Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

Rodriguez had to push past his seatmate on the aisle. "Excuse, please. Is me." He grabbed his denim duffel bag from the rack above the seats, slung it over his shoulder, and went up the aisle to the door. A good many others, some brown like him, others ordinary Texans, got out, too.

Stretching his legs on the platform felt good. A man in a uniform of military cut but made from gray rather than butternut spoke in a loud voice: "I am Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton. I have the honor and privilege to be a Freedom Party guard. Freedom!" The last word was a fierce roar.

"Freedom!" Rodriguez and his comrades echoed.

Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton sneered at all of them impartially, caring no more for white than for brown. "y'all have a lot to learn, and you won't learn some of it till you get to a real camp," he said. "Come on, now, let's get you off to where you're supposed to be at, get your paperwork all done, and then we'll see what the hell we got in you. Follow me." He did a smart about-face and marched off the platform.

"Ain't it nice they're so glad to see us?" Jimmy didn't bother to keep his voice down. Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton's back got even stiffer than it was already; Rodriguez hadn't thought it could. The Freedom Party guard didn't stop or turn around, though.

Buses waited outside the station. The recruits for the Veterans' Brigades filled two of them. Rodriguez got into the second one. The cloud of black, stinking smoke that belched from the tailpipe of the first almost asphyxiated him. If the Confederate States weren't using it for poison gas, they should have been. His own bus coughed out the same sort of fumes, but he didn't have to breathe those. Gears grinding, the bus groaned into motion.

Decatur, Texas, was about forty miles northwest of Fort Worth. Getting there took an hour and a half-not bad, not as far as Rodriguez was concerned. The town was bigger than Baroyeca, but not very big. It stood on what the locals called a hill. To Rodriguez, who knew what mountains were supposed to be, it seemed like nothing more than a swell of ground, but he saw no point in arguing.

On the flat land below Decatur stood a compound surrounded by barbed wire. There was a ramshackle barracks hall inside; a guard tower with a machine gun stood at each corner. The guard towers were manned. Negroes wandered inside the barbed-wire perimeter. Outside the compound were neat rows of butternut tents.

Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton said, "This here is Training Camp Number Three. y'all are gonna learn to take care of nigger prisoners by taking care of the stinkin' sons of bitches. Ain't no better way to learn than by doin' what you got to do. Am I right or am I wrong?" When the men didn't answer fast enough to suit him, he donned an ugly scowl. "I said, Am I right or am I wrong?"

He may have a funny rank because he is a Party guard and not a soldier, but he is nothing but a top sergeant, thought Rodriguez, who remembered the breed well. "You are right, Assault Troop Leader!" he shouted along with the rest of the veterans. By the way some of them smiled, they were remembering their younger days, too.

The paperwork was about what Rodriguez expected: fitting pegs into slots. He had to ask for help two or three times; he spoke more English than he read. He didn't feel bad or embarrassed about it. Others from Sonora and Chihuahua were doing the same thing, some more often than he.

He got a gray uniform like Hamilton's but plainer. He got a pair of shiny black marching boots. He got a submachine gun, but no ammunition for it yet. And he got assigned to a cot in one of those tents. His tentmate turned out to be a Texan named Ollie Parker. "You ain't no nigger-lover, are you?" Parker demanded. Rodriguez shook his head. Parker, who'd looked worried, relaxed. "In that case, I reckon we'll get on just fine."

Rain poured from the night sky. Scipio put on his galoshes and his raincoat and took his umbrella out of a wastebasket at the Huntsman's Lodge. He'd get wet walking home anyway. He knew that ahead of time, and knew how inconvenient it was. He also knew he couldn't do anything more than he'd already done.

"See you tomorrow, Xerxes," Jerry Dover said.

"Reckon so," Scipio answered, although, since it was half past one, his boss would really see him again later today.

He slid out the door and started for the Terry. The thick, black clouds overhead only made it darker than it would have been otherwise-which is to say, very dark indeed. He tried to stride carefully, feeling with each foot as well as stepping. He didn't want to walk off the curb and fall in the gutter or land in a pothole and sprain his ankle.

He'd got almost to the Terry when a flashlight beam stabbed into his face from up ahead. He gasped in surprise and fear. With the raindrops drumming down on his umbrella, he hadn't heard anyone up there. And, coming out of the gloom, the beam felt bright as a welder's torch.

"What the hell you doin' out after curfew, nigger?" The voice that snapped the question belonged to a white man.

Scipio realized the raincoat hid the tuxedo that told without words what he did. "Suh, I waits table up at de Huntsman's Lodge," he answered. "I jus' git off work a few minutes gone by."

By now, just about every cop in Augusta had stopped him at one time or another. From behind the flashlight, this one said, "Show me you got on your fancy duds under that there raincoat."

"Yes, suh. I do dat." Scipio shifted the umbrella from his right hand to his left and used his right to undo the top couple of buttons on the coat and tug it wide so the policeman could see the wing collar and bow tie beneath it.

"It's him, all right," another policeman said. "I almost blew the bastard's head off a few weeks ago." Scipio still couldn't see anything but the dazzling beam of light and the raindrops falling through it. He heard more cops muttering agreement. How many were out there? He got the idea there were quite a few.

"Whereabouts exactly you live, uncle?" asked the policeman behind the flashlight.

After giving his address, Scipio buttoned the raincoat to keep out the November chill. "How come you wants to know dat, suh?" he asked. "I ain't done nothin' wrong."

"You're out after curfew. We wanted to jug you, we sure as hell could," the cop said, and the cold of a winter from much farther north took root in Scipio's vitals. But the white man went on, "You just get your sorry black ass home, then. This here ain't got nothin' to do with you."

"This here what?" Scipio inquired.

"Cleaning out transients and terrorists." Abruptly, the flashlight beam winked out. Green and purple afterimages danced in front of Scipio's eyes. Aside from them, he couldn't see a thing. He'd hardly been able to before, but this was even worse. "Come on through," the policeman told him. "Come on. You'll be fine."

Had he ever heard a white man say something like that before? Maybe, but not for a long time. Since the Freedom Party took over? He wouldn't have been surprised if he hadn't.

And the cop didn't lie. Nothing happened to him when he went by however many white men stood out there in the rain. No colored night runners tried to redistribute the wealth, either. The Negroes had enough sense to stay in where it was dry. Scipio had already unlocked the front door to his apartment building before he started wondering why the police didn't. He shrugged. They'd let him alone. If they got rid of some of the predators who preyed more on their own kind than on whites, he wouldn't shed many tears.

He slipped into bed without waking Bathsheba. He was awakened an hour or so later himself, though, by harsh barks that effortlessly pierced the patter of the rain on the windows. Bathsheba woke, too. "Do Jesus!" she said. "What's that?"