That’s when all hell broke loose. You could hear men in the fields cursing and giving out commands to fire, but none of them knew what they were firing at. A couple of the fighters had these night vision rigs with them, and everyone around them kept asking what they saw, but they didn’t see nothing either. Then there was another click-click-click, and everyone knew now to duck and cover their ears like we’d been taught, and then the ranch house to our left was gone.
I felt the blast like a punch in the gut. When I got the air back in my lungs I called out to my partner to see if he was all right, but he didn’t answer. It wasn’t till morning that I saw how he was killed. Those bombs they dropped on us had all these tiny darts in them, and his entire left side was torn to shreds. If it’d been me to his left instead of him to mine, he’d have lived and I’d have died. But it didn’t happen that way.
When they were done with the houses they bombed the fields. After a while I just lay facedown in the dirt and I said a prayer and I waited.
After the bombs stopped I heard the sound of helicopters overhead. There were still a few men who’d survived the shelling and now they were being mowed down from the air. By then everything sounded distant. I had this awful ringing in my ears. But I could feel the earth shaking all around me.
Then the helicopters flew low, and after a few passes some of them landed. I could feel the soldiers near me but I couldn’t see or hear them. They walked in lines up and down the fields. I lay as still as if I was dead. Once they came as close to me as I am to you right now. I don’t know if they took me for dead already or if they didn’t care or if they wanted me to live and tell, but they just kept walking. An hour later they were gone, but I didn’t move till the sun came up.
Q: What did you see in the morning?
A: I saw the dead in the fields, and the houses turned to dust.
Q: Did you see any federal troops, or the bodies of any federal troops?
A: It was like they were never there.
Q: Were you injured?
A: I didn’t feel a thing.
Q: What did you do then?
A: First I thought I’d go south back to Kilgore. I thought that’s where the others would have gone. I didn’t know then that there were no others. Then I thought better of it. I figured next thing the Blues would do is go into Kilgore and all the nearby towns and kill all the enemy that didn’t fight.
Q: There were fighters who deserted?
A: No.
Q: They just didn’t go in the first place?
A: No, they were never fighters in the first place, but they were the enemy to the Blues. More of an enemy than any of us who had guns.
I don’t expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened.
If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.
Now for most of people, just knowing wasn’t enough to make them take up arms—not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp. But damned if it didn’t make you want to do something.
So you gave alms to certain churches, knowing where that money would end up. Or when the Blues raided your town looking for those insurrectionists they were always talking about, even if you knew exactly where they was hiding, you kept your mouth shut and let the Marines tear your home apart until they got frustrated and left. And whenever news came of some—What do you call it up there? Incendiary homicide attack?—that left a few dead anywhere north of the Tennessee line, you didn’t say nothing, but inside you were pleased. You were pleased because they up there got a little taste of what it’s like for us down here. It didn’t even the score, not by a long shot, but it gave them a little taste.
That’s what you Northerners will never understand. The real insurrectionists never fired a single shot.
Q: Did you fight any other battles during the course of the war?
A: No. I hiked east two days, hitched a ride near Cross Lake and ended up back in my hometown in southern Alabama. Waited out the rest of the war there, and the plague that followed. By the time it was all done, most everyone I’d ever known was dead.
Q: Do you feel any lasting resentment, bitterness, or ill will toward the Union or the Northern states?
A: [Laughter].
II
July, 2081
Iuka, Mississippi
CHAPTER FIVE
The layout of Camp Patience resembled that of a circle drawn into quarters. The Mississippi slice occupied the northwest quadrant, Georgia the southwest, Alabama the northeast, and South Carolina the southeast. Refugees were assigned tents according to their native state. The Chestnuts, interlopers, had lived in the Mississippi quadrant since they first arrived, six years ago.
The camp’s four sectors met at a focus composed of administrative offices: the camp intake, the school, the chapel, the medical clinic, and the cafeteria hall. Outward from the buildings, a centrifugal flare of tents blanketed the land.
To the west, Camp Patience bordered the blistered remains of the Tishomingo County Game Refuge. To the north, beyond the highest, most daunting fences, lay Tennessee. On a clear winter’s day the occupants of the northernmost tents could make out the vague tree-camouflaged towers of the Blues in their forward operating bases, and at night hear the taunts and curses of the Union-aligned militias, stalking from the brush, hunting those who dared make a break for the North.
Some tried anyway, and were shot down. Others came and went, opting instead to take their chances in the city slums surrounding the Southern capital of Atlanta. The only exceptions were the refugees from South Carolina, who made something akin to a permanent life in Patience. South Carolinians had no hope of ever going home, because the South Carolina they knew was no more. Infected by Union agents with a stunting virus early on in the war, part of an effort to quell the fierce secessionist uprising in that state, it was now a walled hospice. The sick remained, imprisoned behind the quarantine wall, and the healthy could never go home again.
MARTINA’S NEIGHBOR Lara knocked on the door of the Chestnuts’ tent and stepped inside. She found Martina where she usually was, seated at a salvaged plastic patio table. The table anchored the makeshift office in which Martina spent most of her days typing letters of appeal and myriad requests on behalf of illiterate refugees.
“How did the interview go?” Martina asked.
“Same,” Lara replied. “You know those journalists from the Blue, they always ask the same questions. Insurrectionists this, secessionists that. Made a few bucks for the cantina, though. Can’t complain about that.”
“Come, sit a while,” Martina said. “Get some water in you, it’s burning up out there.”
Lara opened the small refrigerator by Martina’s desk and took from it two bottles of water. The water bottles arrived in boxfuls on the tenth of every month, a few days after the aid ships docked in Augusta. Their crumpled remains were the most ubiquitous form of litter in the camp.
“What is it this time?” Lara asked, taking a seat on a folding chair beside Martina and looking over her shoulder at the screen of an old, barely functional tablet.
“New girl in Alabama 36:12 wants to ask Atlanta to let her husband out of jail a year early,” Martina replied. “Says he was recruited to the Copperheads at gunpoint, never fired a weapon his whole life.”
“You trying to time it with Independence Day?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it going to work?”
“Of course not. But she offered a whole pack of Yuxis for it, I ain’t gonna say no.”
“That reminds me,” Lara said. “That girl Madison I told you about in the Georgia slice, turns out she changed her mind about getting you to write that appeal to Mr. Sharif.”
“She find some other way to get her boy’s cleft lip fixed?”
“Nah. She said she came around here looking for you the other day and saw that thing.” Lara pointed to the cracked statue of the Virgin that rested on a couple of water bottle boxes near the front of the tent.
“What about it?” Martina asked.
“Guess she don’t like Catholics.”
“You kidding?”