Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Hipolito Rodriguez packed his worldly goods into a duffel bag. He didn’t know how many times he’d done that when he was in the Army during the last war-enough so that he hadn’t lost the knack, anyhow. Shouldering the duffel wasn’t as easy as it had been then, though. A lot more years had landed on him since, and almost getting electrocuted hadn’t helped.

All the same, he managed. Some of the other guards from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades were in no better shape than he was. They managed, too. If you couldn’t manage, you shouldn’t have been here at all.

“Well done, men,” said Tom Porter, the troop leader-essentially, the top sergeant. “God knows we do need to fumigate these barracks-we’ve got more bugs in ’em than you can shake a stick at. I’m not telling you one goddamn thing you don’t already know.”

“Got that right,” a guard drawled. He mimed scratching-or maybe he wasn’t miming. Rodriguez had found out about delousing stations during the Great War, too. They’d changed a little since then-a little, but not nearly enough.

“It’s all them niggers’ fault,” another guard said. “They’s filthy, and we git their vermin.”

He was bound to be right about that. The rank smell of Camp Determination was always in a guard’s nostrils. Put lots of unwashed men and women together with Texas heat and humidity and it was no wonder you raised a bumper crop of every kind of pest under the sun.

The exterminators were a cheerful crew who’d come west from Abilene. BUGGONE! their trucks said. On the side of each was painted a man walking up to an overgrown cockroach. He had a mallet behind his back; the roach wore an apprehensive expression.

“Y’all got dogs or cats or canaries or snakes or goldfish or whatever the hell still in the building?” one of the men asked, fumbling in the breast pocket of his coveralls for a cheap cigar. “Better get ’em out if you do, on account of this stuff’ll kill ’em deader’n shit.”

A couple of the guards did have pets, but they’d taken them out. When the exterminator lit that cheroot, one of Rodriguez’s comrades asked him, “You gonna kill the bugs with the smoke from that goddamn thing?”

Laughing, the fellow answered, “How’d you guess? Now our secret’s out.”

He and his crew covered the barracks with an enormous tent of rubberized cloth. They could make it as big as they wanted; squares of the stuff zipped together. Rodriguez admired that-it struck him as good design.

One of the squares had a round hole in it that accepted the tube from the machine that pumped the poison into the tent: again, good design. The exterminators didn’t leave anything to chance, any more than the people who’d designed Camp Determination had done. A small gasoline engine powered the machine, which was hooked up to a gas cylinder with a large skull and crossbones painted on it.

Rodriguez had seen poison-gas cylinders during the last war. He asked the fellow with the nasty cigar, “You use chlorine or phosgene? I remember how chlorine kill all the rats in the trenches. More come later, though.” The trenches had been heaven on earth for rats and mice.

“Nah, this here is a different mix,” the exterminator told him. “It’s stronger than any of the stuff they used back then.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez said. “This means, maybe, the bugs don’t come back for a while once you kill them?”

“Maybe,” the man answered. By the way he hesitated before he said it, Rodriguez decided he meant no. Sure enough, he continued, “We get paid to kill all the little bastards that’re in there now. What happens after that… If you leave out ant syrup and spray Flit around and keep the place clean so you don’t draw roaches, you’ll do pretty good. And you can always call us out again.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez repeated, more sourly this time. Like undertakers, exterminators weren’t likely to go out of business anytime soon.

The engine came to noisy life. Whatever was in the gas cylinder started going into the tented barracks hall. Rodriguez got a tiny whiff of something that smelled sort of like mothballs but a hell of a lot stronger. That whiff was plenty to convince him he didn’t want to breathe any more of it. He moved away from the barracks in a hurry, and noticed the exterminators had already put some distance between themselves and their machinery.

“How soon can we go back in after y’all leave?” a guard asked one of the Buggone people.

“You folks did leave the windows and doors open so the place can air out?” the exterminator asked in return. The guard nodded. The exterminator said, “Well, in that case you oughta be safe goin’ in there tonight-say, after ten.”

Several guards swore. Rodriguez gave a mental shrug. Some things you just couldn’t help. What was the point of getting all excited about those?

“Wish we could fumigate the damn niggers like they was bugs,” a guard said.

Unfortunately for him, he said it where Tom Porter could hear him. The underofficer reamed him out for it: “Goddammit, Newcomb, watch your fool mouth. This here is a transit camp. It ain’t nothin’ else but a transit camp. You let the idea get out that it is somethin’ else and you turn the devil loose. Do you want that? Do you? Answer me when I talk to you, goddammit!”

“No, Troop Leader,” Newcomb said hastily.

“Then shut up, you hear me? Just shut up,” Porter said, and put his hands on his hips like an angry parent scolding a five-year-old. “You’ve all heard this shit before. To hell with me if I know what’s so hard about keeping your damnfool mouths shut, but y’all leak like a pail with a hole in it. We got to keep the niggers in camp tame, or we buy ourselves all kinds of shit. They go wild on us, we got to watch our backs every second like they did in the camps in Mississippi and Louisiana. Y’all want that? Do y’all?” Now he was yelling at every guard in earshot.

“No, Troop Leader,” they chorused, Rodriguez loud among them.

“All right, then,” the troop leader said, at least partly mollified. “Try and remember. You’re makin’ your own lives easier if you do.”

When Rodriguez patrolled the camp-either the men’s or the women’s half-he tried to watch his back every minute anyway. He didn’t know anybody who came from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade who didn’t. Anybody who’d lived through the last war had seen for himself that not having eyes in the back of your head was a good way to end up dead in a hurry. Some of the younger fellows, the men who’d been Party stalwarts or guards but hadn’t actually known combat, were the ones who strolled through the compounds without a visible care in the world. Sooner or later, one of them would get knocked over the head. That might teach the others some sense. Rodriguez hoped it would, anyhow.

His shift was on the women’s side today. He would have gone up with the window shade if he’d accepted all the favors offered him. The women figured their lives could be easier if they had a guard on their side, and they knew what they had to give to get one. If he wanted favors like that, he could have them. When they got thrown in his face half a dozen times a day, he mostly didn’t want them.

“These nigger bitches is all whores,” opined his partner, an Alabaman named Alvin Sprinks.

“It could be,” Rodriguez said. He didn’t think it was, at least under most circumstances, but he didn’t feel like arguing. Life was too short.

A couple of guards with submachine guns at his back, Jefferson Pinkard prowled through the women’s camp. Rodriguez had seen how his wartime buddy made his own rounds in Camp Determination, going where he wanted to go when he wanted to go there. That was just an extension of the rule of watching your back all the time. To a man of Pinkard’s rank, the whole camp was his back.