turret swung toward the machine-gun nest. The main armament fired once. Sandbags and somebody's leg flew through the air. The machine gun fell silent.
That did the Confederates less good than it would have earlier in the war. Armstrong had a captured automatic rifle. Squidface had his own gun. Herk was banging away with a C.S. submachine gun. Plenty of other captured weapons and U.S.-issue Tommy guns gave the guys on Armstrong's side a lot more firepower than they would have had even a year earlier.
Mortar rounds started landing among the unhappy C.S. soldiers, too. Armstrong whooped. 'See how you like it, you bastards!' he shouted. 'It's better to give than to receive!' Then a U.S. barrel put an AP round through an assault gun's glacis plate. The assault gun slewed sideways, sending greasy black smoke high into the sky. He whooped again. That pillar of smoke marked four men's funeral pyres. They weren't his buddies, so he didn't care.
A moment later, the other assault gun hit a mine and stopped with a track blown off. That was the signal for every U.S. barrel in the neighborhood to open up on it. It didn't last long-what could have? Recognizing the minefield, the enemy barrel's crew also stopped. A couple of rounds hit it, but bounced off. Armstrong stopped whooping and swore. AP rounds could penetrate those monsters-he'd seen it happen. But it didn't happen all the time.
And the metal monster started picking off U.S. barrels, one after another. Its big gun could penetrate any U.S. machine's frontal armor with no trouble at all. Still swearing, Armstrong wished for a stovepipe rocket like the ones Jake Featherston's men carried. If any of those had been captured, they didn't seem to be in the neighborhood. Too bad.
How come the Confederates get all the good stuff first? he wondered. They did, damn them. They'd carried automatic weapons against Springfields. They had the screaming meemies and the stovepipe antibarrel rockets and the long-range jobs. They even used the superbomb first.
And a whole fat lot of good it did them, because there weren't quite enough of them anyway, not if they wanted to conquer a country that could put three times as many soldiers in the field. He supposed Featherston's fuckers got the fancy weapons because they really needed them. The USA muddled along with ordinary stuff, and eventually got the job done.
The local Confederate attack bogged down when the big, nasty barrel stopped going forward. The C.S. infantry knew they couldn't push their foes out of the way without armor support. They went to ground and dug in. Artillery and mortar rounds rained down on them. Dig as they would, their holes weren't so good as the ones they would have had in prepared defensive positions.
Two fighter-bombers zoomed in and ripple-fired rockets from underwing racks. One of those, or maybe more than one, hit the C.S. barrel. The rocket got through the armor where the AP rounds hadn't. The barrel started to burn. Somebody bailed out of the turret. Every U.S. soldier around fired at the barrelman, but Armstrong thought he made it to cover. Too bad, he thought.
Whistles blew. Somebody who sounded like an officer yelled, 'Let's push 'em back, boys! With their armor gone, they won't even slow us down.' Then he said the magic words: 'Follow me!'
If he was willing to put his ass on the line, he could get soldiers to go with him. 'Come on!' Armstrong called, scrambling out of his own scrape in the ground. 'Let's go get 'em! We can do it!'
And damned if they couldn't. Oh, some of the Confederates fought. There were always diehards who wouldn't quit till the last dog was hung. But there weren't very many, not this time around. Some of the men in butternut drew back toward their own start line. Others raised their hands as U.S. soldiers drew near.
'Don't shoot me! Sweet Jesus, buddy, I don't want to die!' an unshaven corporal called to Armstrong. Another Confederate soldier near him also held his hands high.
'Waddaya think?' Armstrong asked Squidface.
'We can take 'em down the road,' Squidface answered.
''Bout what I figured,' Armstrong agreed. He raised his voice: 'Herk! Take these guys down the road.'
'You sure, Sarge?' Herk asked.
'Yeah-go on. Go deal with 'em,' Armstrong said.
'Right.' Herk gestured with his captured weapon. 'Come on, you two.' The Confederate soldiers eagerly went with him. After he led them around behind some trees, the submachine gun stuttered out two short bursts. He came back. 'It's taken care of,' he said.
'Attaboy. C'mon. Let's go,' Armstrong told him. If you told one of your men to take somebody back, you really meant to make a prisoner of him. If you told your guy to take him down the road…Well, it was a hard old war. Sometimes you didn't have the manpower or the time to deal with POWs. And so-you didn't, that was all.
Somebody up in the middle of the fighting was on the horn to U.S. artillery. The USA didn't have screaming meemies, but battery after battery of 105s did a hell of a job. The barrage moved in front of the advancing soldiers, and fell with terrible power on the line from which the Confederates had jumped off. They couldn't hold that line, not with the men they had left after the counterattack failed. They would have done better not to try to hit back at the U.S. forces.
Sunset found Armstrong and his men several miles farther south than they had been at daybreak. He camped in an empty sharecropper village. He'd seen a lot of those here. This was supposed to be the Black Belt, the heart of Alabama Negro life. But the heart had been ripped out of the state.
Or so he thought, till a sentry said, 'Sarge, we got niggers comin' in-maybe half a dozen.'
'Fuck me,' Armstrong said. That didn't happen every day. 'Well, go on, Snake-bring 'em in. We can spare the rations for 'em.'
'Right,' Snake said-he had a rearing rattler tattooed on his left forearm. He came back a few minutes later with two skinny black men, an even skinnier woman, and three kids who were nothing but skin and bones…and, in the firelight, eyeballs and teeth.
The soldiers gave them food, which got their immediate undivided attention. After the Negroes had eaten enough to blunt the edge of their hunger, Armstrong asked, 'How'd you people stay alive?'
'We hid. We stole,' one of the men answered. His accent was so thick, Armstrong could hardly follow him.
'Now we is free again,' the woman said. 'Now we kin live again.'
'Long as they's sojers here. Long as they's Yankees here,' the second man said. 'Reckon the white folks here'd get rid of us pretty damn quick if they seen a chance.'
Armstrong reckoned the Negro was right. Not many white Confederates seemed unhappy about what had happened to the blacks who'd lived alongside them. The only thing the whites were unhappy about was losing the war.
'What is we gonna do?' the first man asked, as if a kid sergeant from Washington, D.C., had answers for him.
'Hang around with soldiers as much as you can. We won't screw you,' Armstrong said, although he knew some of the guys in the platoon liked Negroes no better than most Confederates did. And some of the guys would want to screw the woman. Yeah, she was skinny as a strand of spaghetti. Yeah, she was homely. Yeah, she might have VD. If she stayed around very long, somebody would make a pass at her. And trouble would follow, sure as night followed day.
They can hang around with soldiers, Armstrong decided, but they won't hang around with my platoon. I'll send 'em to the rear, let somebody else worry about 'em. He nodded to himself. That definitely sounded like a plan.
And when he put it to the Negroes, they didn't squawk a bit. 'Rear sounds mighty good,' the first man said. 'We done seen us enough fightin' to las' us fo' always.' All the other blacks solemnly nodded.
Come to that, Armstrong had seen enough fighting to last him for always, too. Maybe, he thought hopefully, I won't have to see much more.
T here was a poem about the way the world ended. Jorge Rodriguez hadn't had as much schooling as his folks wished he would have. When you grew up on a farm in Sonora, you didn't get a whole lot of schooling. But he remembered that poem-something about not with a bang but a whimper.
He knew why it came to mind now, too. He was thinking that the fellow who'd written that poem didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
Buckingham, Virginia, wasn't a whole lot more than a wide spot in the road. It didn't even have a gas station,
