thought about it, but you’re right. Back when this damn war started, who would have thought it’d last into 1917?”

“Not me, I’ll tell you that,” Sturtevant said.

“Me, neither,” George Enos said. “I sailed into Boston harbor with a hold full of haddock the day the Austrian grand duke got himself blown up in Sarajevo. I figured the fight would be short and sweet, same as everybody else.”

“Yeah, so did I,” Sturtevant said. “Didn’t quite work out that way, though. The Kaiser’s boys didn’t make it into Paris, we didn’t make it into Toronto, and the goddamn Rebs did make it into Washington, and almost into Philadelphia. Nothin’ comes easy, not in this fight.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” Enos agreed fervently. “I was in river monitors on the Mississippi and the Cumberland. I know how tough it’s been.”

“The snapping-turtle fleet,” Sturtevant said with the good-natured scorn sailors of the oceanic Navy reserved for their inland counterparts. Having served in both branches, George knew the scorn was unjustified. He also knew he had no chance of convincing anyone who hadn’t served in a river monitor that that was so.

Lieutenant Armstrong Crowder came toward the stern, a pocket watch in one hand, a clipboard with some increasingly soggy papers in the other. Seeing him thus made Enos relax inside, though he did not ease his vigilant posture. Lieutenant Crowder took notes or checked boxes or did whatever he was supposed to do with those papers.

After he was done writing, he said, “Men, you may stand easy. This was only an exercise. Had the forces of the Entente been foolish enough to try our mettle, I have no doubt we would have sunk them or driven them off.”

He set an affectionate hand on the depth-charge launcher. It was a new gadget; until a few months before, ashcans had been “launched” by rolling them off the stern. Crowder loved new gadgets, and depth charges from this one actually had crippled a Confederate submarine. With a fisherman’s ingrained pessimism, George Enos thought that going from one crippled boat to a sure sinking was a long leap of faith.

Eventually, Lieutenant Crowder shut up and went away. Carl Sturtevant rolled his eyes. He had even less faith in gadgets than Enos did. “If that first torpedo nails us,” he said, “odds are we’re nothing but a whole raft of ‘The Navy Department regrets’ telegrams waiting to happen.”

“Oh, yeah.” George nodded. The all-clear sounded. He didn’t leave the one-pounder right away even so. As long as he had reason to be here by the rail, he aimed to take a good long look at as much of the Atlantic as he could. Just because the call to battle stations had been a drill did not mean no enemy submarines lurked out there looking for a target.

Quite a few sailors lingered by the rail, despite the rain and sleet riding the wind. “Don’t know why I’m bothering,” Carl Sturtevant said. “Half the Royal Navy could sail by within a quarter-mile of us and we’d never be the wiser.”

“Yeah,” Enos said again. “Well, this makes it harder for the submersibles to spot us, too.”

“I keep telling myself that,” the petty officer answered. “Sometimes it makes me feel better, sometimes it doesn’t. What it puts me in mind of is playing blind man’s buff where everybody’s got a blindfold on and everybody’s carrying a six-shooter. A game like that gets scary in a hurry.”

“Can’t say you’re wrong,” Enos replied, riding the deck shifting under his feet with automatic ease. He was a good sailor with a strong stomach, which got him respect from his shipmates even though, unlike so many of them, he wasn’t a career Navy man. “Could be worse, though—we could be running guns into Ireland again, or playing hide-and-seek with the limeys around the icebergs way up north.”

“You’re right—both of those would be worse,” Sturtevant agreed. “Sooner or later, we
will
cut that sea bridge between England and Canada, and then the Canucks
will
be in the soup.”

“Sooner or later,” George echoed mournfully. Before the war, the plan had been for the German High Seas Fleet to break out of the North Sea and rendezvous with the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, smashing the Royal Navy between them. But the Royal Navy had had plans of its own, and only the couple of squadrons of the High Seas Fleet actually on the high seas when war broke out were fighting alongside their American allies. “Sooner or later,” Enos went on, “I’ll get some leave and see my wife and kids again, too, but I’m not holding my breath there, either. Christ, George, Jr., turns seven this year.”

“It’s hard,” Sturtevant said with a sigh that made a young fog-bank grow in front of his face. He peered out at the ocean again, then shook his head. “Hellfire, I’m only wasting my time and trying to fool myself into thinking I’ll be able to spot anything anyhow.”

That was probably true. George shook his head. No, that was almost certainly true. It didn’t keep him from staring at the sea till his eyelashes started icing up. If he saw a periscope—

At last, he concluded he wasn’t going to see a periscope, not even if a dozen of them were out there. Reluctantly, he headed back toward the bulkhead from which he’d been chipping paint. One big difference he’d discovered between the Navy and a fishing boat was that you had to look busy all the time in the Navy, regardless of whether you were.

Smoke poured from the
Ericsson
’s four stacks. No one had ever claimed beauty for the destroyer’s design. There were good and cogent reasons why no one had ever claimed beauty for it. Some people did claim she looked like a French warship, a claim that would have been vicious enough to start barroom brawls during shore leave if it hadn’t held such a large measure of truth.

Enos picked up the chisel he’d set down when the exercise began. He went back to work—chip, chip, chip. He spotted no rust under the paint he was removing, only bright metal. That meant his work was essentially wasted effort, but he’d had no way of knowing as much in advance. He went right on chipping. He couldn’t get in trouble for doing as he was told.

A chief petty officer swaggered by. He had less rank than any officer but more authority than most. For a moment, he beamed around his cigar at George’s diligence. Then, as if angry at letting himself be seen in a good mood, he growled, “You
will
police up those paint scraps from the deck, sailor.” His gravelly voice said he’d been smoking cigars for a lot of years.

“Oh, yes, Chief, of course,” Enos answered, his own voice dripping virtue. Since he really had intended to sweep up the paint chips, he wasn’t even acting. Propitiated, the petty officer went on his way. George thought about making a face behind his back, then thought better of it. Long tours aboard fishing boats even more cramped than the
Ericsson
had taught him he was always likely to be under somebody’s eyes, whether he thought so or not.

Another strip of gray paint curled against the blade of his chisel and fell to the deck. It crunched under his shoes as he took half a step down the corridor. His hands did their job with automatic competence, letting his mind wander where it would.

It wandered, inevitably, back to his family. He smiled at imagining his son seven years old. That was halfway to man-sized, by God. And Mary Jane would be turning four. He wondered what sort of fits she was giving Sylvia these days. She’d hardly been more than a toddler when he went into the Navy.

And, of course, he thought about Sylvia. Some of his thoughts about his wife were much more interesting than chipping paint. He’d been at sea a long time. But he didn’t just imagine her naked in the dark with him, making the mattress in their upstairs flat creak. She’d been different, distant, the last time he’d got leave in Boston. He knew he never should have got drunk enough to tell her about being on the point of going with that colored whore when his monitor got blown out of the water. But it wasn’t just that; Sylvia had been different ever since she’d got a job in the fish-packing plant: more on her own, less
his wife
.

He frowned as he tapped the chisel yet again. He wished she hadn’t had to go to work, but the allotment she took from his salary wasn’t enough to keep body and soul together, especially not with the Coal Board and the Ration Board and all the other government bureaus tightening the screws on civilians harder every day to support the war.

Then he frowned again, in a different way. The throb of the engines changed. He not only heard it, he felt it through his shoes. The
Ericsson
picked up speed and swung through a long, smooth turn.

A few minutes later, the chief petty officer came back down the corridor. “Why’d we change course?” Enos asked him. “Which way are we heading now?”

“Why? Damned if I know.” The chief sounded as if the admission pained him. “But I know which way we’re heading, by Jesus. We’re heading south.”

Private First Class Jefferson Pinkard sat in the muddy bottom of a trench east of Lubbock, Texas, staring longingly at the tin coffeepot above the little fire burning there. The wood that made the fire had been part of somebody’s fence or somebody’s house not so long before. Pinkard didn’t give a damn about that. He just wanted the coffee to boil so he could drink it.

A few hundred yards to the south, a couple of Yankee three-inch field guns opened up and started hitting the Confederate lines opposite them. “God damn those sons of bitches to hell and gone,” Pinkard said to anybody who would listen. “What the hell good do they think they’re going to do? They’ll just kill a few of us and maim a few more, and that’ll be that. They’re not going to break through. Shitfire, they’re not even
trying
to break through. Nothin’ but throwin’ a little death around for the fun of it, is all.”

The nearest soldier happened to be Hipolito Rodriguez. The stocky little farmer from the state of Sonora was darning socks, a useful soldierly skill not taught in basic training. He looked up from his work and said, “This whole war, it don’t make no sense to me. Why you think any one part of it is supposed to make sense when the whole thing don’t?”

“Damn good question, Hip,” Pinkard said. “Wish I had me a damn good answer.” He overtopped Rodriguez by nearly a head and could have broken him in half; he’d been a steelworker in Birmingham till conscription pulled him into the Army, and had the frame to prove it. Not only that, he was a white man, while Hip Rodriguez, like other Sonorans and Chihuahuans and Cubans, didn’t fit neatly into the Confederate States’ scheme of things. Rodriguez wasn’t quite black, but he wasn’t quite white, either—his skin was just about the color of his butternut uniform. What he was, Pinkard had discovered, was a fine soldier.

The coffee did boil then, and Jeff poured some into his tin cup. He drank. It was hotter than the devil’s front porch in July and strong enough to grow hair on a little old lady’s chest, but that suited him fine. Winter in Texas was worse than anything he’d known in Alabama, and he’d never tried passing an Alabama winter in a soggy trench, either.

Rodriguez came over and filled his cup, too. Sergeant Albert Cross paused on his way down the trench line. He squatted down by the fire and rolled himself a cigarette. “Don’t know where the dickens this war is getting to,” he remarked as he held the cigarette to the flames.

Pinkard and Rodriguez looked at each other. Sergeant Cross was a veteran, one of the trained cadre around whom the regiment had been formed. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart to show he’d been wounded in action. That was about all that kept the other two men from braining him with the coffeepot. Pinkard couldn’t begin to remember how many times over the past few weeks Cross had made the same weary joke.

Wearily, Pinkard pointed north and east. “Town of Dickens is over that way, Sarge,” he said. “Christ, I wish we’d run the damnyankees back toward Lubbock a ways, just to get us the hell out of Dickens County and make you come up with somethin’ new to say.”

“Godalmightydamn,” Cross said. “Put a stripe on somebody’s sleeve and listen to how big his mouth gets.” But he was chuckling as he sipped his coffee. He knew how often he said the same thing. He just couldn’t stop himself from doing it.