Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“This way!” guards yelled. “This way!” The Negroes obeyed. They were too dazed and battered not to-and the guards had automatic weapons to make sure they didn’t get out of line. Most of them didn’t even try.

One man did ask, “How come we gonna git shipped somewheres else when we only just got here?” Nobody answered him, and he didn’t ask twice.

“Listen up, y’all!” an officer shouted. “You’re gonna be in two groups. One group goes on to a camp by Lubbock, the other one goes down by El Paso.” There were camps in both places, small ones. They were there mainly to keep Negroes from panicking when they heard something like that. The officer went on, “Those of you bound for the Lubbock camp, we’re gonna bathe and delouse y’all right here, on account of we got bigger bathhouses than they do at that camp. Y’all goin’ to El Paso, they’ll take care of that when you get there.”

Pinkard and his top officers had hammered out the story in the time before the trains started coming in. He didn’t like it; it had holes you could throw a dog through. But it gave some kind of explanation, anyway, and the Negroes wouldn’t have much time to wonder and worry.

Guards started going along the lines of Negroes. They would say, “Lubbock,” to some and, “El Paso,” to others. Every so often, they would add, “Remember where you’re supposed to go, or you’ll catch hell!”

When everybody had an assignment, officers yelled, “El Paso, this way!” and, “Lubbock, this way!” Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. “Now get moving!” the officers shouted.

A fat black woman let out a screech: “My husband goin’ to de one place, an’ I is goin’ to de other one!” The baby she held in her arms wailed.

“Can’t do anything about it now,” a troop leader told her. “When you get where you’re goin’, you talk to the people there. They’ll do the paperwork and transfer you.”

She still grumbled, but she seemed happier. Pinkard craned his neck to see who that troop leader was. Hobart Martin, that was his name. He’d won himself a commendation letter, sure as hell. That kind of complaint could have caused real trouble, maybe even a riot. It was something the guards hadn’t thought of, and they should have. Of course separating families made people jump and shout. But Martin had calmed the woman down, and his words kept other men and women from raising a stink. As long as they thought everything would be taken care of…

Pinkard nodded to himself. Everything would be taken care of, all right.

He went with the men who believed they were bound for El Paso. They had to march-or rather, shamble-all the way through the camp to get to the bathhouse that wasn’t. He’d posted guards with automatic rifles on both sides of their route. He didn’t think they would try to break away, but he worried that the present inmates might try to rescue them. A show of force ahead of time was the best thing he could think of to keep that from happening.

“Move along! Move along!” guards shouted. “Don’t hold up the line, or you’re in trouble!” They were already in the worst trouble they could find, but they didn’t know it. This whole charade was to keep them-and the present inmates-from finding out.

Hipolito Rodriguez stood there with a rifle at the ready. Like most men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, Hip liked a submachine gun better because it was lighter and smaller. But Jeff wanted the guards to have weapons with real stopping power today. He nodded to Rodriguez. The Sonoran nodded back. Then he looked away, scanning the inmates for any sign of trouble. He knew how things worked. The more you showed that you were ready for anything, the less likely you were to run into trouble.

Jeff nodded to himself when the last black man passed through the gateway separating the main camp from the bathhouse. Getting the line through the camp was the hardest, most worrisome part. Already, trucks were taking away the first Negroes who thought they were heading for El Paso. Their true journey would be a lot shorter-and a good thing, too, because Jeff would need those trucks again pretty damn quick to handle more blacks.

He nodded again when the door to the bathhouse closed behind the last Negro man in the queue. Wasn’t there some poem that went, All hope abandon, ye who enter here? Once that door closed, those Negroes lost their last hope. They’d get herded into the big room that wasn’t a delousing chamber, and that would be that.

When was the next train coming? Would the camp be able to handle it? Could the crew get the corpses out of the alleged bathhouse, could the trucks get back from the mass grave, fast enough? They could. They did. By the time the next trainload of Negroes from Jackson stopped on the spur between the men’s and women’s camps, the guards were ready.

The next week was the busiest time Jeff remembered. He and his crew ran on sleep snatched in the intervals between trains and on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Every storage facility in the camp overflowed, even if relatively few of the Negroes had brought baggage with them. Where those Negroes went, they didn’t need baggage.

And at the end of it, Jefferson Pinkard looked at Vern Green and said, “By God, we reduced that population.”

“Sure as hell did,” the guard chief agreed. Jeff pulled a pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He took a snort, then passed the pint to Green. The number two man at Camp Determination also drank. After what they’d just been through, they’d damn well earned the booze.

Black clouds boiled up over Andersonville, Georgia. Where the sky wasn’t black, it was an ugly yellow, the color of a fading bruise. The rising wind blew a lock of Jonathan Moss’ hair into his eyes. He tossed his head. The wind got stronger. A raindrop hit him in the nose.

He looked around the prison-camp grounds. POWs were heading into the barracks as fast as they could. That looked like a hell of a good idea. The wind tugged at his clothes as he hurried toward shelter.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” one of the other prisoners said when he walked in. “Moss does have the sense to come in out of the rain.”

POWs laughed. Hell, Moss laughed himself. In Andersonville, fun was where you found it, and you didn’t have a lot of places to look. But Captain Nick Cantarella, who’d come in just ahead of Moss, said, “Noah would find someplace to hide from this. It looks like a bastard and a half out there.”

“Worse than that storm this summer?” somebody said.

“I think maybe,” Cantarella answered, and Moss found himself nodding. That had been a cloudburst to end all cloudbursts, yeah. It had also been a cloudburst to end all escape plans, at least for the time being. But whatever was building out there now looked downright vicious. The light was weird, almost flickering; it might have come from the trick-photography department of a bad horror film.

Somebody sitting close by a window said, “Son of a bitch!” Several people asked him what was going on. He pointed. “The guards are coming down from their towers and running like hell!”

“Jesus!” Moss said, which was one of the milder comments in the barracks. The gray-uniformed guards never left the towers unmanned. Never. They always wanted to be able to rake the camp with machine-gun fire. If they were bailing out now…

“Oh, fuck!” said the man by the window. Then he said something even worse: “Tornado!”

Somebody with a flat Indiana accent said, “Open the doors, quick! It’ll try and suck all the air out of any building it comes close to. If the air can’t get out, the buildings’ll blow up.” Moss, who’d shut the door behind him, quickly opened it again. The Midwesterner sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.