Jorge had been on the Dixie Princess. How exhausted did you have to be to lose yourself so completely while you were upright?
After that, the train passed into North Carolina. There was a sign by the tracks that said so. The license plates on the autos went from white with blue letters and numbers to orange with black. Other than that, he couldn't see any difference. If the Confederate States had a safe haven, he was rolling through it.
Somebody at the front of the car dished out ration tins from a crate. They weren't good, but they were better than nothing. Drinks were bottles of Dr. Hopper, warm and fizzy. Jorge belched enormously.
Virginia was another sign at the border, and motorcar license plates with yellow characters on a dark green background. It was also, before long, the cratered, shattered, bombed-out landscape Jorge had grown used to. He nodded to himself. He knew what he'd be doing here.
R and R. Armstrong Grimes had gone out of the line in hostile country before. Did the people in Utah hate U.S. soldiers even more than the people here in Georgia did? He wouldn't have been surprised. But the locals here had nastier weapons with which to make their lack of affection known.
That meant Camp Freedom-the name had to be chosen with malice aforethought-had maybe the most extensive perimeter Armstrong had ever seen. Foxholes and barbed-wire emplacements and machine-gun nests and entrenchments gobbled up the fields for a couple of miles around the camp on all sides.
'Shit on toast,' Squidface said as Armstrong's weary platoon made its way through the maze of outworks. 'What all's inside here, the fucking United States mint?'
'They don't have soldiers, the bad guys go and take the mint away,' Armstrong said.
'Well, yeah, Sarge, sure.' Squidface spoke in calm, reasonable tones. 'But they care about money, and they mostly don't care about us.'
Armstrong grunted. It wasn't as if the PFC were wrong. Soldiers got the shitty end of the stick every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. If the other side didn't screw you, the assholes in green-gray who stayed safe behind the line would. The only people he trusted these days were smelly, dirty men in ragged uniforms that said they actually did some fighting. They knew what was what, unlike the jerks who campaigned with typewriters and telephones.
He didn't love MPs, either, not even a little bit. One of the snowdrops-he wore a white helmet and faggy white gloves-pointed and said, 'Delousing station and showers are over that way. Where's your officer, anyway?'
'In the hospital.' Armstrong jabbed a thumb at his own chest. 'This is my outfit now.'
The MP sniffed. A platoon with a sergeant in command couldn't be anything much, his attitude said. Somebody from the back of the platoon said, 'Boy, Featherston's fuckers'd send him to Graves Registration in nothing flat.'
'Who said that, goddammit?' the MP shouted. 'I'll kick the crap out of you, whoever you are.'
'Don't worry, Sergeant. I'll deal with him,' Armstrong promised. All right, so the snowdrop wasn't yellow. But he didn't realize combat troops wouldn't fight fair. They'd ruin him or kill him, and then laugh about it. Getting away in a hurry was the best plan.
Back in the Great War, Armstrong's father said, delousing meant baking your clothes and bathing in scalding water full of nasty chemicals, none of which kept the lice down for long. The spray that a bored-looking corporal turned on the men now was nothing like that. But it had one advantage over the old procedure: it really worked.
There was nothing wrong with showering under scalding water. 'Wish I had a steel brush, to get all the dirt off,' Squidface said, snorting like a whale.
'Yeah, well, if you didn't have a goddamn pelt there, you could get clean easier,' Armstrong said. Squidface was one of the hairiest guys he'd ever seen-he had more hair on his back than a lot of guys did on their chest. 'If the Confederates ever kill you, they'll tan your hide for a rug.'
'Ahh, your mother,' Squidface said. Only somebody who'd saved Armstrong's bacon plenty of times could have got away with that. Squidface qualified. So did several other guys from the platoon.
After the shower, food. Along with canned rations, Armstrong had eaten a lot of fried and roasted chicken in the field-plenty of henhouses around, and you didn't need much more than a skillet or, in a pinch, a sharp stick to do the cooking. But this was fried chicken done right, not half raw and half burnt. The hash browns were crisp and just greasy enough, too. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a regular potato that didn't come out of a can. Yams and sweet potatoes were all right for baking, but they just didn't cut it when you sliced them up and put them in hot lard.
And apple pie! And vanilla ice cream on top! 'Goddamn!' Squidface said reverently. 'I think I just came in my pants.'
'I know what you mean.' The size of the bite Armstrong took would have made a boa constrictor jealous.
'I want a slice of cheese to put on my pie, not ice cream,' Herk said. The replacement was a veteran now, entitled to a veteran's gripes-and entitled to get razzed like a veteran, too.
'Herk wants to cut the cheese.' Squidface held his nose.
'You were the one who came in your pants,' Herk retorted. 'Me, I want a broad.'
Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn't officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own-which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you'd caught it.
Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. 'Shut up already,' Armstrong said after a while. 'You're making me lose my appetite.'
'You better show up for sick call in the mornin', Sarge,' Squidface said. 'Something's sure as shit wrong with you.'
The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. 'Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!' the announcer said importantly.
Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He'd seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn't ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn't, till the camera panned across what was left of Petrograd. The Russian town was leveled, all the way out to the horizon. When the camera got to something that stuck up from the devastation, it moved in for a closer look.
It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback-or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.
'This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd,' the announcer said. 'Now he demonstrates the power of our allies' scientific accomplishments.'
'Fuck our allies,' Squidface said. 'We don't get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser'll drop one on Philly next.'
That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: 'What do you want to bet Featherston's got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA.'
'Shit.' Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. 'You're right.'
As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn't touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.
'On our side of the Atlantic…' the newsreel announcer said. The screen showed the charred wreckage of gracious homes that had to date back to long before the War of Secession. It showed sunken ships in a bombed-out harbor district. It showed dirty, unshaven Confederate soldiers shambling off into captivity.
'We was there. We seen that,' Squidface said.
'Better believe it,' Armstrong agreed.
'On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Savannah cuts the Confederate States in half,' the announcer said proudly. 'This on the heels of the loss of Richmond…'
