In at the Death by Harry Turtledove Page A

it?” Cincinnatus said.
    “Well, there’s always fucking,” the other driver replied, which got a laugh.
    “Maybe
you
ain’t no good at that,” Cincinnatus said, which got a bigger one. “Me, though, I know what I’m doin’ there.”
    “That’s telling him,” Williamson said.
    Cincinnatus’ answering grin was crooked. Even his buddies seemed surprised when he held his own in banter or didn’t turn cowardly when he got shot at or generally acted like a man instead of the way they thought a nigger would act. It might have been funny if it weren’t so sad. These were U.S. citizens, men from a country where Negroes mostly had the same legal rights as anybody else, and they thought—or at least felt down deep somewhere—he ought to be a stupid buffoon.
    What about white people in the Confederate States? His mouth tightened, the grin disappearing altogether. He knew the answer to that, knew it much too well. They thought Negroes were so far below ordinary human beings that they got rid of them without a qualm. And what would the local in overalls say about that? He’d probably say the Confederacy’s Negroes had it coming.
    “Fuck him, too,” Cincinnatus muttered.
    “Who? Dolf there?” Williamson nodded toward the poker player who’d gone back and forth with Cincinnatus. “What’d he do to you?”
    “No, not Dolf. This peckerhead redneck I was talkin’ with in town,” Cincinnatus answered, not even noticing he was tarring the Confederate with the same kind of brush whites in the CSA used against blacks. “He reckoned I was uppity. If I was really uppity, I would’ve plugged the son of a bitch.”
    “Probably no great loss,” Williamson said. “We’re gonna have to kill a lot of these Confederate assholes to scare the rest into leaving us alone.” Again, Confederate whites might have talked about Negroes the same way.
    The next morning, soldiers loaded crates of 105mm shells into the back of Cincinnatus’ truck. The convoy of which he was a part rattled north to replenish the guns that had been firing at the Confederates the day before. The artillery position was only a few miles away. Even so, a halftrack and three armored cars came along with the trucks. No one inside Ellijay seemed eager to take on the assembled might of the U.S. Army, but things were different out in the countryside. It seethed with rebellion.
    Two bushwhackers fired from the undergrowth that grew too close to the side of the road before the convoy got halfway to where it was going. One bullet shattered a truck’s windshield. Another flattened a tire. The armored cars sprayed the bushes with machine-gun fire. Cincinnatus hadn’t seen any muzzle flashes. He would have bet the soldiers in the armored cars hadn’t, either.
    One of those cars stayed behind to help the truck driver with the flat change his tire—and to shield him from more bullets while he worked. Cincinnatus hoped the driver would be all right. He had to keep going himself. He wished a barrel with a flail were preceding the convoy. That way, it would probably blow up any land mines before they blew up people. As things were…
    As things were, they didn’t run into—or over—any. Cincinnatus figured the convoy was lucky. He also figured it had no guarantee of being lucky again on the way back. Who could guess what holdouts or stubborn civilians were doing while nobody in a green-gray uniform could see them?
    Gun bunnies unloaded the crates. “We’ll give ’em hell,” one of them promised. Cincinnatus nodded, but the artillerymen couldn’t do anything about the enemies likeliest to hurt him.
    He wished he could stay by the gun pits. Bushwhackers didn’t come around here. But then, as he was driving back towards Ellijay, he heard thunder behind him. A glance in the rear-view mirror told him the artillerymen were catching it. Wherever you went, whatever you did, the war would reach out and grab you and bite you.
    Snipers fired a few shots at the trucks