Harry Turtledove - The Disunited States of America

Beckie Royer was running guns from Ohio into Virginia, and she was scared to death. She hadn't intended to be a gun runner. She didn't want to be one. At the moment, she didn't have much choice.

Her grandmother and the man she called Uncle Luke even though he was only a relation by marriage sat in the front seat of his beat-up old white Honda. Beckie had the back seat—what there was of it—to herself. Her feet wouldn't go all the way to the floorboards, and with that cramped back seat she needed all the leg room she could get.

There was a gray blanket down there. When she lifted it to see what it hid, she almost passed out. Haifa dozen assault rifles, and heaven only knew how many clips of ammunition.

She didn't say anything. She couldn't say anything. She was too scared—scared not just of the guns but scared that if she opened her mouth Uncle Luke would throw her and Gran out of the car and leave them stuck in the middle of nowhere. He hadn't wanted to drive them to Elizabeth, Virginia, in the first place. If his wife (who really was Gran's sister) hadn't insisted, he never would have done it.

Not for the first time, Beckie wished she were back in California. California had money, and it was at peace with most of its neighbors. Oh, the border squabble with Baja never went away, but it never got too hot, either. Baja knew California would clean its clock if it tried anything real grabby.

Gran had been born in Elizabeth a long time ago, back in the 2020s. Now that she'd turned seventy, she wanted to see her friends and relatives one last time before she died. That was what she said, anyway—Beckie wouldn't have been surprised if she lasted to a hundred.

So Gran took Beckie with her and flew to Columbus. Beckie had been excited then. How many seventeen-year-old girls from Los Angeles got a chance to go to other states, especially states filled with history and blood like Ohio and Virginia?

Everything turned out to be the world's biggest yawn. All Gran wanted to do was visit other old people. The dialects they spoke among themselves were so different from the English Beckie was used to that she hardly understood them. Even the food tasted weird. Nobody'd ever heard of salsa or cilantro. Gran's relatives hardly even used garlic. Boring!

And now the Honda was bouncing through the potholed streets of Belpre, Ohio. The town couldn't have had more than nine people in it. The bridge over the Ohio River looked a million years old. She hoped it wouldn't fall down. Right in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of the river, sat the Virginia border checkpoint.

Uncle Luke stopped the car. Two Virginia border guards in old-fashioned gray uniforms strode up to it. Beckie tried to keep her teeth from chattering. If they found those guns, they would throw her in jail and lose the key. They would figure the rifles were bound for the black guerrillas down in the lowlands. For all Beckie knew, they would be right.

How she wished she were bored now!

"From Ohio, eh?" one of the guards said. "I'm gonna have to see your papers." To Beckie's ear, he spoke with a peculiar nasal twang. Papers sounded like pipers. She could follow him, but she had to work at it.

"Give me your passports." Uncle Luke—Uncle Luke who wasn't an uncle, Uncle Luke who ran guns—held out his hand, first to Gran, then to Beckie.

She didn't want to give hers up, but what choice did she have? She felt even more naked, even more afraid, without it. She hadn't thought she could.

Uncle Luke's passport got only a brief glance. The guard stamped it and handed it back. But when he saw Gran's and Beckie's, he stiffened like a bird dog coming to point. "Hey, Cloyd! Lookie here!" he called. "These folks're from California!"

"From California?" Cloyd exclaimed. "What in blue blazes are they doin' here?"

"Beats me," the other guard said. "If I lived in California, I sure wouldn't come here, and that's a fact." He let out a wistful sigh, then bent down to speak to Gran and Beckie. Beckie kept her feet very still on the blanket. If she wiggled—and she had a habit of wiggling when she was nervous—the guns might make a noise. That would be dreadful, or whatever was worse than dreadful. "What're you California ladies doin' comin' into Virginia?" he asked.

"I was born in Elizabeth," Gran answered, and the hill-country twang in her voice showed she was telling the truth. "I'm comin' back to visit kinfolk and friends one last time 'fore I die, and I want my granddaughter here to know where her roots are."

"How about that?" the guard said. "Ifn I moved away, reckon I'd be prouder I was gone than of where I came from. Ain't that right, Cloyd?"

"Expect it is." Cloyd kept staring at Beckie's passport and Gran's—her real name was Myrtle Bentley, but except when she had to sign something she didn't use it. Beckie wondered if he'd ever seen a California passport before. This was about as no-account a border crossing as the state of Virginia had. Why would a Californian want to come across here? Beckie sure didn't, not with those guns under her feet.

"California," the other guard, the one whose name she didn't know, said with a jealous sigh. California was big and rich and strong, all right. If people in another state tried mistreating its citizens, it could throw rockets all the way across North America. It hadn't needed to for a long time, but it could.

Beckie realized Uncle Luke was using those precious California passports as a shield to make sure his car didn't get searched. Normally, the guards would have looked to see if he was carrying moonshine or grass, trying to sneak them into Virginia without paying duty. That kind of smuggling happened all the time. Guns . . . Guns were a different business.

And Uncle Luke's gamble was going to pay off. "They have the right visas and everything?" the guard by the car asked Cloyd.

"Sure enough do," Cloyd said. He took the California passports over to the kiosk in the middle of the bridge and ran them through a computer terminal. He stamped them, too, as the other guard had stamped Uncle Luke's commonplace Ohio passport—Virginia was an old-fashioned place. Then he brought them back and returned them. "Here y'go, folks. Enjoy your stay."

"Thank you kindly," Gran said. Uncle Luke didn't say anything—he was as sour as an unripe persimmon. He just drove across the bridge, across the river, and into Virginia.

As Beckie stuck her passport into her purse, she let out an enormous sigh of relief. "What's eating you, kid?" Uncle Luke said.

"Nothing." Beckie didn't know if he would get mad that she'd found the guns. She didn't know, and she didn't want to find out. She kept her mouth shut.

"Beckie's just glad to be coming into Virginia," Gran said. "Isn't that right?"

"Sure," Beckie lied. She hadn't got on real well with her grandmother before this trip. Gran wasn't a sweet old lady—her favorite sport was complaining. Traveling with her for so long. . . Well, Beckie didn't like her better now than she had when they set out from Los Angeles.

But she had her precious passport back again, and she was heading for Elizabeth, not wherever Virginia kept the closest maximum-security prison. She wouldn't be a headline—unless Uncle Luke drove off the side of the road. It was narrow and winding, and he seemed to be going much too fast. She almost said something—but the less she said to him, the better, so she kept quiet again.

Parkersburg, the first town on the Virginia side of the border, went by in a blur. Once upon a time, it had been an oil town. Outside of Texas and Russian Alaska, there weren't many of those left in North America any more. Even for California, oil was hard to come by.