goes.'
'Mmm…maybe.' Cincinnatus paused to light a cigarette. 'Got us plenty o' cheerful stuff to talk about, don't we?'
'You wanted cheerful, you shoulda stayed home,' Williamson said.
Cincinnatus grunted. That held more truth than he wished it did. But he said, 'I tell you one cheerful thing- we're beatin' the livin' shit outa Featherston's fuckers. That'll do for me. Only thing that'd do better'd be beatin' the shit outa Featherston.'
'Could happen,' the other driver said. 'You believe even half of what Stars and Stripes says, he won't be able to stay in Richmond much longer. Where's he gonna run to then?'
With another grunt, Cincinnatus replied, 'You believe half o' what Stars and Stripes says, we won the goddamn war last year.'
Hal Williamson laughed. 'Yeah, well, there is that. Those guys lie like they're selling old jalopies.'
'They got a tougher sell than that,' Cincinnatus said. 'They got to sell the war.'
'Soon as the Confederates jumped into Ohio, I was sold,' Williamson said. 'Bastards tried to knock us flat and steal the war before we could get back on our feet again. Damn near did it, too-damn near.'
He was right about that. 'Same here,' Cincinnatus said. ''Course, they ain't as likely to shoot our asses off as they are with the kids in the front line.'
'Still happens, though. You know that as well as I do. We've lost more drivers than I like to think about,' Williamson said.
'Oh, yeah. I won't try to tell you anything different. All I said was, it ain't as likely, and it ain't,' Cincinnatus said. He waited to see if the other driver would keep arguing. When Williamson didn't, Cincinnatus decided he'd made his point.
The next morning, he picked up a load of canned rations and headed for the front. He liked carrying those just fine. The soldiers needed them, and they wouldn't blow up no matter what happened. He couldn't think of a better combination.
About every third Georgia town had Negro guerrillas patrolling the streets along with U.S. soldiers. Whenever Cincinnatus saw some of them, he would tap his horn and wave. The blacks commonly grinned and waved back. 'You a Yankee nigger?' was a question he heard again and again.
'I'm from Kentucky,' he would answer as he rolled past. Let them figure that out. Yes, he'd grown up in the CSA, but he'd spent most of the second half of his life under the Stars and Stripes. His children were Yankees-no doubt about it. They even sounded as if they came from the Midwest…except when they got upset or angry. Then an accent more like his own would come out. But he was more betwixt and between than any one thing. He probably would be for the rest of his life.
U.S. authorities here took no chances. Bodies hung in almost every town square. That was supposed to make the living think twice about giving the USA any trouble. Seeing how much trouble the living gave the USA, Cincinnatus had his doubts about how much good it did. But those dead men wouldn't bother the United States again. He had no doubts about that at all.
Would the United States need to kill every white male in the Confederate States above the age of twelve? If they did need to, would they have the will to do it? Cincinnatus wasn't so sure about that, either. And even if the United States did set out to slaughter white male Confederates, wouldn't it be the same kind of massacre the Confederate whites had inflicted on their Negroes?
'Damn ofays have it coming, though,' Cincinnatus muttered, there in the cab of his deuce-and-a-half.
Reluctantly, he shook his head. You couldn't play God like that, no matter how much you wanted to. Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party really and truly believed blacks had it coming, too. Nothing Cincinnatus had seen while stuck in Covington or while driving a truck through the wreckage of the CSA gave him any reason to think otherwise. Sincerity wasn't enough. What was? What could be?
'We got to stop killing each other. We got to,' Cincinnatus said. Then he started to laugh. That would have been a fine thought…if he'd had it somewhere else, when he wasn't hauling food to soldiers dedicated to putting the Confederate States of America out of business for good.
The roads here didn't seem to be mined, the way so many had been in Tennessee. Up there, the enemy had known which way U.S. truck convoys were going. Here, they didn't. Cincinnatus wasn't sure U.S. commanders knew where their forces were going from one day to the next. And if they didn't, how could the Confederates?
Every so often, snipers would take pot shots at the trucks from the woods. When they did, U.S. armored cars and halftracks lashed the pines with bullets. That took care of that…till the halftracks and armored cars drove on. Then, more often than not, the unharmed bushwhackers would climb out of their holes and start banging away at U.S. trucks again.
Cincinnatus watched the woods as closely as he watched the road, then. He kept a submachine gun on the seat beside him, where he could grab it in a hurry if he needed to. He didn't want to get shot, but he really didn't want to get captured. One of the bullets in the captured Confederate weapon might be for him if he had to use it that way.
He wondered how many movies he'd seen where the bad guy snarled, You'll never take me alive, flatfoot! He didn't think he was the bad guy in this particular melodrama, but the Confederate skulkers wouldn't feel the same way about him.
Everything went fine till the convoy got to Swainsboro, Georgia, not far from where the trucks would unload. The woods around Swainsboro were particularly thick. The town itself had a turpentine plant, a couple of planing mills, and a furniture factory to deal with the timber. In the cleared areas, farmers raised chickens and turkeys, hogs and goats. All in all, it was a typical enough backwoods Georgia town-or so Cincinnatus thought till a big bomb went off under a deuce-and-a-half a quarter of a mile in front of him. He was still in town; the other truck had just cleared Swainsboro.
The poor driver never knew what hit him. His truck went up in a fireball that would have been even bigger had he carried anything inflammable. Chunks of metal and asphalt rained down around Cincinnatus as he slammed on the brakes. Something clanged off a fender. Whatever it was, it sounded big enough to leave a dent. He was amazed his windshield didn't blow in and slash his face to ribbons.
No sooner had he stopped-just past the last buildings on the outskirts of town-than he grabbed for the submachine gun. He'd been through bombings before. Usually, the bomb was intended to stall the convoy so bushwhackers could hit it from the sides. His head swiveled. He didn't hear any gunfire, and wondered why not.
As the trucks ahead of him moved forward, he put his back in gear. An armored car went off the road to one side, a halftrack to the other. The light cannon and machine guns the armored vehicles carried were potent arguments against getting gay with the convoy. Cincinnatus hoped they were, anyhow.
He ground his teeth when he had to leave the paving and go off into the mud to the side. The truck's all- wheel drive kept him from bogging down, but getting stuck was the least of his worries. If those bastards had planted more explosives next to the road…He'd seen that before, too.
He'd just got back up onto the road-and breathed a sigh of relief because he'd made it-when an antibarrel rocket trailing fire streaked out of the woods and slammed into the armored car's side. Those rockets were made to pierce much thicker armor than that. The armored car burst into flames.
Cincinnatus fired into the trees again and again. Short bursts, he reminded himself. The muzzle wouldn't pull up and to the right if he didn't try to squeeze off too many rounds at a time. That fire trail pointed right back to where the man with the launcher had to be. If Cincinnatus could nail him…
He growled out a triumphant, 'Yeah!' when he did. A man in bloodied Confederate butternut staggered out from behind a loblolly pine and fell to his knees. Cincinnatus squeezed off another burst. The Confederate grabbed at his chest as he toppled. He lay there kicking. How many bullets did he have in him? Men often proved harder to kill than anyone who wasn't trying to do it would imagine.
This bastard, though, had surely killed everybody in the armored car. No hatches opened; no men got out. And the driver hadn't got out of the blasted truck, either. No way in hell he could have. So the Confederate had extracted a high price for his miserable, worthless life. If all his countrymen did the same…
But they couldn't. Cincinnatus had already seen as much. The enemy soldiers had the advantage of playing defense, of making U.S. forces come to them. But the United States also had an advantage. They could pick when and where to strike. And they could concentrate men and barrels where they thought concentrating them would do
