The Disunited States of America

Eight

The artillery fire was getting closer. Justin was sure it was louder than it had been the day before. Virginia didn't want to admit that Parkersburg was lost, but it seemed to be.

"What do we do when somebody else gets sick?" he asked Mr. Brooks. One of the things he most hoped was that the coin and stamp dealer would stay healthy. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in this little town on his own. For one thing, he would start going hungry unless his mother could transfer him some money—the credit cards belonged to Mr. Brooks. Justin was supposed to be nothing but a kid along for the ride. He wanted that supposition to stay true.

"Maybe they haul them down to Charleston," the older man answered. "Or maybe they decide the Ohioans are going to take Elizabeth, too, and so they're welcome to all the diseased people in it."

"That's—disgusting," Justin said. It also sounded a lot like the way governments thought, especially during wartime. Then something else occurred to him. "If we're occupied and Charleston isn't, how do we get back to the home timeline?" How do I get back to Mom? was part of what he was thinking. The way he said it, though, sounded much more grown-up.

"Good question," Mr. Brooks said. "If you don't have any other good questions, class is dismissed."

What did that mean? Justin saw only one thing it could mean: Mr. Brooks had no idea how they'd get back to Charleston, which meant getting back to a transposition chamber. Justin sent him a resentful look. What good were adults if they didn't have the answers when you really needed them?

Sometimes there weren't any good answers. Was this one of those? It better not be, Justin thought, not that he saw anything he could do about it. He didn't want to get stuck here the rest of his life. Oh, it wouldn't be horrible, not the way getting stuck in a low-tech alternate that had never heard of antibiotics or anesthesia would be. But it still seemed backward next to the home timeline. And he would be a foreigner wherever he went, a foreigner with a tremendous secret he could never tell.

Maybe I could settle down with Beckie in California, he thought, and then laughed at himself. How many conclusions was he jumping to with that? Enough to set an Olympic record, probably.

If he talked about such records with her, she'd give him a funny look. They'd never revived the Olympics in this alternate.

"Why aren't there any Virginia soldiers here?" he asked.

"They're coming up Highway 77 from Charleston to Parkersburg—the highway we turned off of to get here," Mr. Brooks answered. "That's the easiest road they can come up— and almost the only road the Ohio soldiers can go down if they want to get anywhere worth having. Nobody cares about Elizabeth, not one bit."

"I guess not," Justin said. "If I weren't stuck here, I wouldn't care about Elizabeth, either."

"You're not the only one," Mr. Brooks said with more feeling than he usually showed about anything. "At least you've got a pretty girl to keep you company. Ted Snodgrass is a nice man— don't get me wrong. But he's not the most exciting company in the world. And he doesn't care about anything now with his wife sick—who can blame him?"

"There's always Beckie's grandmother," Justin said. Mr. Brooks didn't dignify that with an answer. Had he suggested it to Justin, Justin wouldn't have dignified it, either. Some people were just natural-born pains in the neck, and Beckie's grandmother fit the bill.

Something made itself heard over the hum of the air conditioner: a deep diesel growl and the rattle and clank of tracks. While Justin was still trying to figure out where it was coming from, Mr. Brooks said, "Unless we've been invaded by a herd of bulldozers, those are armored fighting vehicles."

"Armored . . . ?" That was a mouthful for Justin.

"Tanks," the older man translated. Before Justin could say, You're welcome, Mr. Brooks went on, "Armored personnel carriers. Mobile antiaircraft guns or missile launchers. Self-propelled artillery. Engineering vehicles. That kind of thing."

"Oh," Justin said in a hollow voice, and then, "Oh, boy. How'd they get here, anyway, if they didn't come up from Charleston?"

"Well, they could belong to Ohio," Mr. Brooks said, which was certainly true. "Or they could have come up Route 14 to get here. It's the long way around and not a good road, but they could have done it. They might think they can hit the Ohioans in a flanking attack."

"Flanking attacks. Armored fighting vehicles. All this stuff," Justin said. "How come you talk like a general?"

The mild-mannered, bald coin and stamp dealer looked at him over the tops of his glasses. "When I was just a little older than you are now, I did a hitch near Qom in the Second Iranian Intervention. When something can mean you keep breathing, it sticks with you."

"Oh," Justin said again, this time hardly above a whisper. For him, the Second Iranian Intervention was like the first one: something he had to remember for an AP test. The books said it hadn't worked out the way the U.S.A. and the European Union wished it would have. He tried to imagine Mr. Brooks in a camouflage uniform with a gas mask and an assault rifle. It wasn't easy.

Then the armored vehicles rumbled past the motel, and he was too busy staring at them to imagine much of anything. "They're Virginian, all right," Mr. Brooks said.

"How do you know?" Justin answered his own question: "Oh—because they're heading west, toward Parkersburg."

"Well, that, too," Mr. Brooks allowed. Justin must have made a questioning noise, because the older man—the veteran—explained, "They've all got Sic semper tyrannis painted on their sides, and that's Virginia's motto. Thus always to tyrants, you know."

"Right." To Justin, it was what John Wilkes Booth yelled after he shot Abraham Lincoln—one more bit of trivia from an AP class. But was Sic semper tyrannis Virginia's motto in the home timeline, too? Probably. Was that why Booth shouted it? Till this moment, Justin had never thought about why.

He could figure out which machines were the armored personnel carriers: the ones with soldiers sitting in them. Brilliant, Justin—brilliant, he thought sourly. As for the rest of the large, snorting, purposeful machines, he would have thought of all of them as tanks. And he would have been wrong. By Mr. Brooks' expression, he knew each one for what it was. As a—mobile antiaircraft gun?—clanked past, the coin and stamp dealer murmured, "That's a good design—as good as we've got, except maybe the radar."

"What makes it good?" Justin asked. "How can you tell?"

He found out. "It's got a strong engine, well-shaped armor, and hard-hitting guns," Mr. Brooks answered.

When Justin thought of well-shaped things, he thought of girls and maybe cars. "How can armor be well-shaped?"

"See how it's sloped?" Mr. Brooks seemed eager to explain. "If a shell or a missile hits it, it's liable to bounce off instead of going through. The guys inside appreciate that, believe me."

"I guess they would," Justin said. They're glad they aren't getting killed—that was what he meant.

The tail end of the column rumbled past. Mr. Brooks went on, "They'd better get under cover pretty darn quick, that's all I've got to say. Ohio's aerial recon is bound to have picked them up by now."

So many things Justin hadn't thought about. He wasn't sorry to be ignorant of them, either. The home timeline had stayed fairly peaceful the past hundred years, not least because so many countries could create so much havoc that most of them were afraid of starting trouble with their neighbors.

A few minutes later, artillery started booming, close enough to make windows rattle. After a pause, the guns started up again somewhere else. Mr. Brooks nodded approval. "Shoot and scoot," he murmured, like someone reciting a lesson he hadn't thought about for a long time.

The only trouble was, the lesson didn't mean anything to Justin. "Huh?" he said.

"Shoot and scoot," Mr. Brooks repeated, louder this time.

"They fire. The guys they're shooting at pick up the incoming rounds on radar and shoot back. You don't want to be there when the other fellow's shells come down. Trust me—you don't, even if you've got armor around you. So as soon as you fire, you scoot away and send off your next barrage from somewhere else."

Like any other game, this one had rules. Justin had never had to learn them. Mr. Brooks had never given any sign of knowing them. In civilian life, he could put them away because he didn't need them. But when he found himself in the middle of a war, he knew what was going on. Justin wouldn't have worried that he didn't—except that his ignorance might get him killed.

He heard high-pitched whines in the air. They swiftly got louder, and were followed by more window-rattling explosions. Mr. Brooks nodded to himself once more. "The Ohioans are plastering the place where the gun bunnies were. I'm pretty sure the guys from Virginia were gone before that stuff came down." He cocked his head to one side and nodded yet again. "Sounds that way. I don't hear any secondary explosions."

Justin knew what those were. He'd run into the term on the news. If something blowing up made something else blow up, that was a secondary explosion. "What happens if shells start coming down in town?" he asked.

"Get flat," Mr. Brooks answered. "If you can find a hole, jump in it. If you've got anything to dig a hole with, dig one. Keep your head down. Pray."

That all sounded practical, even the praying. Just the same, Justin almost wished he hadn't asked the question.

On the TV screen, talking heads blathered about Virginia's brilliant counterattack. Beckie watched Mr. Snodgrass watching as much as she watched the TV herself. He looked much less happy than she'd thought he would. Then an announcer said, "Damage to Parkersburg is believed to be minimal," and she understood. He didn't care about Parkersburg for its own sake. He just didn't want the fighting to hurt Mrs. Snodgrass.

The phone rang. Mr. Snodgrass jumped. He took it off his belt. "Hello?" he said, and then he jumped again. "Oh, hello, Doctor! How is she?" The Ohioans were jamming cell-phone calls, but evidently not all of them. And then Mr. Snodgrass' shoulders slumped. He looked as if he'd been kicked in the face. "Thank you ... Thank you for letting me know, sir. You stay safe now, you hear?" He clicked off. He didn't really need to say what he said next, but he did anyway: "She's ... gone." He didn't sound as if he believed it.

"I'm so sorry," Beckie said.

"God will take care of her," Gran said. She got to her feet and pointed at Ted Snodgrass. "You stay there." She went into the kitchen with a more determined stride than Beckie could remember seeing from her.

Where would he go? Beckie wondered. He took off his glasses and pulled out a pocket handkerchief to wipe his streaming eyes. "What am I going to do without her?" he asked, which was a question without an answer. Then he said, "How can I even bury her? I'm on the wrong side of a stinking battle line." That was probably another question without a good answer—maybe without any answer at all.

"I'm sorry," Beckie repeated, feeling how useless words were. "She was a nice lady," she added, which was also true and also inadequate.

"She was . . . everything to me," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Now I've got nothing, and nothing left to live for."

"Here." Gran came back, carrying a glass half full of amber liquid. Ice cubes clinked inside. She thrust it at Mr. Snodgrass. "Drink this, Ted."

"What is it?" Beckie asked.

"A double," Gran answered briskly. Beckie's jaw dropped. Gran didn't usually approve of drinking. Her husband had drunk a lot when he was alive. (Beckie thought she would have drunk, too, if she were married to Gran.) But she went on, "Go on, Ted. It won't make you feel much better, but it'll put up a kind of a wall for a little while." She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.

And if she'd told Mr. Snodgrass to go up on the roof and flap his arms and crow like a rooster right then, chances were he would have done that, too. He finished the drink sooner than Beckie thought he could. She'd tasted whiskey before, and didn't like it. But when he got to the bottom of the glass, he said, "Thank you kindly, Myrtle. Most of the time, people who say they need a drink just want one. That one, I really needed."

"Drinks are for bad times more than they're for good ones, I think," Gran said.

"Wouldn't be surprised." Mr. Snodgrass blinked a couple of times. He still didn't look happy, or anything close to happy. But he didn't quite look as if he'd walked in front of a truck any more, either. He nodded to Gran. "I hope you stay well, you and Rebecca."

"And you," Beckie said before Gran could stick her foot in her mouth and spoil the moment. She didn't know Gran would do something like that, but it was the way to bet.

"Me?" Mr. Snodgrass shrugged. "Who cares about me at a time like this? I don't even care about me right now."

"Well, you should. You have to watch out for yourself," Beckie said.

"Nobody'll do it for you," Gran put in.

Sure as the devil, that was the wrong thing to say. Mr. Snod-grass clouded up. "Not now, anyway," he said.

Beckie gave her grandmother a look that Gran didn't even notice. Of course she doesn't, Beckie thought. She couldn't even come right out and say Gran was a jerk. Gran wouldn't listen. And even the truth got you a name for disrespecting your elders. You couldn't win.

More artillery boomed—off in the distance, yes, but not nearly far enough away. That was especially true because these were incoming rounds, not ones fired by the Virginians. Beckie could tell the difference now. There was one bit of knowledge she'd never imagined she would have. She wouldn't have been sorry to give it back, but life didn't work that way. Too bad.

Then she heard the rumble of diesel engines and the clatter of tracks. Route 14 was only about half a kilometer from the house, and the noise was easy to make out. "What's going on?" she said. "They just went through here a couple of days ago. Now it sounds like they're coming back."

"It does, doesn't it?" Mr. Snodgrass seemed eager to think about anything except what had just happened to him.

"Something will have gone wrong," Gran said. That was just about her favorite prophecy. And here it was much too likely to be true.

Watching the—the armored fighting vehicles, that was what Mr. Brooks called them—fall back through Elizabeth made Justin scratch his head. "Something's gone wrong," he said. "It must have."

"Pretty good bet," Mr. Brooks agreed. "But what? They weren't under what you'd call heavy pressure or anything. Why pull back?"

"Beats me," Justin said. "What do you want to do, ask them?"

To his amazement, the coin and stamp dealer headed for the door. "Why not? Maybe they'll tell us."

"Maybe they'll shoot us, you mean," Justin said. But he followed. He didn't want Mr. Brooks to think he was afraid, even if he was.

"Why should they?" the older man said as he walked outside. "We're just ordinary citizens of Virginia, going about our lawful business and trying to find out what our very own soldiers are doing. It's a free state, isn't it? Except for the sales tax, I mean."

"Funny," Justin said. "Funny."

Mr. Brooks ignored him. He waved to somebody standing up in the cupola of a tank—and yes, by now Justin recognized tanks and could tell them from the other armored behemoths that clanked through Elizabeth. "Where are you guys going?" Mr. Brooks yelled, pitching his voice to carry through the racket. "Y'all just got here." If he laid the accent on a little thicker than he might have, well, so what?

"We've got to pull back," the real Virginian said—sure enough, he didn't mind talking to a civilian.

"How come?" Mr. Brooks asked in a civilian-sounding way.

The soldier in the tank—they called them trackforts or mobile pillboxes in this alternate—cussed. He swears like a trooper, Justin thought. Then the fellow said, "Blacks went and rose up back in the cities. We've got to go and squash them before we can give those Ohio rats what they deserve."

Mr. Brooks swore, too, the way a real Virginian would have when he got news like that. Justin was very impressed. "What are we supposed to do here?" Mr. Brooks asked.

"Best you can till we get back," the tankman answered.

Justin and Mr. Brooks trotted down the street to keep up with him. "What's going on in Charleston?" Justin called. If Mr. Brooks could do it, he could, too. "My mother's down there," he added, in case the soldier thought he was a spy. It was even true.

"Don't know much. There's some shooting—I've heard that," the soldier said. "Like I told you, just hang on. We'll be back." He waved as the tank clattered away. The pavement on Route 14 was taking a devil of a beating.

"Well, we might have known they'd play that card," Mr. Brooks said.

Justin hardly paid any attention to him. "There's fighting in Charleston!" he exclaimed.

Mr. Brooks nodded. "I heard what he said." He set a hand on Justin's shoulder. "Your mom's a smart woman. She'll know how to stay out of trouble."

"Sure she will—if she has the chance," Justin said. "But what if she was out shopping somewhere or something when the shooting started? She wouldn't have a chance then." Seeing everything that could go wrong was much too easy.

"Even when bullets start flying, they miss most of the time," Mr. Brooks said. "If that weren't so, I'd've been holding a lily for a long time now." He looked past Justin, probably looking back into another timeline a long time before.

"Can we get back to Charleston?" Justin asked.

The older man returned to here and now in a hurry. "We can try," he said, and Justin brightened—till he went on, "if you don't mind getting arrested somewhere south of Palestine or along whatever other highway we use. They're serious about not letting people move around."

Justin pointed to the armored vehicles pulling out of Elizabeth. "What about them?"

"They're soldiers. Soldiers always break the rules," Mr. Brooks said with a shrug. "I know what the consul was thinking when he ordered them to move, though. Maybe they're not infected. E they are, maybe they'll go someplace where other people are infected, too. But whether they're infected or not, he needs them to fight the uprising. And so—they're moving."

"If they're infected, they won't keep fighting long," Justin said.

"Mm, maybe not," the coin and stamp dealer allowed. "But if they're that sick, chances are they'll infect the Negroes they're shooting at. Do you think the consul's heart would break if they did? I sure don't."

"You've got a nasty way of looking at things, don't you?" Justin said.

"Thank you," Mr. Brooks answered, which left him with no comeback at all.

Explosions blossomed with a terrible beauty, there on the TV screen. The rattle and bang of small-arms fire blasted from the speakers. Bodies lay in the street, some white, some black. A white man and woman supported a reeling teenage boy. Blood ran down his face. "Why?" he said as he staggered past the camera. A box in the corner of the screen said this was Charleston. But it might have been Richmond or Newport News or Alexandria or Roanoke. Uprisings crackled through the whole state— blacks murdering whites, whites savagely striking back.

Beckie watched with a special kind of horror. Every time somebody—who didn't matter—fired a burst from an automatic rifle, she flinched. Finally, she couldn't stand it any more. She put her hands up in front of her eyes. "Oh, my God!" she moaned. "Oh, my God!"

"See how bad it is?" Gran didn't mind when it was bad. If anything, she liked it that way—then everybody was complaining along with her. "Those people are getting what they deserve."

She hadn't talked about Negroes that way when she lived in California. Coming back to Virginia was bringing out all sorts of nasty things Beckie didn't know about and didn't want to know about.

But that wasn't why she couldn't bear to watch the TV right now. "Uncle Luke!" she said. By the way it came out, she couldn't have found anything nastier if she tried for a year.

"What about him?" Mr. Snodgrass asked. "He's the fellow who drove you here, isn't he?"

"My sister's husband," Gran said with a grimace that declared it wasn't her fault.

That would have been funny if the TV were showing something else. The way things were ... "He was running guns," Beckie said.

"What?" Mr. Snodgrass and Gran said at the same time. No, her grandmother hadn't believed her when she said it before. She might have known Gran wouldn't.

"He was," Beckie said. "He dropped us off here, and then he went on to wherever he went to deliver them."

"I never heard anything so ridiculous in all my born days," Gran said. "Lord knows I don't love Luke, but—"

"Why do you say that, Rebecca?" Mr. Snodgrass broke in.

"Because I was in the back seat, and there was this blanket so I couldn't put my feet all the way down on the floor," Beckie said. "And I moved it back to see why I couldn't, and I found all these rifles."

"Why didn't you say something then?" Gran asked, which had to be in the running for dumbest question of all time.

"What was she supposed to say?" Mr. Snodgrass asked. " 'Got any ammunition for these?'"

"I was just scared the customs people would find them when we crossed the bridge," Beckie said, remembering how scared she'd been and wishing she could forget it. "Wouldn't that have been great?"

A millimeter at a time, Gran got the idea that she wasn't crazy and she wasn't blowing smoke. She should have known that since they got out of Uncle Luke's Honda here in Elizabeth, but... As the realization sank in, her grandmother started to get angry. "Why, that low-down, no-good, trifling skunk!" she exclaimed. "I told my sister when she wanted to marry that man, I told her he was . . ."

She went on. Beckie stopped listening to her. Maybe she had told Great-Aunt Louise what a so-and-so Uncle Luke was. Or maybe she'd had a good time at the wedding and kept her mouth shut. That didn't seem like Gran, but it was possible. Either way, what difference did it make now? But Beckie knew the answer to that. Gran had to prove, to herself and to the world, that she was right all along.

"Maybe he wasn't sending the guns—selling the guns—to the Negroes," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Maybe they went. . . somewhere else, anyway." When you had to go that far to look for a bright side to things, weren't you better off leaving them dark? It looked that way to her.

On the television, meanwhile, planes dropped bombs on what was probably the Negro district in Roanoke. Virginia soldiers were herding prisoners—black men, most of them in jeans and undershirts—along a highway. "These fighters will receive the punishment they so richly deserve," the announcer said. He sounded happy about it.

One of the prisoners turned toward the camera and mouthed something. I'm innocent, I didn't do anything. Beckie was no great lip-reader, but she could figure that out. Figuring out whether to believe him was another story. There was a Negro rebellion here. Blacks were playing for keeps just as much as whites were. She would have bet anything that some of the men in that column, maybe most of them, were part of the uprising. She also would have bet not all of them were. The white soldiers would have grabbed anybody who looked as if he might be dangerous—if they left someone alone, he might get the chance to prove he was.

Mr. Snodgrass was watching, too. "What a mess," he said. "What a crazy mess." But he didn't seem to see that if white Virginians treated black Virginians better they might not have this kind of mess. He wasn't a bad man, but he just didn't see it—couldn't see it. Maybe that was the scariest thing of all.

Justin nodded to Beckie when she let him into the Snodgrasses' house. "How are you doing?" he asked.

"Not so good," she answered, her voice hardly above a whisper. "Mrs. Snodgrass died yesterday—a doctor in Parkers-burg managed to get a call through to let Mr. Snodgrass know."

"Oh. I'm sorry." Justin wasn't just sorry, though—he was jealous. "I still can't reach Charleston."

"Charleston?" Then Beckie remembered. "Your mother's down there. I hope she's okay."

"You ain't the only one!" Justin exclaimed. "Somehow or other, I've got to get down there and find out."

"How?" Beckie asked reasonably. "Those aren't just roadblocks between here and there. Those are roadblocks with soldiers. Can you go sneaking through the woods?"

Justin wanted to say yes. He told the truth instead: "No, I'm a city kid." He wanted to add some pungent comments to that. In the home timeline, he would have; people there took swearing for granted. They weren't so free-and-easy about it here.

"Well, then, do what's smart," Beckie said. "Sit tight. Maybe your mom will be able to get through to you if you can't get through to her."

"Maybe." Justin didn't believe it. He couldn't reach her with his cell phone. Mail was shut down. Telegrams here were as dead as they were in the home timeline. E-mail was wireless, again like home. That was great—convenient as anything— when the system was up. When it went down ... It was down now, in this part of Virginia, anyhow.

"What could you do there that you can't do here?" Beckie had to be able to tell he meant no even if he didn't say it.

"I could know she was all right. She could know I was all right, too." Schrb'dinger's mom, he thought. Schrodinger's kid. Just like the cat in the thought experiment, Justin and his mom weren't all right to each other till each one knew the other was all right... or wasn't. Uncertainty gnawed at him.

One thing he didn't say, or even think, was, / could go back to the home timeline. He couldn't. He knew too well he couldn't. There were too many genetically engineered viruses in the home timeline already. No transposition chamber would come to the room deep under Mr. Brooks' shop till somebody found a cure for this one. The quarantine methods the home timeline used were a lot more effective than roadblocks, with or without soldiers. Stuck. The word resounded in his mind. Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.

"She'll be the way she is. And you are all right—as long as you don't come down sick." Beckie knocked wood. Justin wondered how old that superstition was. Plenty old enough to be in both this alternate and the home timeline. Older than the breakpoint, then. Thinking about things like that hurt a lot less than thinking about the disease or the war or what a mess this assignment turned out to be.

"I'm not the only one to worry about. You're in as much danger as I am," Justin said.

"Everybody in Elizabeth's in danger," Beckie said, which was bound to be true. She laughed. "If I didn't come with Gran, I could be lying on the beach right now, you know?"

"Sorry about that," Justin said.

"You want a fizz?" she asked.

"Sure," Justin said. They walked into the kitchen together. Before she opened the refrigerator, he put his arm around her. She gave him a surprised look—but not too surprised. "Thanks for listening to me," he told her. "Thank for putting up with me, you know?"

"No problem," she said. "It works both ways, believe me." She squeezed him for a second. Then she slipped away. "Fizzes."

He drank his in a hurry. It wasn't just like anything in the home timeline, but it was sweet and cold. It even had caffeine in it. What more could you want? He wondered if he should try something more with Beckie. Something about the set of her mouth told him it wouldn't be a good idea right this minute.

Then her grandmother walked into the kitchen. "Oh," she said. "The boy." By the way she eyed him, he might have been something she'd just cleaned off the floor with a wet paper towel.

"Gran!" Beckie said.

"What?" her grandmother said. "It is him, isn't it?"

Oh, yeah, Justin thought. You stick in the knife and then you try to pretend you didn't mean anything by it. And if he got mad—if he told her where to go and how to get there or even if he showed he was annoyed any way at all—she won. She was a sweet old lady, and he was just a punk kid. The very best he could do in the game was break even, and the only way he could do that was to make believe he didn't notice a thing. Kids had had to do stuff like that since Urk the australopithecine broke an antelope bone over Urk, Junior's, head for making a monkey out of himself when he shouldn't have. Nope, you couldn't win.

Beckie's grandmother took a pear out of the fridge, looked at it, breathed all over it, and then put it back and got out another one. She went away, munching. You chew with your mouth open, too, Justin thought.

Once her grandmother was gone, Beckie sighed. "I'm sorry," she said. "She's like that."

"What can you do?" Justin said. "My aunt's a world-class dingbat. People choose their friends. Your family? You're stuck with your family."

"Stuck with." Beckie looked in the direction her grandmother had gone. "Boy, you can say that again. I feel like she's my ball and chain."

"Yeah, well. . ." Justin kind of shrugged. "It's not like you're going anywhere much, not the way things are."

"Tell me about it." Beckie cocked her head to one side, listening. "What's that? That rumble, I mean?"

"Sounds like more trackforts and stuff," Justin answered. "But that's crazy. They pulled out to fight the uprising, and now they're coming back? Why would they do that?" Suddenly he flashed on Mr. Brooks, and he knew just what the older man would say, right down to his tone of voice. "I bet the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing." He sounded cynical enough to alarm himself.

He made Beckie blink, too. But she said, "I bet you're right. Either that or"—she looked scared—"they're soldiers from Ohio instead."

She probably didn't care about Virginia or Ohio. She didn't want to get stuck in the middle of fighting, that was all. Since Justin felt the same way, he couldn't very well argue with her. Even so, he said, "I don't think they're Ohioans. The noise is coming from that way, not that way." He pointed first east, then west.

Beckie listened, then nodded. "It is, isn't it? That's a little better." No, she didn't care about either side. After a couple of seconds, she remembered he was supposed to. "I didn't mean—"

"Don't worry about it," he said. "To somebody from a rich state on the other side of the continent, this whole thing probably looks pretty silly."

"Nothing where you can die from a horrible disease or get blown to pieces looks silly when you're stuck in the middle of it." Beckie spoke with great conviction.

"You hit that nail right on the thumb," Justin said gravely.

Beckie started to nod, then gave him a peculiar look. "You come out with the weirdest stuff sometimes, you know?"

"Thanks," he said. This time, he knew exactly what kind of face she made at him. Before he could say anything more, he heard rising screeches in the air.

"What's that?" Beckie said again.

He didn't answer. He knocked her flat, and threw himself flat, too, even while she was squawking. He was dragging both of them toward the kitchen table—get under something, he told himself—when the first shells went off. Something slammed into the kitchen wall, and all at once the house started leaking air-conditioned air through a hole the size of his head.

"What was that?" Beckie's grandmother called. "Did anything break?"

Justin lost it. There with artillery raining down on Elizabeth, he started laughing like a loon. Half a second later, Beckie was doing the same thing. They clung to each other. Either they were both crazy or they were an island of sanity in a world gone mad. Part of it, probably, was simple fear of death. The rest was proof of just how far out of it Beckie's grandmother really was.

The shelling lasted only a few minutes. It sure seemed like forever while it was going on, though. When it finally stopped, Justin sat up—and banged his head on the underside of the kitchen table. The bombardment hadn't touched him. Banging his head hurt a lot—but only for a little while.

"Wow," he said in place of something stronger, "that was fun."

"Now that you mention it," Beckie said, "no." She wiggled out from under the table without trying to fracture her skull on it. Then she looked at the hole in the kitchen wall and slowly shook her head. When she muttered, "Wow," too, she seemed amazed. "If that hit one of us, or maybe both of us . . ."

"Yeah," Justin said. "I know."

That hole was about a meter—they would say three feet here—off the ground. Beckie looked at it some more. "Thanks for knocking me down," she said. "I didn't know what you were doing for a second, but—thanks. How did you know to do that?"

For that second, she likely thought he was attacking her. Well, he wasn't, not like that. "My uncle's a veteran," he answered. "He says you've got to get fiat if they start shelling. He says a hole in the ground is better, but we didn't have one handy."

"I was trying to dig a hole in the linoleum for a while there." Beckie looked at her hands. So did Justin. She'd broken a couple of fingernails. She wasn't kidding. Justin had wanted to dig a hole and pull it in after himself, too. "Thanks," Beckie said again. She kissed him half on the cheek, half on the mouth.

"It's okay." Justin put a hand on her shoulder. "I mean, it's not okay, but I was glad to do it. I mean—you know."

"I think so." Beckie laughed—shakily this time, not the wild laughter that had kept them both from screaming. "You're all right, Justin. Better than all right."

"Am I?" He was stuck in Elizabeth. He was stuck in this whole alternate. He was liable to get blasted to hamburger or murdered by a plague. All things considered ... He patted Beckie. "Could be worse, I guess."