Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

"We'll need a driver," Hamilton said. Rodriguez didn't volunteer; he couldn't drive.

They packed him and the other trainee prison guards into a couple of ordinary trucks with butternut canvas canopies over their beds. Those trucks followed the one with the Negro prisoners. Rodriguez wondered where they were going. He didn't know of any other camps close by. Of course, Texas had more empty space than it knew what to do with. Maybe there were others, somewhere not too far over the horizon.

His truck ride lasted about an hour. Looking out at where he'd been-he couldn't see where he was going-he found he'd passed through a gate in a perimeter marked off by barbed wire. Maybe it's another camp after all, he thought.

The truck stopped. "Everybody out!" Billy Joe Hamilton yelled. "y'all got work to do!"

Out Rodriguez came. Like a lot of the other middle-aged men who'd ridden with him, he grunted and stretched. His back ached. The truck had been anything but comfortable.

The other truck, the one with the Negroes in it, had stopped, too, at the edge of a long, deep trench a bulldozer had scraped in the ground. Rodriguez looked around. All he saw was prairie. They were a long way from anything that mattered. He nodded to himself. He remembered this kind of landscape from when he'd fought in the Great War, though he'd been farther west then.

"You!" Hamilton pointed to him. "Open the rear doors on that there truck."

"Yes, Assault Troop Leader!" Rodriguez answered. His pure English would never be great, but he followed what other people said to him, and he could speak enough to get by. Nobody'd complained about the way he talked.

He went over to the truck with the iron box for a passenger compartment. He needed a moment, but no more than a moment, to figure out how the heavy bar that kept the doors closed was secured. He got it loose before the Freedom Party guard either showed him or brushed him aside as a goddamn dumb greaser. That done, he grabbed the handles and pulled the doors open.

"?Madre de Dios!" he exclaimed as the fecal stink poured out of the compartment and into the chilly air. He crossed himself, not once but two or three times in quick succession. None of the blacks in the truck remained alive. They sprawled atop one another in unlovely, ungainly death.

"Isn't this smooth?" Hamilton said. "We take 'em out, we drive 'em off, and they're dead by the time they get where they're goin'. Matter of fact, the only place they're goin'is straight to hell." He shook his head, correcting himself. "Nope-other place they're goin'is right into this here ditch. y'all drag 'em out of the truck and fling 'em in. Then the 'dozer'll scrape the dirt back over 'em, and that'll be the end of that. Good riddance to bad rubbish." He made hand-washing motions.

Nobody said no. The trainees did the job willingly enough. It didn't bother Rodriguez all that much once he got over his first horrified astonishment. The Freedom Party hadn't been kidding when it said it wanted to put Negroes in their place. After all the trouble they'd caused the Confederate States, he wasn't going to lose much sleep over what happened to them.

Into the ditch thudded the corpses, one after another. They were still limp; they hadn't started to stiffen. Good riddance to bad rubbish, the Freedom Party guard had said. To him, and to Hipolito Rodriguez as well, that was all they were. Rubbish.

Somebody asked what struck him as a practical question: "Can we kill 'em off faster'n they breed?"

"Oh, you bet your ass we can." Assault Troop Leader Hamilton sounded as if he hadn't the slightest doubt. "If we want to bad enough, we can do any goddamn thing we please. And Jake Featherston wants to do this really bad. Whatever we have to do to take care of it, well, that's what we do. Pretty soon, we don't got to worry about niggers no more."

The guards murmured among themselves. Most of the murmurs sounded approving to Rodriguez. Nobody who didn't see this as at least a possibility would have volunteered for camp-guard duty. Wiping his hands on his trousers, a trainee asked Hamilton, "How come this used to be a tougher duty than it is now?"

"On account of these trucks are new," the Freedom Party guard answered. "Up until not so long ago, guards had to shoot the niggers they needed to get rid of." His voice was altogether matter-of-fact. "That was hard on everybody. Some guards just couldn't stand the strain, poor bastards. And the niggers knew what was comin' when they got marched outa camp, too. Made 'em twice as dangerous as they would've been otherwise. Some fella named Pinkard, runs a camp over in Mississippi or Louisiana-one o' them places-came up with this here instead."

"?Madre de Dios!" Rodriguez said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.

"What's eatin' you?" the Party guard asked.

"I know this Pinkard-or a Pinkard, anyhow," Rodriguez answered. "We fight together here in Texas in the Great War. Not many with this name, I think."

"Reckon maybe you're right," the Freedom Party man agreed. "Ain't that a kick in the nuts? This here Pinkard, he's come up a long ways since then. Runnin' a camp, that's like commanding a regiment."

Rodriguez tried to imagine Jefferson Pinkard as a high-ranking officer. It wasn't easy. It was, in fact, damn hard. The Pinkard he'd known had been an ordinary soldier-till he started having woman trouble. After that, all he'd cared about was killing damnyankees. Up until then, he'd been like any sensible fighting man, more interested in staying alive himself than in getting rid of the enemy. But afterwards… Afterwards, he hadn't cared whether he lived or died.

Evidently he'd lived. And now a lot of mallates were efficiently dead because he had. Rodriguez shrugged and pulled one of them out of the truck. Who'd miss them, after all?

They'd sent Irving Morrell to a military hospital outside of Syracuse, New York. The sprawling wooden building had enormous Red Crosses painted on the roof, in case Confederate bombers came that far north. Up till now, none had. Syracuse had to seem like the end of the world to the Confederates. It sure as hell seemed like the end of the world to Morrell.

Dr. Silverstein had told him his shoulder would heal well. And it was healing-but not nearly fast enough to suit him. He looked at the snow blowing by outside and asked, "How long before I get out of here?"

The sawbones currently in charge of him was named Conrad Rohde. "I don't know, exactly," he answered. "A few weeks, I expect."

"That's what everybody's been telling me for-a few weeks now," Morrell said irritably.

Dr. Rohde shrugged. He was a big, blond, slow-moving man. Nothing seemed to faze him. A bad-tempered colonel sure didn't. "Do you want a wound infection?" he inquired. "You told me you had one of those the last time you got shot. You're older than you were then, you know."

"Oh, yeah? Since when?" Even Morrell's sarcasm drew nothing more than a chuckle from Rohde. Morrell did know he was older than he had been in 1914. Even with the wound infection that didn't want to go away, he'd got his strength back then a hell of a lot faster than he was now.

"Do your exercises," Rohde told him, and went off to inflict his resolute good cheer on some other injured soldier.

"Exercises." Morrell said it as if it were a four-letter word. He started opening and closing and flexing his right hand. It didn't hurt as much as it had when he'd begun doing it. Then it had felt as if his whole right arm were being dipped in boiling oil. Now he just imagined he had a wolverine gnawing at his shoulder joint. This was progress, of a sort.

Dr. Rohde insisted that the more he did the exercises, the easier they would become. To Morrell, that only proved that Dr. Rohde, no matter how smart and well trained he was, had never got shot. Morrell wished he could say the same thing.