Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Oh, yeah. Him.” Armstrong nodded. “This ain’t him, though, I’ll tell you that. This guy’s probably a bad actor-you know what I mean? He’s our age-gotta be-and he’s not in the Army. He’s pulling some strings somewhere, sure as hell.” He eyed the announcement with distaste. “Damn paper’s too stiff to wipe my ass with.” He scaled it away.

The letter from his father mentioned Clara’s upcoming wedding, too. Merle Grimes had little to say about Clara’s intended. Armstrong nodded to himself. His old man had seen the elephant, and took pride in it. He wouldn’t have much use for somebody who’d managed to wiggle out of conscription.

Yossel Reisen was methodically going through his mail. He held up one letter. “My aunt was in a meeting room when that auto bomb went off in front of Congress.” He always played down being the nephew of the former First Lady. If he hadn’t downplayed it, Armstrong didn’t suppose he would have had to put the uniform back on at all. Unlike this Humphrey Baxter item, Yossel pulled his weight.

“She get out all right?” Armstrong asked.

“Uh-huh. Not a scratch, she says,” Reisen answered. “She wasn’t near the front of the building, thank God.”

“That’s good,” Armstrong said, and then, “Goddamn Mormons.” The Latter-Day Saints hadn’t claimed responsibility for the recent wave of auto bombs, but Deseret Wireless didn’t go out of its way to deny anything, either. Its tone was, Take that! Serves you right, too.

“They look just like anybody else,” Yossel said. “That makes them hard to catch, hard to stop.”

“Don’t it just?” Armstrong’s agreement was ungrammatical but heartfelt. He added, “I don’t like the way Confederate Connie goes on and on about it.”

“Well, who would?” Yossel paused. “Even when you know she’s full of crap, though, she’s fun to listen to.”

“Oh, hell, yes!” Armstrong’s agreement there was heartfelt, too. Nobody he knew took Confederate Connie even a quarter of the way seriously. Like every wireless broadcaster from the CSA, she was Jake Featherston’s mouthpiece. But a doozie of a mouthpiece she was, and she sounded like a doozie of a piece, period-she had the sexiest voice Armstrong had ever heard.

She spent a lot of time between records gloating about the auto bombs that had U.S. cities so on edge. “Now you-all know how we feel,” she would say. “We’ve been putting up with these contraptions for years. You laughed when it happened to us. Do you-all reckon we’re laughing now?” She would pause. She would giggle. “Well, you know what?… You’re right!”

Yossel Reisen opened another letter. “Who’s this one from?” Armstrong asked, having already gone through his meager mail.

“My Uncle David.”

“Which one’s he again?” Armstrong asked-Yossel had a lot of relatives.

“The one who lost a leg in the last war,” Reisen answered. “He’s a right-wing Democrat now. It drives Aunt Flora nuts.”

“Oh, yeah.” Armstrong nodded. Yes, his own father was inordinately proud of the wound that made him walk with a cane. Yossel’s uncle David overtrumped Dad’s wound in a big way. Come to that, Yossel’s father had got killed before he was even born. Sure as hell, some people had had a tougher time of it than Merle Grimes, even if he wouldn’t admit it this side of the rack. Armstrong asked, “What’s he got to say?”

“He’s talking about the auto bombs in New York City,” Yossel answered, not looking up from the letter. “He says there were four of them-one on Wall Street, one in the Lower East Side where I grew up, and two in Times Square.”

“Two?” Armstrong said.

“Two,” Yossel repeated, his face grim. “One to make a mess, and then another one that went off fifteen minutes later, after the cops and the firemen showed up.”

“Oh.” Armstrong grimaced. “That’s a dirty trick. Confederate Connie hasn’t talked about anything like that.”

“Probably doesn’t want to give the shvartzers in the CSA ideas if they’re listening to her,” Yossel said. Armstrong nodded; that made pretty good sense. Yossel went on, “Waste of time, I bet. If the Mormons can figure it out, you’ve got to figure the shvartzers can, too.”

“Bet you’re right. It’s a goddamn lousy war, that’s all I’ve got to say. Poison gas and blowing the other guy’s cities to hell and gone and both sides with maniacs blowing their own cities to hell and gone… Some fun,” Armstrong said. “And these fucking Mormons won’t quit till the last one’s dead-and his ghost’ll haunt us.”

As if on cue, somebody shouted, “Incoming!” Armstrong threw himself flat even before he heard the shriek of the incoming round. It was a terrifying wail. The Mormons had something homemade and nasty. Artillerymen called it a spigot mortar. Most soldiers called the projectiles-each about the size of a wastebasket with fins-screaming meemies.

When they hit, they made a roar like the end of the world. They were stuffed with explosives and scrap iron, to the point where they were almost flying auto bombs themselves. The only drawback they had that Armstrong could see was that, like most of the Mormons’ improvised weapons, they couldn’t reach very far. But when they did get home…

Blast picked him up and slammed him down again, as if a professional wrestler-or possibly God-had thrown him to the canvas. He tasted blood. When he brought a hand up to his face, he found his nose was bleeding, too. He felt his ears, but they seemed all right. After he spat, his mouth seemed better. His nose went on dripping blood down his face and, as he straightened, onto the front of his tunic. That was all right, or not too bad. Anything more and he would have worried about what the screaming meemie had done to his insides.

Instead, he worried about what the horrible thing had done to other people. The corporal who’d brought the mail forward was torn to pieces. If not for the sack, Armstrong wouldn’t have recognized him. Poor bastard wasn’t even a front-line soldier. Wrong place, wrong time, and he’d make another closed-casket funeral.

Shouts of, “Corpsman!” rose from half a dozen places. There weren’t enough medics close by to see to everybody at once. Armstrong bandaged wounds and tied off one tourniquet and gave morphine shots with the syrettes in the soldiers’ first-aid kits: all the things he’d learned how to do since he got thrown into battle the summer before.

Yossel Reisen was doing the same sorts of things. He also had a bloody nose, and he’d put a bandage on the back of his own left hand. More blood soaked through it. “There’s a Purple Heart for you,” Armstrong said.

Reisen told him where he could put the Purple Heart, and suggest that he not close the pin that held it on a uniform.

Armstrong gave back a ghastly grin. “Same to you, buddy, only sideways,” he said. They both laughed. It wasn’t funny-nothing within some considerable distance of where a screaming meemie went off was funny-but it kept them both going and it kept them from shrieking. Sometimes men who’d been through too much would come to pieces in the field. Armstrong had seen that a few times. It was even less lovely than what shell fragments could do. They only ruined a man’s body. When his soul went through the meat grinder…

Belatedly, U.S. field guns started shelling the place from which the screaming meemie had come. Odds were neither the men who’d launched it nor the tube from which it started its deadly flight were there anymore.

“Bastards.” Even Armstrong wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Mormons on the other side of the line or the gunners on his own. It fit both much too well.