In at the Death (50 page)

“Sense? No,” Potter answered. As the President glared at him, he added, “I understand what you mean, though. Let’s hope you’re wrong, that’s all.”

“Yeah. Let’s.” Jake’s voice stayed harsh. “You know what? You’re liable to be our ace in the hole. We do run into damnyankees, you can talk for us, make ’em think we’re on their side.”

“I hope I can, anyhow,” Potter said. He’d done it up in the USA. If he couldn’t do it again—they were up the well-known creek, that was all. “I hope I don’t have to. I hope there aren’t any Yankees within miles.”

“That’d be nice.” Featherston didn’t sound as if he believed it was likely. Since Potter didn’t, either, he would have let it rest there. But Featherston went on, “Best thing we can do is get into some town the Yankees didn’t bother garrisoning. We borrow a couple of motorcars from loyal people, we can head west…. Wish to hell I knew just where we were at.”

Potter did. They were in trouble, that was where. Jake Featherston yelled for the pilot and asked him. “Somewhere east of Atlanta—can’t tell you closer,” he replied. “I was going to fly south a little while longer, then swing west. That’s about as good as I can do right now. Beg your pardon, sir, but I’m fuckin’ surprised I’m in one piece.”

“You did good, son,” Jake said—he was never shy about patting small fry on the back. That was probably one of the things that had helped him rise and kept him on top. “Yeah, you did good. So where’s a town?”

“Let’s find a road,” Potter said. “Sooner or later, a road’s got to take us into a town.” He didn’t say what kind of town a road would take them into. They just had to trust to luck on that. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Featherston’s mournful comment followed it.

He found the road by the simple expedient of stepping down into it. He came closer to hurting himself then, than he had in the Alligator’s crash-landing. “Which way?” Ferdinand Koenig asked.
North or south, east or west?
was supposed to follow that question, but Potter had no idea which direction was which. Evidently, neither did anyone else.

But there was the moon, a thin waning crescent, so that had to be the east. Which meant the North Star should be about…there. And there it was, with the rest of the Little Dipper curling from it.

Jake Featherston worked it out at the same time as Potter did. “This way,” he said, pointing. “We’ll keep on heading south, see what the hell happens.” He’d most likely spent more time in the field than anybody else here. He would be able to figure out which way was which as soon as he set his mind to it.

Down the road they went, a ragged squad, some hale enough, others limping. Most of them had pistols; one officer carried an automatic Tredegar. If Yankee soldiers came on them, they wouldn’t last long. Potter understood that perfectly well. He wondered how many of the others did.

He also wondered how long they could keep going. Sooner or later, their minor injuries would catch up to them. And more than a few of them were, to put it politely, not men accustomed to taking much exercise. Ferd Koenig, in particular, resembled nothing so much as a suet pudding in a gray Freedom Party uniform.

Potter realized they should have changed into civilian clothes before they got on the Alligator. Too late to worry about that now. Too late to worry about lots of things now.
Would I be here if I’d managed to shoot Jake at the Olympics?
No, of course he wouldn’t; the President’s bodyguards would have gunned him down. But maybe the country wouldn’t have been in the mess it was in.

Or maybe it would have—how could you tell? The Vice President in those days hadn’t been an amiable nonentity like Don Partridge. Willy Knight of the Redemption League wanted to do a lot of the same things Jake Featherston did. The only reason he didn’t get a chance was that the Freedom Party grew bigger faster. A couple of years later, he came close to assassinating Jake himself.

And close counted in…? Horseshoes and hand grenades, was the soldiers’ joke. Knight disappeared off the face of the earth after that. Potter supposed he’d died in one camp or another. Or maybe he just got summarily killed and dumped in the James. Any which way, he was gone.

“Can we get away?” somebody asked.

“Believe it,” Jake Featherston said instantly. “If you believe it, you can do it. That’s what life’s all about. Believe it hard enough, work for it with everything you’ve got, and you’ll get it. Look at me.”

He was right—and he was wrong. He’d climbed from nowhere to the top of the heap in the CSA. He’d run the country for ten years. And now the Confederate States of America—
are getting it, all right
, Clarence Potter thought.
Nice to know I can still make stupid jokes at a time like this
.

Off in the distance, like the roar of faraway lions, he heard the rumble of truck motors. They neared far faster than lions would have, and they were likely to be far more dangerous. “Hit the dirt!” Potter sang out.

The Confederate dignitaries scrambled off to the side of the road and hid behind bushes and in ditches. It would have been funny if it weren’t so grim.
This
was what the Confederate States of America had come down to: a dozen or so frightened men hiding so the damnyankees wouldn’t catch them.

One after another, the heavy trucks pounded past. Exhaust stank in Potter’s nostrils. He got a glimpse of soldiers in green-gray in the rear compartments and heard a couple of windswept snatches of bad language in U.S. accents. Then, after a few seconds that were among the longest of his life, the last deuce-and-a-half was gone.

“God damn them, they’ll find Willard, and that’ll spill the shit in the soup,” Jake Featherston said. Potter wouldn’t have put it the same way, which didn’t mean he disagreed with the President. Jake went on, “We
got
to make it to a town quick, grab us some autos, and get the fuck out of here.” That also seemed like good advice.

“Let’s get moving,” the pilot said. He was younger than just about everybody else there—and also the man the Yankees were least likely to shoot out of hand if things went wrong.

Move they did. Fifteen minutes later, they all hid and flattened out as more trucks growled up the road. These machines had an ambulance with them, which likely meant the Yankees had indeed found the head of the C.S. General Staff. Would they rough Willard up? Would he keep quiet if they did?
Next episode of the serial
, Potter thought.

He began to pant. His feet started hurting—he was wearing dress shoes, not marching boots. The sky lightened in the east. “Where the hell’s that town?” somebody said, voice numb with fatigue. “Feels like we’ve been going down this goddamn road forever.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Potter said. He was definitely getting a blister on his left heel. If it worsened, he wouldn’t be able to keep up. The damnyankees would catch him—and, he suspected, that would be that in short order.

Featherston pointed. “Sign up ahead.” Half an hour earlier, they wouldn’t have seen it till they were right on top of it.

Potter, with his weak eyes, would have been one of the last men to be able to read it. Somebody called out the name of the town on the sign and said it was a mile and a half off, so he didn’t have to.

“Where the hell are we?” Ferd Koenig demanded—the name meant as little to him as it did to Potter.

“Smack in the middle of Georgia,” Jake answered confidently. Did he carry a map of the CSA in his mind detailed enough to include a nowhere of a place like this one? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised. Jake knew all kinds of strange things, and remembered almost everything he heard. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was, he’d come up with too many wrong answers from what he knew—or maybe, if you went and aimed the CSA at the USA, there weren’t any right ones.

C
assius yawned. He hadn’t been on patrol all that long, but the antiaircraft fire woke him up ahead of when he would have had to crawl out of the sack anyway. He wondered what the hell was going on. The Confederates hadn’t sent any airplanes over Madison for quite a while.

He yawned again and shook his head. For all he knew, somebody’d got a wild hair up his ass and started shooting at a Yankee airplane, or maybe at something imaginary. You never could tell with something like that.

“Anything goin’ on?” he asked Gracchus when he replaced the other Negro at the north end of town.

“More guns an’ tracers an’ shit than you can shake a stick at,” the older man replied.

“I knew
that
,” Cassius said. “Got me up early. See a real airplane, though?”

“Not me,” Gracchus said. “
Somethin’
funny goin’ on, though. They wouldn’t’ve sent out so many sojers in trucks if there wasn’t.”

“Soldiers?” Cassius echoed. Gracchus nodded. “Huh,” Cassius said. “Bet you’re right, then. They got somethin’, all right, or they think they do.”

“I know what I’s gonna get me.” Gracchus yawned till his jaw seemed ready to fall off. “Gonna get me some shut-eye, is what. You kin march around the nex’ few hours an’ earn your vittles. I’s gone.” He patted Cassius on the back and headed off toward the Negro guerrillas’—the Negro auxiliaries’, now—camp.

All mine
, Cassius thought, and then,
Hot damn
. By now, the whites in Madison were pretty well cowed. They hadn’t given any real trouble for several weeks.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind when he heard somebody’s voice in the distance, floating through the clear, quiet early morning air. He started to bark out a challenge—it was still before the Yankees’ curfew lifted. Then he looked north along the highway that led down from Athens. Damned if at least a dozen ofays weren’t heading his way.

The rosy light of dawn showed them well enough. Cassius didn’t think they could see him: he stood in the deep shadow of some roadside pines. He scurried behind one of them. Challenging that many men when he was by himself didn’t seem like a good idea. Maybe they were Yankees, in which case a challenge would be pointless. If they weren’t, they were trouble. That many Confederates wouldn’t be running around together at daybreak unless they were trouble.

He waited and watched as they got closer. He almost relaxed—they were in uniform, and who but U.S. soldiers would be in uniform around here? But then he saw that the uniforms were gray and butternut, not green-gray. He wanted to scratch his head, but he stood very still instead. Whoever these people were, he didn’t want them spotting him. One of them carried a better rifle than his, and almost all of them had holsters on their belts.

“Come on, goddammit,” a rangy, middle-aged man up near the front of the pack said loudly. “We’re almost there.”

That voice…Cassius knew it instantly. Anyone in the CSA would have. Anyone black in the CSA would have reacted as he did. The Tredegar leaped to his shoulder. He could almost fire over open sights—the range couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards. He’d never aimed so carefully in all his life. Take a breath. Let it out. Press the trigger—don’t squeeze.

“Get us some motorcars, and—” the rangy man went on as the rifle roared and bucked against Cassius’ shoulder. The bullet caught the fellow right in the middle of the chest. He got his left foot off the ground for one more step, but he never finished it. He crumpled and fell instead.

Cassius worked the bolt and fired again, as fast as he could. Jake Featherston jerked before his face hit the asphalt. While he was lying there, Cassius put another bullet into him. This one made red bits spurt from his head. Cassius chambered one more round. When you were shooting a snake, you didn’t know for sure what it took to kill him.

One of the men in butternut knelt by the President of the CSA. The just-risen sun shone from his spectacles and their steel frames. He leaned toward Jake Featherston. Cassius could easily have shot him, too, but waited instead to see what happened next. The bespectacled man started to feel for Featherston’s wrist, then shook his head, as if to say,
What’s the use?
When he rose, he seemed suddenly old.

The rest of the Confederates might have turned to wax melting in the sun, too. When Cassius saw they slumped and sagged, he began to believe Jake Featherston was dead—began to believe he’d killed him. Were the tears in his eyes joy or sorrow or both at once? Afterwards, he never knew.

“Y’all surrender!” he shouted blurrily, and fired another shot over the Confederates’ heads.

As if on cue, Gracchus ran up the road from Madison. Four or five white men in green-gray pounded after the Negro. One by one, the Confederates standing in the roadway raised their hands above their heads. The officer with the automatic Tredegar carefully set it on the tarmac before he lifted his.

Only then did Cassius step out from behind the tree. Gracchus skidded to a stop beside him. “Who is them ofay shitheads?” the guerrilla chief panted.

“Dunno. Big-ass ol’ Confederates, that’s all I kin tell you,” Cassius said. “But I just shot me Jake motherfucking Featherston. That’s him on the ground there, an’ he’s dead as shoe leather.”

“No,” Gracchus whispered. The U.S. soldiers heard Cassius, too. They stared north toward the knot of Confederates and the corpse in the road. Then they stared at Cassius.

“Kid, I’d give my left nut to do what you just done,” one of them said.

“My right nut,” said another.

“Do you know how famous you just got?” a third one added.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cassius said. “He killed my whole family, the son of a bitch. Shooting’s too good for him, but it’s all I could do. I heard his voice, and I knew who it was, and then—
bang!
”

Gracchus set a hand on his shoulder. “You got that, anyways. Rest of us, we don’t got nothin’. He done kilt all our famblies. But you kilt him? You really an’ truly did?” His voice was soft with wonder.

“I sure did.” Cassius sounded amazed, too, even to himself. “Now I want to see him dead.”

He walked forward, his rifle still at the ready in case any of the men ahead tried something. He had only one round left in the clip, but he wasn’t too worried about that, not with Gracchus and those U.S. soldiers to back him up.