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.