“Yes.”
The man looked over the forms on the desk in front of him a while longer. His thin eyes were circled with the dark shadows of insufficient sleep.
“You’re not from the Free Southern State territories,” he said.
Martina did not respond. The man flipped through the intake form again.
“Do you have…any authorization documents from the FSS consulate…” the man started, then paused. “Did anyone give you papers? This is a camp for internally displaced persons of the Free Southern State, yes? You understand what I’m saying?”
“I got no papers,” Martina said.
The man set the intake forms down on the desk and scratched his scalp. He sighed and retrieved from another drawer a pink form. He began filling it, asking Martina questions without looking up.
“What is your date of birth?”
“March 21, 2036.”
“The boy’s name and date of birth?”
“Simon Chestnut. January 1, 2066.”
“The girls’…”
“Sara Chestnut, December 30, 2068. Dana Chestnut. Same.”
“Are they immunized?”
“What?”
“Do they have their shots? Measles, mumps rubella, you understand?”
“No.”
“Are they sick? Do they have any communicable diseases? Coughing, fever, anything like that?”
“No.”
The man shook his head and struck out several lines on the form. He read over the rest of the sheet and then scratched the bottom half of the page out entirely. He stamped the sheet with the Red Crescent seal and placed it together with the other intake forms in a folder.
“You came here on the bus with the Hazel Green refugees, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Then, for administrative purposes, that is where we will say you are from. If anyone asks you—and sometimes we have members of the media in these facilities—this is where you will say you are from. It’s very important, you understand?”
“Sure.”
The man called in his assistant, who led the Chestnuts out of the administrative building.
“We’re filled up in the Alabama slice right now, so you’re going to Mississippi. Row thirty-six, tent fourteen,” the assistant said. “Remember that—it’s your address now.”
In the purple light of dusk, the Chestnuts walked into the huge tent favela that would, until the night of the great massacre, serve as their city of refuge.
Excerpted from:
AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: VOLUME II, 2074–2080
Q: How many men were on your side?
A: About five hundred where I was, north of Kilgore. Maybe three times that number in the places between Longview and Gladewater, and up to East Mountain. There were fighters all over that side of Texas back then. This was right around the time the Southern State declared independence, and everybody was still excited for a fight.
Q: Can you describe some of the men in your regiment at Kilgore? Their background, where they came from.
A: There was no regiment, just a bunch of men with guns who didn’t know they were being led to slaughter. They were Texans, most of them. Or at least, they had ancestry in Texas, family from back when it was a real state. Some of them had experience as soldiers in the National Guard or the Blue military back before Southern independence. You could tell from the beginning they looked down on the rest of us. They had themselves real uniforms, fresh from Austin, and new guns same as the Blues had. The rest of us carried Type-95s from the boats, or old hunting rifles or even handguns and such. A couple of boys from Mississippi came lugging these old rusted broadswords, like it was King Arthur’s Court or something. Could barely lift them off the ground.
Q: What motivated the men from outside Texas to come to the oil fields?
A: The ones who came from the purple states—Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee—they were either broke or jobless or on the lam back home, so they were looking for three squares a day and any kind of soldier’s wages, or they were genuinely angry that their home states went along with Columbus and the fuel prohibition, so they were looking for a fight.
The ones from the Mag were for the most part members of the rebel groups—the Palmetto Guns, the New Zouaves, the Mississippi Sovereigns, and about a dozen smaller ones with maybe ten members each, maybe even less. Those ones, any chance they got, they’d talk your ear off about the righteousness of the Southern cause. I think some of them really believed they were doing the Lord’s work out there in East Texas.
Then you had the South Carolina men, and they were a different bag altogether. This was before Columbus put that whole state to sleep, but even then the Carolina fighters were the meanest sons of bitches on the front. I’ve been to that state in peacetime, and didn’t meet a single inhospitable soul. But from the first day of the war they didn’t talk to no one, didn’t smile or shake hands or none of that. You got the sense from being around them that no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, that they were still fighting all of them at once.
Then there were some men just sort of showed up—no affiliation, no nothing. Hell, I’d bet some of them were Blues by birth, never left New York state till the week before. I guess they just wanted some excitement, to see the fighting up close, to taste rebellion. Most of the Texans and the rebels hated that kind, called them tourists or spies. But once you got over that sort of thing, there was something comforting about having Northerners wanting to fight on your side. It made you feel your cause was just in an absolute kind of way.
Q: Can you describe what you saw when you first reached the front?
A: When we got to the place, it looked just like farmland you’d see anywhere else, but no crops were growing. They had us set up in and around five abandoned farmhouses. There was one, maybe two miles of space between each house, and that land was overgrown with this sharp brown grass. I don’t know what it was, but it itched like hell to walk through it, and no matter what you did to it it wouldn’t die. I saw a guy out there with a machete trying to clear a path from one of the houses to a shotgun shack not a hundred feet away. He slashed for the better part of an hour and didn’t make a dent in it. When he came back he looked like he’d gone swimming in a jellyfish pond.
Good thing about the grass, though, was it was high. You dropped to your knees in that brush and you became invisible. So the Texans stationed most of us in the fields. We wrapped old towels around our faces to keep from itching.
Q: Can you talk about the night of the attack?
A: In our part of the field they had us lined up every hundred feet or so, two men to a spot. My partner was a guy from Montgomery named…hell, I can’t remember anymore. The whole night we whispered back and forth—You see anything? No, you? Nothing.
At around three in the morning I heard something like a—like when you turn the numbers on those old combination locks that suitcases used to have. Just a click-click-click. It wasn’t too loud but it was out of place. I remember one of the old Texas army veterans once said nature doesn’t do straight lines or straight sounds. This was a straight sound. But before I had a chance to say anything, the ranch house down the way had been blown to bits. It was a bright orange burst and this sound like a metal balloon popping, and then there was nothing left but a lick of fire and a big cloud of black smoke.