Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you-”

“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cincinnatus said, and Lucullus stared at him. The barbecue cook usually dominated between them. Not now. Cincinnatus went on, “We’re all shut up in here. Bad things start happenin’ out past the wire, how could we have much to do with ’em? But you kin get hold of Luther Bliss, and that son of a bitch got other ofays who’ll do what he tell ’em to.”

Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean, You’re crazy. Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”

“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cincinnatus said, startling a laugh out of Lucullus. “But the people Luther Bliss hates most are Freedom Party men and the Confederates who run things. We hate them people, too, so we’s handy for him.”

“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”

“You got any better ideas?” Cincinnatus demanded, and then, “You got any ideas at all?”

Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cincinnatus, who didn’t like seeing the younger man paralyzed. Cincinnatus would have done almost anything to get Lucullus’ wits working again; enraging him seemed a small price to pay. Lucullus said, “I kin git hold o’ him. He kin do dat shit, no doubt about it. But how much good it gonna do us ?”

“What do you mean?” Cincinnatus asked.

“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us-whatever they wants to do to us-they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”

Cincinnatus laughed at him. “They gonna let us out. They gonna let a lot of us out, anyways.” Lucullus’ jaw dropped. Cincinnatus drove the point home: “Who’s gonna do their nigger work for ’em if they don’t? Long as they need that, we ain’t cooped up in here all the time.”

“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.

“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus repeated. “Hell, they let me out for anything, I’ll talk to him.”

“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’-you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far-jus’ over de river.”

“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cincinnatus said with a bitter laugh. “Confederate soldiers holdin’ that part of Ohio. By what I hear, they’re worse on colored folks than the Freedom Party boys are here. They reckon they’re United States colored folks, an’ so they got to be the enemy.” Cincinnatus thought that was a pretty good bet, too. He added, “ ’Sides, I ain’t leavin’ without my pa.”

“You is the stubbornest nigger ever hatched,” Lucullus said. “Onliest thing that hard head good for nowadays is gittin’ you killed.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on. Git. I don’t want you ’round no mo’.”

Cincinnatus didn’t want to be in the barbecue place anymore. He didn’t want to be in Covington anymore. He didn’t want to be in Kentucky at all anymore. The trouble was, nobody else gave a damn what he wanted or didn’t want.

Cane tapping the ground ahead of him, he walked out for a better look at what the whites in Covington had done. He’d seen more formidable assemblages of barbed wire when he was driving trucks in the last war, but those had been made to hold out soldiers, not to hold in civilians. For that, what the cops and the stalwarts had run up would do fine.

Normally, making a fence out of barbed wire would have been nigger work. Whites had done it here, though. That worried Cincinnatus. If whites decided they could do nigger work, what reason would they have to keep any Negroes around in the CSA?

A swagbellied cop with a submachine gun strolled along outside the fence. He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk. The sun sparkled from the enameled Freedom Party pin on his lapel. Hadn’t Jake Featherston climbed to power by going on and on about how whites were better than blacks? How could they be better than blacks if they got rid of all the blacks? Then they would have to work things out among themselves. Race wouldn’t trump class anymore, the way it always had in the Confederacy.

That fat policeman spat again. His jaw worked as he shifted the chaw from one cheek to the other. Did he care about such details? Did the countless others like him care? Cincinnatus couldn’t make himself believe it. They’d get rid of Negroes first and worry about what happened after that later on.

Cincinnatus suddenly felt as trapped as Lucullus did. Up till now, the rumors about what the Confederates were doing to Negroes farther south in the CSA, things he’d heard at Lucullus’s place and the Brass Monkey and in other saloons, had seemed too strange, too ridiculous, to worry him. Now he looked out at the rest of Covington through barbed wire. It wasn’t even rusty yet; sunshine sparkled off the sharp points of the teeth. He couldn’t get out past it, not unless that cop and his pals let him. And they could reach into the colored district whenever they pleased.

He didn’t like the combination, not even a little bit. Except for trying to escape with his father as soon as he got even a halfway decent chance, though, he didn’t know what he could do about it.

I need a rifle, he thought. Reckon I can get one from Lucullus. They come after me, they gonna pay for everything they get.

Dead night again, and the Josephus Daniels creeping along through the darkness. Sam Carsten peered out at the black water ahead as if he could see the mines floating in it. He couldn’t, and he knew as much. He had to hope the destroyer escort had a good chart of these waters, and that she could dodge the mines. If she couldn’t… Some of them were packed with enough TNT to blow a ship high enough out of the water to show her keel to anybody who happened to be watching. Out on the open sea, he didn’t worry much about mines. Here in the narrow waters of Chesapeake Bay, he couldn’t help it.

At the wheel, Pat Cooley seemed the picture of calm. “We’re just about through the worst of it, sir,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” Sam said. “If we go sky-high in the next couple of minutes, I’m going to remind you you said that.”

The exec chuckled. “Oh, I expect I’ll remember it myself.”

Sam set a hand on his shoulder. The kid was all right-not a nerve in his body, or none that showed. And he was a married man, too, which made it harder for him. “Family all right?” Carsten asked.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Cooley answered. “Jane’s over the chicken pox, and Sally didn’t catch ’em.” His wife had worried when his daughter came down with the ailment, because she didn’t remember having it as a little girl. If she hadn’t got chicken pox by now, though, she must have had them then, because anybody who could catch them damn well would.

Another twenty minutes crawled by in a day or two. The soft throb of the engines came up through Sam’s shoes. The sound, the feel, were as important as his own pulse. If they stopped, the ship was in mortal peril. As things were… “I think we’re out of it now,” Sam said.

Cooley nodded. “I do believe you’re right-except for the little bastards that came off their chains and started drifting.” He paused. “And unless one side or the other laid some mines nobody knows about that aren’t on our charts.”