A group of locals from the nearby town had gathered around the twisted remains of the vehicles, gawking at the carnage. The remains were of three cars and a bus. The bus was charred although the shape of its body held, but the Tik-Toks had been cracked open like fortune cookies, and no longer resembled cars at all. A crater severed the road.
They drove to the nearest hospital. It was more of a clinic, no bigger than a diner, and had once been an animal hospital before the war. Relatives of the dead and injured crowded the entrance and the lobby. Alongside them were members of the United Rebels, who had been dispatched from Atlanta to document the carnage. Sarat shoved past them all, yelling her sister’s name, until Adam Bragg Jr. took her by the arm and led her to a room near the back of the clinic.
They passed a silent spectacle of the dead and dying. The bus had been carrying migrant Southern workers returning from the Blue border of South Carolina. They’d been hired as part of an agreement engineered quietly between Atlanta and Columbus to send workers to help fix cracks in the Northern quarantine wall. It was dangerous work for little pay, and no Union laborer would do it.
The men and women lay covered in stained white sheets, their relatives gathered around them. The nurses and doctors, greatly outnumbered, moved from patient to patient with grim resignation.
She found the room where her sister lay. Before she entered, she heard Bragg Jr. as he tried to tell her something—“It was just dumb luck,” he said. “They haven’t had control over those things in years.” But his voice sounded very far away.
She closed the door behind her, and the sounds of the pained and wailing were muted.
The girl on the bed ended at the knees. The sheet on which she lay and the one that partially covered her were colored a red that, in places, had darkened to black. The clothing had been sheared off her, and the skin below was blistered and burned.
Sarat stood over her sister. She ran her hand along the skin of Dana’s thigh. She felt the indentation in the skin where someone must have tried to stem the hemorrhaging wound. She saw the coal marking on her sister’s forehead—“3:49,” the time the tourniquet was tied.
She saw the chest rise and fall for the last time. She saw the eyes flicker, the lips move.
“It’s going to be all right,” said Sarat, but it was not Sarat making the words. They left her mouth but they belonged to an impostor. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay with me, it’s going to be all right.” The room smelled of rubbing alcohol.
Sarat dropped to her knees and rested her head on her sister’s chest. Dana’s fingers curled around hers.
“Beautiful girl,” Dana said. “I miss you already.”
FOR THE NEXT WEEK Sarat did not set foot inside her house, except to lock Dana’s bedroom door and prohibit Karina from ever coming anywhere near it.
She slept outside, sometimes in the woodshed but other times on the damp soil by the river, near the plot where Karina’s crops struggled to grow. At night she dreamed of drowning.
A month after she set her sister’s ashes free in the Savannah, the Blues finally came for Sarat. One night she heard music among the trees; a whisper of hands against bark, of feet against earth, very faintly in the distance. The night was quiet but enveloped in the quiet was a murmur. Years later, she would recall a pinprick of red light moving across the woodshed wall. Then the door creaked open. A canister tumbled into the woodshed, and the room erupted in sound and light.
Excerpted from:
THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—SUGARLOAF DETAINEE LETTERS (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)
Dear **** *****, I received your letter in February. ****** from the ************* ******** humanitarian team delivered it to me. As usual, ******* ***** read it first, so I don’t know if I got the whole thing. But I am grateful to ******, who has tried *** best to help me, and of course to you for writing.
I’m still in Camp Saturday. There are ** of us here, I think, but it’s hard to tell. We are still in isolation, and the ******* ******** ***** ********* us every ***** *****.
Since ***. ***** took over, things have gotten worse. He ******* ** ****, I think, but I’ve never seen his face. I think it was him who ordered them to take our books, our sleeping shades, our toothpaste packets, and everything else that reminded us we’re still human beings. I know he had to give his permission for them to ********* us after we started our protest.
It happens at all hours. Day, night, there’s no difference here. First they’ll come in and tell you to quit being difficult, to just eat.
When you refuse, they take you to another room. There ************************ **. ***************************. *************** *******. **************************. ************.
*************. ********************. ******************. *********. ************. ************************. **********************************************.
******************. ******. ***************************. **************************** ***********************. *************************************. ****************.
*************************. **************************. ******************************. *******************. *****************. *********. *************************** **************************************. ************. ******************************.
I heard ***. ***** believes one of us killed his father. But I’ve been here for years, long before any of that. I never even saw ****** *****, never heard of him before one of the *** ****** told us what happened.
Everything else is the same. The days go by. *********************, except for ****** ********, when we get to see the sun.
I know they’ve stopped telling people how many of us are still being ********. ************* ****************************************. They’ve been trying everything they can think of to make us quit. There’s a nurse here, and *** does everything in *** power to make *** ************ ******** ** ******* as possible. I don’t know why. I told *** it’s a violation of *** oath, but *** doesn’t care. I begged the guard, but he cares even less.
I heard there’s talk of peace back home. I hope for your benefit that it’s true, but I don’t think it matters much for us. We’ve been here too long. Whatever we were before this is all gone. People here speak to themselves. They see ghosts. I dream about you and *****, and about ******, and about home. I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours with love,
*****
CHAPTER TWELVE
They were brought to Sugarloaf in roaring airborne beasts, chained to the floors and chained to each other. Eye-masks and earmuffs severed them from their surroundings. Through their pores the captives took in what little information there was to be had about the thing that carried them—a vast metal cavity, scorching hot as it sat for hours on the tarmac of some clandestine airfield and, soon after the plane ascended, bitterly cold. When the mouths opened to beg for water or relief from the chains, the skin felt other things—the hardness of a rifle butt, the steel-backed tip of a boot. The mouths closed. The bodies flew, dumb as idols, over the Florida Sea.
Only the very crest of the hill remained above water, the last vestige of the peninsular state. Upon it was built an artificial island of stone and concrete, rounded and circled with high razor-wire fencing. A jut of unused land, about fifty feet in length, extended beyond the fence to the shore. Here, but for a strip cleared to build a dock, the grass ran wild and the ground was thick with weeds.
The grass camouflaged the island. When the storm clouds cleared and the residents of the southern Georgia coast were able to look far into the Florida Sea, they sometimes mistook Sugarloaf for a trick of the eye—a tropical sea-dwelling mirage.