'None who've come forward,' Franklin Roosevelt said. 'I'm sure there were some, but when a bomb like this goes off…' He didn't finish. Flora nodded anyhow. When a bomb like this went off, it took a whole neighborhood with it. Anyone who saw the truck-she supposed it was a truck-the bomb arrived in and wondered about it died in the blast.
'From now on, they'll be calling the police and the bomb squad any time anything bigger than a bicycle breaks down,' a Congressman said.
'That's already happened,' Roosevelt said. 'It's got cops all over the country jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, but I don't know what we can do about it. People are nervous. And I'm afraid they've got a right to be.'
'Anyone need to see anything else?' the Army officer behind him asked. When nobody said yes, the man started pushing Roosevelt back toward the bus.
The members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War went back, too. The bus took them east over the Schuylkill to Philadelphia General Hospital, the closest one to survive the blast. The Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, only a couple of blocks from ground zero, was now as one with Nineveh and Tyre: a tallish lump in the melted glass, no more.
'I think you people are a bunch of ghouls to rubberneck here,' a harried doctor said. 'And I think you were crazy or stupid or both at once to rubberneck over there. Don't you know that goddamn bomb left some kind of poison behind? We've had plenty of people who weren't too bad, and then their hair falls out and they start bleeding internally-and out their noses and eyeballs and fingernails and, uh, rectums, too-and they just up and die. You want that?'
'Nobody told us,' a Senator said faintly.
'Nu? Now I'm telling you,' the doctor said. 'And now I've got to do some work.'
Hearing that was plenty for Flora, but some of her colleagues wanted to see what the doctor was talking about. She went with them, and ended up wishing she hadn't. People with ordinary injuries were heartbreaking enough, and the bomb caused plenty of those. If a window shotgunned you with knifelike shards of glass, or if your house fell down on you and you had to lie in and under the ruins till somebody pulled you out, you weren't going to be in great shape.
But there were others, worse ones, who made her have a hard time sleeping that night, and for several nights afterwards. The people with what the nurses called uranium sickness, which had to be what the doctor described. And the burns…There were so many burns, and such horrible ones. How many hands with fingers fused together did she see, how many faces with melted noses, how many moaning sufferers with eyes boiled out of their heads?
She was glad to escape. She didn't have the stomach for such things. One of her colleagues said, 'Well, at least we've paid the Confederates back for this.'
By then, the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War were climbing into their bus. Flora pointed back to the hospital. 'I'm sure that makes the people in there very happy,' she said.
The Congressman gave her an odd look. 'I don't believe your heart's in this any more,' he said. 'You've been a rock since the start. Why not now?'
'Because now I've seen the difference between enough and too much,' Flora answered. 'And what these bombs do is too much.' She looked a challenge at him. 'Go ahead-tell me I'm wrong.' He didn't. He couldn't. She hadn't thought he would.
A bner Dowling had dreamt of seeing Richmond in his professional capacity ever since his West Point days. Those were long behind him now, but here he was, striding through the streets of the captured Confederate capital with not a care in the world…except for breaking his neck in the rubble, stepping on a mine, setting off a booby trap, or getting shot by one of the snipers who still haunted the ruins.
He turned to his adjutant. 'You know, it's a funny thing,' he said.
'What's that, sir?' Angelo Toricelli was sporting silver oak leaves instead of gold on his shoulders-the spoils of victory.
'We mashed this damn place flat, but next to what happened to Philadelphia and Newport News it's nothing but small change.'
'Oh.' The younger officer nodded. 'Well, we had to do it the hard way, not all at once. If they'd held out a little longer, though…'
'Wouldn't have broken my heart,' Dowling said. 'I know that sounds cold, but it's the Lord's truth. A superbomb's about the only thing that would have got these people's attention.'
As if to underscore the point, somebody with an automatic weapon opened up in the distance. Dowling started to dive for cover, then checked himself: none of the bullets came anywhere near. A shattered storefront nearby had FREEDOM! painted on it. That graffito and CSA were everywhere in Richmond. The locals didn't like the idea of living under the Stars and Stripes for the first time since 1861.
Something moved back behind the storefront. Dowling's hand dropped to the.45 on his belt. It wasn't much of a weapon against an automatic Tredegar, but it was what he had. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli's pistol leaped from its holster. 'Come out of there!' he barked.
The kid who did couldn't have been much above seven years old. He looked at the green-gray uniforms, then asked, 'You a couple of nigger-lovin' damnyankees?' Before Dowling or Toricelli could answer, the kid went on, 'Got any rations? I'm mighty hungry.'
'Why should we feed you if you call us names?' Dowling asked.
'What names?' The little boy didn't get it. He'd probably never heard U.S. soldiers called anything else. He rubbed his belly. 'Gimme some rations. Y'all got any deviled ham?'
'Here, kid.' Toricelli took a can out of a pouch on his belt and tossed it to the boy. 'Now you got some. Scoot.' The boy disappeared with his prize. Looking faintly embarrassed at himself, Toricelli turned to Dowling. 'Maybe he'll grow up civilized.'
'Yeah, maybe,' Dowling said, 'but don't hold your breath.'
High overhead, a swarm of bombers flew south like wintering birds. Below the James, the Confederates still fought as stubbornly as they could. If they wouldn't give up, what was there to do but keep pounding them till they didn't have any choice? Dowling wished he could see something, but he couldn't.
'Once we win, do we really want to try to run this place?' he asked, speaking more to God than to his adjutant.
But his adjutant was the one who answered: 'What choice have we got, sir?'
Dowling wished he knew what to say to that. If the USA beat the CSA, what happened next? As far as Dowling could see, the USA had two choices. The United States could leave an independent Confederacy, or they could reunite North America under the Stars and Stripes. An independent Confederacy was dangerous. What had just happened to Philadelphia told how dangerous it was.
But if Virginia returned to the USA…well, what then? If all these states that had been their own nation for eighty-odd years returned to the one from which they'd seceded, wouldn't they spend years trying to break away again? Wouldn't there be guerrillas in the mountains and the woods? Wouldn't there be people bombs in the cities? Wouldn't the locals send Freedom Party bastards to Congress, the way Kentucky and Houston had between the wars?
'Winning this goddamn war will be almost as bad as losing it would have been,' Dowling said in a voice not far from despair.
'That crossed my mind, too, sir,' his adjutant said. 'How many of these sons of bitches will we have to kill?'
'As many as it takes,' Dowling answered. 'If we don't kill any more than that just for the fun of it, our hands are…pretty clean, anyway.'
He had to look around to orient himself. The United States had knocked most of Richmond flat, while the Confederate defenders had flattened much of the rest. They'd fought hard. They never seemed to fight any other way. But there hadn't been enough of them to keep U.S. soldiers from breaking in.
Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Old Pete Longstreet. Woodrow Wilson. The famous Confederates of ages past had to be spinning in their graves-unless U.S. bombs had already evicted them. A pity Jake Featherston wasn't spinning in his. Well, the time for that was coming.
'You know, sir, in a way they're lucky here,' Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said.
