Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

And then all their luck ran out. Everything happened so fast, neither Willard Sloan nor anyone else had the slightest chance to do anything. “In! Get in, God damn you!” shouted the white men with guns. They stuffed cars tighter than should have been humanly possible. By the way the boxcar Scipio and his family went into smelled, it had hauled cattle the last time. The whites packed it till no one could sit down, then slammed the door shut. That cut off almost all of the air. Scipio resigned himself to dying before he got wherever the train was going. With a jerk and a lurch, it began to roll.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull sometimes thought he was trapped in one of the nastier suburbs of hell. One bleeding, mangled, screaming man after another, from the time he gulped coffee to wake up to the moment he lay down for a stolen bit of sleep. Some of the soldiers wore green-gray, others butternut. He’d almost stopped noticing which color uniform he had to cut away to get at the latest mutilation.

“When will this end?” he groaned to Granville McDougald after amputating a shattered arm.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the medic answered. “Only one who can tell you is the Confederate CO.”

“He should have quit three weeks ago,” O’Doull said.

McDougald shrugged. “He’s got orders to hold to as long as he can, and he’s got ammo for his guns. Featherston would probably send a people bomb after him if he did throw in the towel. As soon as we smash him flat, that frees up all of our men here to roll west and knock the Confederates out of Ohio. So he’s holding down a lot more men than he’s still got left himself.”

“You spent all these years as a medic, right?” O’Doull asked. McDougald nodded. The doctor went on, “So how come you talk like you come from the General Staff?”

“Me?” Granville McDougald laughed. “I’m just picking up stuff I hear from the wounded. We’ve got enough of ’em.”

“Well, God knows you’re right about that,” O’Doull said. The University of Pittsburgh hospital held U.S. wounded ranging in rank from private to brigadier general-and Confederates ranging from private to full colonel. It was always stuffed. Men lay on gurneys in the hallway, sometimes on mattresses on the floor, sometimes-when things were at their worst-on blankets on the floor.

The Confederates never had made it over the Allegheny River. They never had tried to break out of Pittsburgh to the west, either. They’d waited till the relieving column could link up with them-but it never did. Now, outside the pocket, there were no Confederate soldiers for miles and miles. The men who’d tried to relieve Pittsburgh had turned west themselves, to try to stem the U.S. advance out of northwestern Ohio and Indiana.

“One thing,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised an eyebrow. O’Doull went on, “I bet the poor bastards stuck here don’t think Jake Featherston is always right anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter,” McDougald said. “What matters is the people down in the CSA. When they figure out Featherston’s led ’em down the primrose path, that’s when things get interesting.”

“Maybe-but maybe not,” O’Doull said. “Yeah, some of them may hate Featherston after things go wrong. But won’t they go on hating us even worse? They really do, you know.” He’d listened to wounded men, too, and some of the captured Confederates were alarmingly frank.

“I don’t care if they hate us. I hate them, too.” Granville McDougald was so matter-of-fact, he might have been talking about the weather. “What I want ’em to remember is, if they mess with us, we’re going to pound the kapok out of ’em, and they better get used to the idea.”

“Oderint dum metuant,” O’Doull murmured. McDougald made a questioning noise. Half embarrassed, O’Doull explained: “I did a lot of Latin when I was an undergrad-in those days, you had to when you went to college. It’s helped with the medical terms, I will say. But the Emperor Caligula said that.”

“Caligula? The crazy one?”

“That’s him. He was nuttier than Jake Featherston, to hell with me if he wasn’t. But it means, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’ ”

“Three words,” McDougald said admiringly. “Boy, that packs more into three words than anything this side of ‘I love you.’ There I was, yakking about how I feel about the Confederates, and that old son of a bitch got it into three words.”

“He wasn’t an old son of a bitch. He was a young son of a bitch,” O’Doull said. “I think he was twenty-seven when they murdered him.”

“Well, he’s been dead long enough that he seems old,” McDougald said. O’Doull nodded; he was right about that. It was something over 1,900 years now.

He didn’t get the chance to cudgel his brains over exactly how many years it was, because the PA system brayed, “Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at once to OR Three! Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at-”

“No rest for the wicked,” McDougald said.

“I thought that was ‘weary,’ ” O’Doull said.

“Works both ways, don’t you think?” McDougald was right about that, too.

They hastily scrubbed in and gowned and masked. Then they found what they were dealing with: a soldier who’d stepped on a mine. That was an even worse misfortune than it might have been, because the Confederates, or possibly the Devil, had come up with a new model. Instead of just exploding and blowing off a man’s foot or his leg, it bounced up to waist height and then burst… with the results they had in front of them.

The kid on the table was shrieking in spite of surely having had a morphine shot. He held his hands in front of his crotch like a maiden surprised, and wouldn’t move them no matter what. “My nuts!” he moaned. “It got my nuts!”

“You’re gonna be all right, son.” O’Doull feared he was lying through his teeth. He turned to McDougald and spoke in a quick, low voice: “Get him under.”

“Right, Doc.” In one swift, practiced motion, McDougald put the ether cone over the soldier’s face and turned the valve on the gas cylinder. The wounded man choked on the pungent fumes, but didn’t try to yank off the mask the way a lot of people did. His hands stayed right where they were till the ether got him and he went limp.

“Let’s see how bad it is,” O’Doull said grimly. Now he could move those blood-dripping hands. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. What he saw made him want to cover himself up the same way.

“How bad?” McDougald asked.

“Well, he won’t need to worry about getting a girl in trouble anymore-that’s for damn sure,” O’Doull answered. “I’ll see if I can put his dick back together well enough for him to piss through it. And he’s got some nasty belly wounds, too.”

“Remember we were talking about the Geneva Convention a while ago?” McDougald said as O’Doull, his mouth a tight line behind the mask, got to work.

“Yeah,” he answered absently, trimming mangled tissue as conservatively as he could. “What about it?”

“Nobody’d thought of Popping Paula back when they were hammering it out,” McDougald said. “Otherwise, it’d be on the list for sure.”

“It’s filthy, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “And you know what’s even worse? I bet you anything the engineer who came up with it got a bonus.”

“I won’t touch that,” McDougald said. “If you look at it the right way-or the wrong way, depending-it’s almost the perfect weapon. Who’d want to maybe trade his family jewels for a hundred-yard advance?”

“I’m just glad they don’t have many of those little toys here,” O’Doull said. “And we’ve got all their airstrips under our guns now, so they won’t be bringing in more.”