The Disunited States of America

Eleven

Justin wore a dead man's uniform. He ate from a dead man's ration cans, plus whatever else he could scrounge. The real soldiers called it liberating or foraging, depending on whether they smiled when they said it or not. A lot of it was just plain stealing. They didn't seem to care. Once Justin's belly started growling, neither did he.

The real soldiers . . . Justin grimaced. If he wasn't a real soldier himself by now, he never would be. He'd helped a wounded buddy. He'd shot somebody. He'd killed somebody. He might have killed other people, too, but he was sure of that one kid. He expected to have nightmares about it, maybe for the rest of his life. The only thing he'd missed was getting shot himself. Even if the Negro rebels had a better cause than the Commonwealth of Virginia, he couldn't make himself sorry about that.

"Smitty," the sergeant said.

"Yeah, Sarge?" said Justin's newfound friend—comrade, anyway.

"Take the new guy here and go on over to that sandbag revetment on the corner for first watch. Cal and Sam will relieve you in three hours."

"Right, Sarge," Smitty said, which was the kind of thing you said when a sergeant told you to do something. He nudged Justin. "C'mon, man. If they couldn't shoot us out in the open, they won't shoot us when we got sandbags in front of us, right?"

"I guess," Justin said. "I hope." Smitty laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. He'd proved himself, so Smitty must have thought he was. Oh, joy.

"Safer here than back there," Smitty said when they got to the revetment. He kicked a sandbag. "Bulletproof as anything."

He was bound to be right about that. The sandbags were two and three deep, and piled up to shoulder height—a little less on Justin, because he was tall. "Yeah, it'd take a rocket to punch through this stuff," he said, and then, "Have they got rockets?" He wondered if Beckie's uncle had smuggled in some along with the rifles she'd had her feet on.

"I reckon they do," Smitty answered, and then said something rude about Ohioans' personal habits. "But they've got a lot more small arms. We came up against everything from the stuff we carry down to .22s and shotguns. Must give them nightmares about keeping everybody in cartridges."

"Yeah." Justin hadn't worried about such things. If you had an empty gun, though, what could you do with it? Hit somebody over the head—that was about all. He looked west through the smoke. "Sun's finally going down. I don't think I've ever been through a longer day."

"Not over yet. Some of those people"—again, not the exact word Smitty used—"will be sneaking around at night. IR goggles are good, but they aren't as good as the real eyeball."

"Uh-huh." Justin hoped his voice didn't sound too hollow. He didn't know how to use his goggles. Adrian had been trained with them. Justin hadn't. I'll turn them on and hope for the best, he thought. That should be better than nothing, anyhow.

With all the smoke in the air, it got dark fast. Justin flipped down the goggles, then fumbled till he found a switch. Now he watched the world in shades of black and green. Night-vision goggles in the home timeline gave much better images. A fire a couple of hundred meters away seemed bright as the sun. Justin didn't know how to turn down the gain.

He wished Smitty would fall asleep. Then he could put on his own clothes and find the coin shop . . . find his mother.

Smitty seemed much too wide awake. What did they do to sentries who fell asleep at their posts here? Shoot them, the way they had in lots of places (including the U.S.A.) in the home timeline? Justin wouldn't have been surprised. One thing he'd already found out about war: both sides played for keeps.

When Justin yawned enormously, Smitty reached into a pocket and pulled out a little plastic bottle. "Want a pill? You won't worry about sleeping for the next two days."

"I'll be okay." Improvising, Justin went on, "I don't like to use 'em unless I really have to. I'm liable to run down just when I ought to keep going."

"Then you take another one." But Smitty didn't push it. "You've got a point, I guess. Take too many and they'll mess you up. Every once in a while, though, you gotta."

"Sure," Justin said, and then, "What was that?" Was it an imaginary noise, a noise that came from nerves stretched too tight? He wouldn't have been surprised. Still, better to think you heard a noise that wasn't really there than to miss one that was.

"Where?" Smitty's voice was the tiniest thread of whisper.

"Over that way," Justin whispered back, pointing in the general direction of the fire. "Can't see anything much."

To his surprise, Smitty slipped off his goggles. When he did, he started to laugh. "Those sneaky so-and-so's," he said. "They know we'll be using the IR gear, and the fire masks them. But when you just look that way ..."

Justin raised his goggles, too. The fire lit up three men crawling toward the revetment. They were almost close enough to chuck a grenade. That would have been no laughing matter. Smitty started shooting: neat bursts of three or four rounds, so his assault rifle's muzzle didn't climb too high. The advancing Negroes never had a chance. Justin fired a few rounds, too, not aiming at them, so he'd seem to be doing something. It hardly mattered—inside of a few seconds, the blacks were all dead or dying.

"Good thing you had your ears open," Smitty said. Killing people didn't bother him much. Yes, they would have blown him up if they got the chance. Even so ...

"Don't know how I can hear anything after all the gunfire." Justin's ears were ringing.

"Gun bunnies have it worse than we do," Smitty said. "Artilleryman's ear is no fun at all. It makes you deaf to people talking and lets you hear the stuff that doesn't matter half as much."

"Wonderful," Justin said, and Smitty nodded. Justin wished he had ear plugs. Maybe he did—he didn't know what all was in the pack or in the pouches on his belt. He couldn't very well start fumbling around to find out now. One thing did occur to him: "Why don't you leave your goggles on, and I'll take mine off? That way, one of us will be sure to spot any kind of trouble." And I won't have to mess with what I don't understand.

"Good thinking," Smitty said. "We'll do it."

Every time anything made any kind of noise, close or near, Justin flinched. Adrenaline rivered through him. "I don't need your little pills after all," he told Smitty. "Nothing like fear to wire you."

"Wire you?" Smitty frowned. Justin realized that wasn't slang in this alternate. After a second, though, Smitty got it. "Oh, I know what you mean. Yeah, being scared cranks me, too—you betcha." That made sense here and in the home timeline.

Nobody else came close to them while they were on watch. Justin supposed three corpses lying not far away discouraged visitors. He knew they would have discouraged him. After what seemed like forever, their reliefs came up. "Had company, did you?" one of the soldiers said, pointing to the bodies.

"Yeah. They got cute." Smitty explained the trick the Negroes had used. "Don't let 'em catch you the same way, or you'll be sorry." He also mentioned Justin's idea for having one soldier use goggles while the other went without. "He's pretty smart," he finished, and thumped Justin on the back. "Glad we brought him along."

"He got Eddie to cover when they shot him, too, didn't he?" one of the new men said. Eddie nodded. The other soldier turned to Justin. "You're good in my book, buddy."

"Thanks." How much that meant to Justin himself surprised him.

He and Smitty made it back to their company's encampment without any trouble. As he unrolled his sleeping bag, he thought about waking up in the middle of the night and sneaking away. He thought about it. ... Then he lay down. Sleep clubbed him over the head. Whatever happened after that, he didn't know a thing about it.

One of the amusement parks in Southern California had something called Mr. Frog's Crazy Ride. It was—loosely—based on a famous children's book. Beckie had always liked The Breeze in the Birches. All she could think now, though, was that the fabulous Mr. Frog was only a polliwog when it came to crazy rides. Getting from Elizabeth to Charleston beat the pants off anything at Mortimer's World.

Mr. Brooks started going by the route he'd used to come up to Elizabeth: over side roads west to the main highway south. That probably would have worked it he were able to get to the main highway. But he wasn't. A couple of kilometers west of Elizabeth, the road stopped being a road. There was an enormous crater that stretched all the way across it, and something—a bulldozer?—had piled the rubble into a neat barricade.

"Well. . . fudge," Mr. Brooks said. "I guess they didn't want anybody from Ohio coming down this road. They know how to get what they want, don't they?"

"Can you go around?" Gran asked. As far as Beckie knew, that was her second dumbest question of all time, right behind Did anything break? when the shell put a hole in Mr. Snodgrass' kitchen wall. That topped the list, but this one gave it a run for its money.

"If I had an armored personnel carrier, I might try it," Mr. Brooks answered with what Beckie thought was commendable calm. "In a Hupmobile that's seen better days—thanks, but no thanks."

"What will you do, then?" Gran asked.

"Go back and try the long way around. What else can I do?" Mr. Brooks said. Even going back wasn't easy. He did some fancy driving to turn around on the narrow road, then started east towards Elizabeth again. "I hope we don't get there at the same time as the Ohio troops do."

They beat the Ohioans, but not by much. Somebody yelled at them through a bullhorn. Somebody else fired a couple of shots at them. Beckie thought the shots were aimed their way, anyhow. Mr. Brooks took two corners on two wheels and got away. Beckie would have been more impressed than she was if she hadn't been scared to death, too.

"Are you trying to kill all of us?" Gran squawked.

"No, ma'am," Mr. Brooks answered, polite as a preacher. "I'm trying not to." The Hupmobile's brakes squealed as he jerked the car around another corner.

"Well, now I know why we wear seat belts," Beckie said. Gran hadn't wanted to put hers on. Mr. Brooks had been polite then, too: he'd politely told her she could walk in that case. He wasn't kidding. Even Gran, who was stubborner than most cats, could figure that out for herself. She had the belt on. So did Beckie, without argument.

As they sped east, away from Elizabeth, Mr. Brooks said, "I hope the Virginians didn't mine this stretch of road after they went down it."

Gran found another smart question to ask: "What happens if they did?"

"We blow up." Mr. Brooks sounded remarkably lighthearted about it. Would that make Gran stop asking questions? Beckie would have quit a lot sooner herself, but her grandmother never had known how to take a hint.

"Do you think we can get there without blowing up?" No, Gran had no clue that she might be irritating.

"Not a chance. I came this way on purpose, just so I could go sky-high," Mr. Brooks answered, deadpan. "And when you and Beckie wanted to come along, I really looked forward to blasting a couple of innocent bystanders, too."

Beckie giggled. She couldn't help herself. Gran was not amused. "Young man, are you playing games with me?" she demanded. Her tones suggested she would take Mr. Brooks to the woodshed if he dared do such a thing.

He stopped wasting time being polite: "Mrs. Bentley, get out of my hair and let me drive. I didn't want to bring you. You wanted to come. Now pipe down."

Gran opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Chances were nobody'd talked to her like that since Beckie's grandfather was alive. It didn't do him much good, not from what Beckie'd heard, but Mr. Brooks took Gran by surprise. The silence was chilly, but he didn't seem to care.

Then they came to a checkpoint. A soldier strode out from a sandbagged machine-gun nest and held up his right hand. "Where y'all think you're going?" he demanded. "There's not supposed to be any civilian traffic on the road."

"I know that, but we've got a medical emergency." Mr. Brooks pointed to Gran.

The soldier took a step back. He brought up his assault rifle. "If she's got the plague, you really can't take her anywhere."

"No, nothing to do with that. You can see for yourself— she'd look sicker if she did," Mr. Brooks said. He was right about that. Gran, as usual, looked healthy as an ox. She also looked surprised to hear she was sick. Usually, she complained about her health. It would be just like her to say she was fine now. To Beckie's relief, she didn't. Mr. Brooks went on, "She's been getting her therapy in Parkersburg. We can't go there now, so I have to take her down to Charleston for treatment. You don't want her to die, do you?"

By the look on the soldier's face, he couldn't have cared less. "Let me talk to my sergeant," he said at last. "You stay right there till I get back if you know what's good for you."

He walked back to the revetment. When he returned, he had an older man with him. "What the devil's going on here?" the noncom said.

Mr. Brooks went through his song and dance again. "She's a sweet old lady," he said—with a straight face, too, which proved he was a good actor. "I wouldn't do this if I didn't have to, believe me."

"Well. . ." The sergeant rubbed his chin. "All right. Go on. I hope your mother gets better."

"Uh, thanks." Mr. Brooks hadn't said anything about that. In his shoes, Beckie wouldn't have, either. But he rallied fast— maybe he could have been an actor. "Yeah, thanks. Twonk's Disease is treatable if you catch it in time." He drove away before the sergeant could change his mind.

"Twonk's Disease?" Beckie said.

He cast off his usual air of gloom to grin at her. "First name that popped into my mind."

"Is there such a thing as Twonk's Disease?"

"There is now. If you don't think so, ask that soldier."

Beckie thought it over. Mr. Brooks had something, no doubt about it. What people believed to be true often ended up as important as what really was true. "What would you have done if he told you to turn around?" she asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I could have taken out the whole checkpoint." He didn't sound as if he was kidding. He sounded more like someone weighing the odds. Beckie didn't know what kind of weapons he had. She hadn't known he had any, though she would have guessed he did.

"More to you than meets the eye, isn't there?" she said.

"Me?" He shook his head. "Nah. I'm about as ordinary as—"

"Somebody who talks about taking out a checkpoint full of soldiers," Beckie finished for him. Had he tried, she suspected he could have done it. He might look ordinary, but he wasn't. Come to think of it, neither was Justin. An interesting family. An unusual family, Beckie thought. She wondered what Justin's mother was like.

Mr. Brooks looked faintly embarrassed. Embarrassed at talking that way, or embarrassed at showing too much of himself? Beckie wasn't sure. "Talk is cheap," he said. "I got mad at that guy, and so . . ."

"Sure," Beckie said. Yeah, sure, she thought.

"You know," Gran said, "I saw a TV show about Twonk's Disease once. I think I should go to the doctor and get looked at, because I may have it."

Beckie didn't say anything. There didn't seem to be anything to say. Mr. Brooks just kept driving. If his eyes twinkled a little, if his cheeks and even his ears turned pink, then they did, that was all. If he was laughing inside, nobody could prove it. And that was bound to be just as well.

Things weren't as simple as Justin wished they were. They weren't as simple as he'd expected them to be. That seemed to be how growing up worked. Once you got into the middle of something, it usually turned out to be more complicated than you figured it would when you started.

With most things, that was annoying, but you dealt with it and went on. When you were pretending to be a soldier, complications were liable to get you killed.

Justin hadn't thought he would have to go on pretending very long. He hadn't thought he would have to go into combat, either. He had thought he would be able to slip away from the real soldiers as soon as he got into Charleston. He turned out to be wrong, wrong, and wrong, respectively.

Gunfire started up again well before sunup. He didn't hear it, not at first. Even if he was sleeping on the ground, he was sleeping hard. He didn't want to wake up even when Smitty shook him. "Come on, man—move," Smitty said. "You want to get shot?"

"Huh?" All Justin wanted to do was close his eyes again.

"Come on." Smitty shook him some more. Then a bullet cracked by overhead. That got Justin moving. It got him moving faster than Smitty was, in fact. His lifelong buddy of not quite twenty-four hours laughed at him. "There you go," Smitty said. "See? I knew you could do it."

"Thanks a lot," Justin said as he dove into a hole a shell had torn in the ground.

Smitty went on laughing, but not for long. "Hey, man," he said, "you better pile some of that dirt in front of you. You'd rather have a bullet or a fragment get stopped there. That way, it won't tear you up."

"Uh, yeah." Justin pulled an entrenching tool—halfway between a big trowel and a small shovel—off his belt and started work. He dug some more dirt out of the hole and piled that in front of him, too. The deeper he dug, the thicker the rampart got, the safer he felt. Maybe some of that safety lay only in his mind, but he'd take it any which way.

Would he have thought to dig in if Smitty didn't suggest it? He hoped so, but he wasn't sure. Soldiering seemed like any other job—it came with tricks of the trade. Smitty knew them.

He'd probably learned them in basic training, or whatever they called it here. Justin . . . didn't.

In an ordinary job, knowing the tricks let you work better, work faster. Maybe it kept you from getting hurt if you worked with machinery. Here, knowing what was what helped keep you alive. Justin had seen a lot of dead bodies since he got to Charleston. He could smell more that he couldn't see. It was another hot, sticky day, and corpses went bad in a hurry. The sickly-sweet stink made him want to puke.

He could smell himself, too, and the other soldiers. He'd been in this uniform for more than a day, and done plenty of sweating. How long before he could shower or change clothes? He had no idea. Nobody'd told him anything about stuff like that. People told you what to do. They didn't bother with why. You were supposed to know, or else not to care. That didn't strike Justin as the best way to do things, but nobody cared what he thought. Getting ignored by the people set over you also seemed to be part of soldiering.

An officer came forward with a white flag on a stick. He stood out in the open and waited to be noticed. Justin wouldn't have wanted that job for anything in the world. Little by little, though, the firing petered out.

Along with the flag of truce, the Virginia officer carried a bullhorn. He raised it to his mouth. "You people!" wasn't quite what he shouted. Hearing the hateful word he did use made Justin grit his teeth. It wasn't as bad a word in this alternate. He understood that. But understanding it didn't take the sick feeling out of his belly. And that word was no endearment here, either. The officer used it again: "You people! You want to listen to me or what?"

"We'll listen. Say your say," a Negro called from the rubble ahead. He didn't show himself.

The Virginia officer didn't seem to expect him to. "Okay," he boomed. "You better pay attention, on account of this is your last chance. You surrender now, you come out of your holes with your hands high, we'll let y'all live. You keep fighting, we won't answer for what happens after that. You're whupped. No matter what the fancy talkers from Ohio told you, you are whupped. Give up now and keep breathing. Otherwise ..." He paused ominously. Looking at his watch, he went on, "You've got fifteen minutes to make up your minds. You make us come and get you, that's all she wrote."

"You'll get your answer," the black man shouted back. "Hang on."

No rebels showed themselves. They had to scurry back and forth somewhere out of sight, deciding what to do. Was the officer even telling the truth? Would Virginia authorities spare the Negroes' lives? Probably, Justin judged. If they didn't, and other bands found out, it would make them fight to the death. But would you want to go on living with what the authorities were likely to do to you? Justin wasn't so sure about that.

"Time's up!" the officer blared. "What's it gonna be?"

"Reckon we'd sooner die on our feet than on our knees," the rebel answered. "You want us, come an' get us."

"Your funeral," the officer said. "And it will be. You asked for it."

He turned and walked away. Some self-propelled guns like the ones west of Elizabeth—maybe they were the same ones— rumbled into place. Instead of hurling their shells twenty kilometers, they blasted away at point-blank range, smashing the buildings in which the Negro rebels were hiding.

After they finished wrecking one block, they ground forward to start on the next. The foot soldiers went with them. They got rid of the men the bombardment didn't kill or maim. They also kept the rebels from harming the guns. Justin wondered why they needed to do that—the guns seemed plenty able to take care of themselves.

Then a Negro jumped up on top of one. Justin didn't see where he came from. He yanked open a hatch and threw a burning bottle of gasoline into the fighting compartment. Somebody shot him before he could leap down again. But horrible black smoke poured from the hatch. Shells started cooking off in there. So did machine-gun ammo, which went pop! pop! pop! happy as you please.

Nobody got out of the self-propelled gun. One Molotov cocktail—not that they called them that in this alternate— took out an expensive machine and several highly trained soldiers. One Molotov cocktail and one brave man, Justin reminded himself.

Even Smitty said, "That took guts." Then he swore at the Negro who did it. Was he angry because the man hurt his comrades? Or was he angry because the black showed himself to be a man? Justin didn't know and couldn't ask without giving himself away. He wondered if Smitty knew.

Another Negro with a Molotov cocktail got gunned down before he could come close enough to a serf-propelled gun to use it. The flaming gasoline set him on fire. He screamed for much too long before he died.

Justin was pretty sure he shot somebody else. The black man popped up from behind a bus bench, just like a target in a video game. Justin aimed and squeezed the trigger. The rebel went down, and didn't do anything else after that. It bothered Justin much less than shooting the first kid had. That it bothered him much less bothered him much more. He didn't want to get hardened to killing people.

He didn't want to do any of what he was doing. The people he was doing it with were no prizes, either. They didn't bother taking many prisoners. The rebels didn't try to surrender. They fought till they couldn't fight any more, and then, grimly, they died.

"They've risen up before. They've got squashed every time," he said to Smitty as they both crouched in a doorway. "They must have known they couldn't win this time, too. So why try?"

"Some folks are natural-born fools," Smitty answered. "And the Ohioans sent 'em guns and filled their heads with moonshine." He spat. "Look what it got 'em."

"Maybe if we'd treated them better beforehand, they wouldn't have wanted to rebel no matter what the Ohioans did," Justin said.

Smitty looked at him as if he were nuts. "Don't let an officer catch you talking that way," the real soldier warned. "You'll get in more trouble than you know what to do with." He wouldn't say any more than that. Plainly, though, Justin had disappointed him. You couldn't even talk about racial equality here. If you so much as opened your mouth, they thought you came from some other world.

And Justin did.

By the time evening came, there weren't many rebels left to kill. There wasn't much still standing in the part of Charleston they'd held, either. They make a desert and call it peace. Some Roman historian said that. It was just as true now as it had been back in the days of the Empire. The Romans had actually got peace—for a while—by winning their wars like that. Maybe the Virginians would, too ... for a while.

And will I ever find any? Justin wondered. The chances didn't look good.

No Virginia soldiers arrested Beckie and her grandmother and Mr. Brooks. No suspicious military doctor asked him about how to treat Twonk's Disease. All that made getting to Charleston a little easier, but not much. The real problem was the road itself. It kept disappearing, usually at spots where going around involved something interesting—falling off a cliff, for instance.

"Cruise missiles. Terrain-mapping technology." Mr. Brooks sounded as if he admired the fancy technology that was causing him endless delays. Maybe he did. It wouldn't have surprised Beckie. He seemed a man who admired competence wherever he found it, because he didn't think he'd find it very often.

As Mr. Brooks admired the Ohioans who'd wrecked the road, so he also admired the Virginian military engineers who repaired it and let him go forward again. Beckie also couldn't help admiring them. They were busy with hard, dangerous work. They had no guarantee more cruise missiles wouldn't fly in and wreck everything they were doing—and maybe blow them up, too. But they kept at it.

Gran admired nothing and nobody. She complained whenever the road was blocked. And she complained that the military engineers weren't fixing it fast enough. When Mr. Brooks drove over one of the newly repaired stretches, she complained it was bumpy. When it wasn't bumpy, and saying it was would only make her look silly, she complained he was driving too fast instead.

Mr. Brooks took it all in stride. At one point, when Gran was going even better than usual, he looked over at Beckie and said, "This is fun, isn't it?"

She started to laugh. She couldn't help herself. Then Gran complained she wasn't taking things seriously enough. She only laughed harder.

Whenever the military engineers did finish a stretch, they waved the civilian car through. After about the third time it happened, Mr. Brooks said, "Maybe it's just as well you two came along after all."

"What do you mean?" Beckie asked.

"They see a car with a guy in it, they're going to wonder what he's doing here. They see a car with a guy and his 'mother'"—Mr. Brooks made a face—"and his 'daughter' in it, they don't worry so much. Probably doesn't hurt that his 'daughter' is a pretty girl, either."

Beckie didn't think she was anything special. But he didn't sound as if he were praising her just to butter her up. And she'd seen the way the soldiers looked at her. Of course, how fussy were soldiers likely to be?

"Did Justin come this way?" Beckie asked, not least so she wouldn't have to think about things like that. "If he did, was the road smashed up for him, too?"

Mr. Brooks only shrugged. "Maybe this happened after he went through. Or maybe the convoy he's with is five miles ahead of us, waiting for the military engineers to fix another hole in the highway. But if he went to Charleston, he either went this way or the other way we couldn't get through, because there aren't any more."

"Oh." Beckie thought about that, then nodded. "What if he didn't go to Charleston?"

"In that case, we're up the well-known creek without a paddle," Mr. Brooks answered. "And so is he."

"Which creek?" It wasn't well-known to Gran. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm just being metaphorical, Mrs. Bentley," Mr. Brooks said.

"Well, cut it out and talk so a person can understand you."

He sighed. "If all writers did that, chances are it would improve ninety percent of them. But it would ruin the rest—and those are the ones we need most."

Gran only sniffed. After a few seconds, Beckie said, "You say interesting things."

"Who, me?" Mr. Brooks shrugged. "The only thing I want to say is, 'And they all lived happily ever after.' But I don't know if I'll be able to manage that. Looks like the sun's about to go down, and we aren't there yet."

"Well? Turn on your lights and keep going," Gran said.

"I would do that, Mrs. Bentley, but I'm not sure it's a good idea," Mr. Brooks said. "Missiles may home on our lights. Or the Virginians may shoot us because they think we're trying to make missiles home on us. Which would you rather?"

"What? I don't want either one! Are you crazy?" Gran sounded sure he was.

"He's trying to tell you he doesn't want to keep driving after dark, Gran," Beckie said, working hard not to laugh.

"See? I told you he should just talk sense." Nothing got through to Gran, even the things that should have.

They stopped for the night in a town called Clendenin, which was even smaller than Elizabeth. Once upon a time, it had been an oil town. Now the derricks stood silent and rusting. The town did have a motel. It looked shabbier than the one in Elizabeth, and was full of soldiers. Clendenin also had a gas station. The travelers used the restrooms there. They also bought snacks—no diner there.

Then they went out and slept in the car, or tried to. Beckie couldn't remember a more uncomfortable night. Gran had the back seat to herself. She soon started snoring. Even with her front seat reclined, Beckie couldn't doze off. She usually slept on her stomach. She leaned back and did her best to keep quiet—Mr. Brooks was breathing deeply and steadily, too.

She tried counting sheep. She tried counting boulders— plenty of them all around the road they'd been traveling. She felt herself getting sleepy . . . till a mosquito started buzzing. She was so tired, she could hardly see straight. But her eyes wouldn't stay closed no matter what.

And then gray predawn light streamed through the windshield, and she had no idea how it had got there. She looked around in surprise. Mr. Brooks nodded to her. "Your grandmother is still out," he whispered.

She sure was. She was snoring louder than ever. "I guess I did sleep," Beckie said. "I didn't think I could."

"You get tired enough, you can do almost anything." Mr. Brooks sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.

"How long have you been awake?" Beckie asked.

"A while now." He looked at what they'd bought the night before. "We've got some warm fizzes, and some chocolate Super-snax cakes, and some pork rinds. Sounds like a great breakfast, doesn't it?"

"Makes my mouth water," Beckie said solemnly. He laughed softly. She ate one of the cakes and drank a fizz. Then she hoped the fellow who ran the gas station would come back and open up, because she needed to make a pit stop.

He did, so she didn't have to go into the bushes behind the station. At least there were bushes to go back to. In Los Angeles, there wouldn't have been.

Gran crunched pork rinds as if she ate them for breakfast every morning. Beckie didn't want to think about what that meant. Had there been a time when Gran . . . ? Beckie shook her head. She didn't want to think about it.

She heard booms off in the distance. Before she came to Virginia, she would have thought they were thunder. Now she knew better—more knowledge she wished she didn't have. But she did, and so she said, "That's artillery."

"Sure is," Mr. Brooks agreed. "Sounds like it's coming from Charleston. They're blowing the place up to save it." That went right by Gran. The cynicism made Beckie wince.

"Will there be anywhere to stay?" Beckie asked.

"I expect there will," Mr. Brooks answered. "Charleston's a good-sized city. To wreck it all, you'd need a nuke or two great big armies fighting a no-holds-barred battle there—like, uh, Tsaritsyn in the War of the Three Emperors a hundred and fifty years ago. An uprising? An uprising's just a nuisance."

"Unless you get shot in it," Beckie said.

"There is that," he agreed. "You're just as dead if you get shot in an uprising as you are any other time. Shall we go find out how bad things are?" Neither Beckie nor Gran said no. He drove southwest toward Charleston.

He passed several military checkpoints coming into the city. Two things got him through: everybody in the car was white, and he had a genuine Virginia driver's license. Soldiers checked it with their laptops. It came up green every time.

"Oh, my," Beckie said when they got into Charleston.

"It wasn't like this when I left," Mr. Brooks said.

"I sure hope not," she told him.

"It's not this bad on the news," Gran said, looking around in disbelief. This was without a doubt a city that had been fought over, and fought over hard. Buildings were knocked flat. Bullet holes scarred wooden fences and walls. The stink of smoke filled the air and stung Beckie's eyes. Under it lay another, nastier stink: the stink of death.

"On the news, Gran, they don't want you to think it's bad," Beckie said, as gently as she could.

"But the news is supposed to show you what's what," Gran said.

Beckie wondered how Gran could have got to be an old lady while staying so innocent. Mr. Brooks said, "The news shows what the people in charge want you to think is what." No, he didn't come to town on a load of turnips.

He passed up a couple of motels and hotels that had taken battle damage, and a couple of more that hadn't. "What's wrong with this one?" Beckie asked when he drove past yet another.

"Didn't look good," he answered, and left it there. "Ah, here we go," he said a minute or so later, and pulled up at one across the street from a police station. "You ought to be safe here. I'll come back and check on you later today."

"Thank you very much," Beckie said.

"I want a room with a TV with better news," Gran said. When you got right down to it, that didn't sound like such a bad idea.