Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Guards went through the cars to bring out the dead, the dying, and anybody who thought he’d get sneaky and try to hide. It was nasty work, but they couldn’t trust it to the stretcher bearers, who were too soft on their own kind. Some of the dead ones had money or jewelry worth lifting. You never could tell.

Shouts farther down the train said another squad had caught a lurker. More shouts-these of pain-said he was getting what was coming to him. The guards would beat him to within an inch of his life. Then he’d get thrown on the first available truck “to the transfer facility”-and that would take care of the last inch.

“They’re such damn fools,” said a guard heaving bodies out of the car with Rodriguez. “They think we’re not gonna check the fuckin’ cars. Gotta be dumb as rocks if they do.”

“That’s right,” Rodriguez said.

“Damn straight it is,” the other guard said. Buchanan Thornton was his name-he told people to call him Buck. He had no doubts about anything, not as far as Rodriguez could see. Few whites in the CSA did, and Buck Thornton was as white as they came: sandy hair with a lot of gray in it, blue eyes, pointy nose, freckles.

If there weren’t blacks around to revile, he probably whiled away the time cussing at greasers. Where he was, though, he didn’t have the time or energy to worry about anything but Negroes. As a Sonoran, Rodriguez knew he was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. But he was on the ladder; down below lay the ooze and the muck-the blacks on whose back the ladder stood.

He looked down on them all the more because he was closer to them than people higher up the ladder. In an odd way, though, Negroes were an insurance policy for people of Mexican blood. As long as they were there, nobody except a few Texans got excited about his kind.

The first trucks rolled out of Camp Determination. When they came back, the mallates aboard them wouldn’t be there anymore. Rodriguez wouldn’t miss them a bit, either. The first Negroes he’d ever met had had guns in their hands. They’d done their level best to kill him. He’d hated and feared them ever since. If Jake Featherston wanted to get rid of them, more power to him and to the Freedom Party.

As more stretcher bearers hauled away dead and dying blacks, Rodriguez had an odd thought. Suppose Camp Determination and others like it-for there were bound to be others like it-succeeded. Suppose they made the Confederate States Negro-free. What would the country be like then?

It would be a lot safer, was the first answer that sprang into his mind. Mallates were nothing but trouble. Even now, they left car bombs in cities and bushwhacked whites in the countryside. Good riddance to them.

But if they were gone-if they were all gone-what would that social ladder be like? People always needed someone at whom they could look down their noses. Who would fall into that unenviable role?

People like me, Rodriguez thought-people with brown skin and black hair, people who spoke English with an accent. That might not be so good. He wondered why the question hadn’t occurred to him sooner.

He shrugged. That would come later, much later, if it ever happened at all. It wasn’t anything he had to lose sleep over, and he didn’t intend to. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it the best way he knew how.

And maybe he shouldn’t have looked down his nose at that Thais. She wasn’t bad, and he hadn’t seen Magdalena for a long time now. He shrugged again. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of fish in that particular sea.

Air-raid sirens howled, tumbling George Enos, Jr., out of bed much too early on a Sunday morning. Either somebody with a sadistic sense of humor had picked the time for a drill-always a possibility in the Navy-or the Japs were feeling friskier than usual.

When antiaircraft guns not far from the barracks started banging away, George got his answer. He also heard several anguished groans-gunfire and hangovers mixed poorly.

He took the time to throw on tunic and trousers and shoes before running for the closest slit trench. Not everybody bothered. Some people dashed out in nothing but skivvies. Nobody ragged them for it, either. In combat, what you had to do came first, with everything else a long way behind.

A fighter swooped low. Machine-gun bullets chewed up the grass and sent dirt jumping. Some of them kicked into the trench, too. Somebody howled like a coyote when a bullet found him. George scrunched himself up as small and as low as he could. His whites got filthy, but that was the least of his worries.

Most of the action, though, was well away from the barracks. The Japs were aiming for the harbor and the nearby airfield. Warships and airplanes could hurt them. Mere men were an afterthought.

Fremont Blaine Dalby jumped into the trench and just missed pulverizing George’s kidneys with his big feet. He must have dodged the strafing fighter’s bullets like a halfback dodging tacklers. “Bastards are going to pay for this,” he panted, crashing down beside George.

Something blew up with force enough to make the ground shake. “Looks like they’re dishing it out, not taking it,” George pointed out in a bellow that, under those circumstances, did duty for a whisper.

“Yeah, but if they want to yank the lion’s tail, they gotta stick their head in his mouth,” Dalby said. That wasn’t the way George would have gone about pulling a lion’s tail, assuming he were mad enough to try such a thing, but he knew better than to criticize a CPO’s choice of metaphors. And when Dalby went on, he was as concrete as Boulder Dam: “If their airplanes can reach us, ours can reach their carriers. And we must have known they were coming unless every goddamn Y-range operator in the Sandwich Islands is asleep at the switch. So we oughta be good and ready for ’em.”

“Here’s hoping,” George said.

An airplane smashed to the ground not far enough away. He stuck his head up, hoping to watch a Japanese pilot fry in the wreckage. But the burning fighter was American: he could still make out the eagle and crossed swords painted on the fuselage. He hoped the pilot had bailed out before his machine crashed. Then the warm, tropical breeze brought him the stink of burning meat. His stomach did a flipflop worse than any in the North Atlantic in wintertime.

Dalby stuck his head up, too. He was looking along the trench. “We’ve got a lot of our crew here,” he said. “We ought to find us a gun to man.”

The prospect of getting out of the trench did not fill George with delight. He wanted to tell Dalby as much. What came out of his mouth was, “I’ll follow you, Chief.” The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing.

When Dalby yelled, Fritz Gustafson answered the call right away. George might have known nothing would faze the loader; even if he was scared, he was too damn stubborn to show it, probably even to himself. Dalby looked around again. The rest of the gun crew were either out of earshot or sensibly keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. “Screw it,” Dalby said. “We got a shell-heaver, a loader, and I can damn well aim. Come on.”

He scrambled out of the trench. George did follow him. If he muttered about how many different kinds of damn fool he was, then he did, that was all. There was still a hell of a lot of racket all around. Dalby either didn’t hear him or had a good enough excuse to pretend he didn’t.

“Plenty going on,” Gustafson said: a novel’s worth of words from him.

He wasn’t wrong. American and Japanese warplanes tangled overhead. If anybody had an edge, George couldn’t tell who it was. Both ground-based antiaircraft guns and those mounted on ships in Pearl Harbor were throwing shells up as fast as they could. Shrapnel was starting to come down, pattering and clattering off roofs and sidewalks and thumping into bare ground. George wished he had a helmet. That stuff would rearrange your brains if it hit you in the head.