Maybe I could settle down with Beckie in California, he thought, and then laughed at himself. How many conclusions was he jumping to with that? Enough to set an Olympic record, probably.
If he talked about such records with her, she'd give him a funny look. They'd never revived the Olympics in this alternate.
"Why aren't there any Virginia soldiers here?" he asked.
"They're coming up Highway 77 from Charleston to Parkersburg—the highway we turned off of to get here," Mr. Brooks answered. "That's the easiest road they can come up— and almost the only road the Ohio soldiers can go down if they want to get anywhere worth having. Nobody cares about Elizabeth, not one bit."
"I guess not," Justin said. "If I weren't stuck here, I wouldn't care about Elizabeth, either."
"You're not the only one," Mr. Brooks said with more feeling than he usually showed about anything. "At least you've got a pretty girl to keep you company. Ted Snodgrass is a nice man— don't get me wrong. But he's not the most exciting company in the world. And he doesn't care about anything now with his wife sick—who can blame him?"
"There's always Beckie's grandmother," Justin said. Mr. Brooks didn't dignify that with an answer. Had he suggested it to Justin, Justin wouldn't have dignified it, either. Some people were just natural-born pains in the neck, and Beckie's grandmother fit the bill.
Something made itself heard over the hum of the air conditioner: a deep diesel growl and the rattle and clank of tracks. While Justin was still trying to figure out where it was coming from, Mr. Brooks said, "Unless we've been invaded by a herd of bulldozers, those are armored fighting vehicles."
"Armored . . . ?" That was a mouthful for Justin.
"Tanks," the older man translated. Before Justin could say, You're welcome, Mr. Brooks went on, "Armored personnel carriers. Mobile antiaircraft guns or missile launchers. Self-propelled artillery. Engineering vehicles. That kind of thing."
"Oh," Justin said in a hollow voice, and then, "Oh, boy. How'd they get here, anyway, if they didn't come up from Charleston?"
"Well, they could belong to Ohio," Mr. Brooks said, which was certainly true. "Or they could have come up Route 14 to get here. It's the long way around and not a good road, but they could have done it. They might think they can hit the Ohioans in a flanking attack."
"Flanking attacks. Armored fighting vehicles. All this stuff," Justin said. "How come you talk like a general?"
The mild-mannered, bald coin and stamp dealer looked at him over the tops of his glasses. "When I was just a little older than you are now, I did a hitch near Qom in the Second Iranian Intervention. When something can mean you keep breathing, it sticks with you."
"Oh," Justin said again, this time hardly above a whisper. For him, the Second Iranian Intervention was like the first one: something he had to remember for an AP test. The books said it hadn't worked out the way the U.S.A. and the European Union wished it would have. He tried to imagine Mr. Brooks in a camouflage uniform with a gas mask and an assault rifle. It wasn't easy.
Then the armored vehicles rumbled past the motel, and he was too busy staring at them to imagine much of anything. "They're Virginian, all right," Mr. Brooks said.
"How do you know?" Justin answered his own question: "Oh—because they're heading west, toward Parkersburg."
"Well, that, too," Mr. Brooks allowed. Justin must have made a questioning noise, because the older man—the veteran—explained, "They've all got Sic semper tyrannis painted on their sides, and that's Virginia's motto. Thus always to tyrants, you know."
"Right." To Justin, it was what John Wilkes Booth yelled after he shot Abraham Lincoln—one more bit of trivia from an AP class. But was Sic semper tyrannis Virginia's motto in the home timeline, too? Probably. Was that why Booth shouted it? Till this moment, Justin had never thought about why.
He could figure out which machines were the armored personnel carriers: the ones with soldiers sitting in them. Brilliant, Justin—brilliant, he thought sourly. As for the rest of the large, snorting, purposeful machines, he would have thought of all of them as tanks. And he would have been wrong. By Mr. Brooks' expression, he knew each one for what it was. As a—mobile antiaircraft gun?—clanked past, the coin and stamp dealer murmured, "That's a good design—as good as we've got, except maybe the radar."
"What makes it good?" Justin asked. "How can you tell?"
He found out. "It's got a strong engine, well-shaped armor, and hard-hitting guns," Mr. Brooks answered.
When Justin thought of well-shaped things, he thought of girls and maybe cars. "How can armor be well-shaped?"
"See how it's sloped?" Mr. Brooks seemed eager to explain. "If a shell or a missile hits it, it's liable to bounce off instead of going through. The guys inside appreciate that, believe me."
"I guess they would," Justin said. They're glad they aren't getting killed—that was what he meant.
The tail end of the column rumbled past. Mr. Brooks went on, "They'd better get under cover pretty darn quick, that's all I've got to say. Ohio's aerial recon is bound to have picked them up by now."
So many things Justin hadn't thought about. He wasn't sorry to be ignorant of them, either. The home timeline had stayed fairly peaceful the past hundred years, not least because so many countries could create so much havoc that most of them were afraid of starting trouble with their neighbors.
A few minutes later, artillery started booming, close enough to make windows rattle. After a pause, the guns started up again somewhere else. Mr. Brooks nodded approval. "Shoot and scoot," he murmured, like someone reciting a lesson he hadn't thought about for a long time.
The only trouble was, the lesson didn't mean anything to Justin. "Huh?" he said.
"Shoot and scoot," Mr. Brooks repeated, louder this time.
"They fire. The guys they're shooting at pick up the incoming rounds on radar and shoot back. You don't want to be there when the other fellow's shells come down. Trust me—you don't, even if you've got armor around you. So as soon as you fire, you scoot away and send off your next barrage from somewhere else."
Like any other game, this one had rules. Justin had never had to learn them. Mr. Brooks had never given any sign of knowing them. In civilian life, he could put them away because he didn't need them. But when he found himself in the middle of a war, he knew what was going on. Justin wouldn't have worried that he didn't—except that his ignorance might get him killed.
He heard high-pitched whines in the air. They swiftly got louder, and were followed by more window-rattling explosions. Mr. Brooks nodded to himself once more. "The Ohioans are plastering the place where the gun bunnies were. I'm pretty sure the guys from Virginia were gone before that stuff came down." He cocked his head to one side and nodded yet again. "Sounds that way. I don't hear any secondary explosions."
Justin knew what those were. He'd run into the term on the news. If something blowing up made something else blow up, that was a secondary explosion. "What happens if shells start coming down in town?" he asked.
"Get flat," Mr. Brooks answered. "If you can find a hole, jump in it. If you've got anything to dig a hole with, dig one. Keep your head down. Pray."
That all sounded practical, even the praying. Just the same, Justin almost wished he hadn't asked the question.