"Okay, guys—here's what's going on," the noncom said. Everybody leaned toward him. "Those miserable people are still making trouble in Charleston. We're going to help make sure they stop."
He didn't really say people. The word he used was one nobody in the U.S.A. in the home timeline could say without proving he was a disgusting racist. People in the home timeline cussed a lot more casually than they did here. But words that showed you were a racist or a religious bigot or a homo-phobe . . . Nobody in the home timeline, not even people who really were racists or fanatics or homophobes, used those words in public. The taboos were different, but they were still taboos.
That thought was interesting enough to make Justin stop paying attention to the sergeant for a few seconds. If he were a real soldier, he didn't suppose he would have done that. Then I can't do it now, he told himself.
"We're going down to Florida," the sergeant said. That confused Justin till he remembered it was the name of a street in Charleston. The Virginian went on, "Stinking people have a barricade there." Again, people wasn't the word he used. "We'll be part of the infantry force that flanks 'em out, and the guns with us'll help blow 'em to kingdom come. Any questions?"
Justin had about a million, but nobody else said anything, so he didn't see how he could. The real soldiers probably knew the answers to most of them. One of those real soldiers, a guy named Eddie, tapped Justin on the leg and said, "Stick close to Smitty and me. I know you're out of your unit and everything. We'll watch your back, and you watch ours. Deal?"
"Deal." Justin didn't know exactly what kind of deal it was, but he'd find out. Any kind of deal seemed better than getting ignored.
Was he supposed to be excited now or scared? The other guys in the truck just seemed to be doing a job. Were they hiding nerves? How could they help having them?
They got into Charleston a few minutes later. The town, as Justin remembered from his brief acquaintance with it, had a funny shape. It stretched for several miles along the northern bank of the Kanawha River, but it never got very far from the stream. It didn't seem as big as the Charleston of the home timeline. It probably wasn't. That Charleston was a state capital, and the center of all the bureaucracy that went with being one. This Charleston was just a back-country town.
And it was, right this minute, a back-country town in trouble. Automatic weapons sounded cheerful. Pop! Pop! Pop! That brisk crackle might have been firecrackers on the Fourth of July. It might have been, but it wasn't. The occasional boom of cannon fire had no counterpart in the civilian world.
Whump! Justin wondered what that was, but not for long. A hole appeared, as if by magic, in the canvas cover over his truck's rear compartment. No, two holes—one on each side, less than a meter above soldiers' heads. Those were—couldn't be anything but—bullet holes.
He wanted to yelp, but nobody else did, so he kept quiet, too. How much of courage was being afraid to embarrass yourself in front of your buddies? A lot, unless he missed his guess.
"Hope one of the bad guys fired that," Smitty said. Justin stared at him, wondering if he'd heard straight. Smitty went on, "You feel like such a jerk if you get hit by a round from your own side."
"Hurts just as much either way," somebody else said. The soldiers' helmeted heads bobbed up and down.
The sergeant had the earpiece in one ear again, and a finger jammed in the other to keep out background noise. "Listen up," he said when he heard whatever he needed to hear. "When we get out, we go right two blocks. Then we turn left and go down five or six blocks—something like that, depending on what things look like. Then we turn left again, and we come in behind the people's position. Got it?"
"Right, left, left," Eddie said. "We got it, Sarge."
"Okay. Don't foul it up, then," the noncom said, or words to that effect. The truck stopped—stopped short, so that Justin got heaved against the guy in front of him. "Out!" the sergeant screamed. "Out! Out! Out! Move! Move! Move!"
Justin jumped out. So did the other soldiers. They all started running as soon as their boots hit the asphalt. The crackle of gunfire was a lot closer now, and didn't sound nearly so cheerful. Those are real bullets, Justin thought as he pounded after Eddie and Smitty. If one of them hits me, it'll really mess me up.
The African Americans firing those bullets had a genuine grievance against Virginia. The state did treat them badly. Were Justin an African American from this Virginia himself, chances were he would have been shooting at the white men in camouflage uniforms himself. He understood the fury and desperation that sparked the uprising.
All of which meant zilch to him now. However good their reasons for picking up a gun might be, those African Americans were trying to maim him or kill him. He didn't want them to do that.
Some of the other Virginia soldiers fired back. Most of them squeezed off a few rounds from the hip as they ran. They couldn't have expected to hit anybody, except by luck. But if they made the rebels keep their heads down, the ammunition wouldn't go to waste.
"Aii!" A soldier toppled, clutching at his leg.
Two of his buddies grabbed him and dragged him into a sheltered doorway. He howled and cursed all the way there. He left a trail of blood all the way there, too. It shone in the sun, red as red could be.
Something cracked past Justin's face. Automatically, he ducked. Then he looked around. Would Eddie and Smitty and the other soldiers think he was a coward because he flinched? He didn't need long to figure out that they wouldn't. They were ducking, too.
He saw a muzzle flash up ahead. Somebody there is trying to kill me. It wasn't a thought, not really. He felt it in his bones as much as anything else. He flopped down behind a trash can and fired a few shots at... at what? He tried to think of it as shooting at the flash. That way, it seemed like a video game. If those flashes stopped, he wouldn't be in danger any more—from there, anyhow.
But part of him knew this was no game, and he wasn't shooting just at a flash. A man held that assault rifle, a living, breathing, sweating man. What was that living, breathing, sweating man thinking as bullets cracked past him? What would he think if bullets slammed into him?
Justin wondered if he really wanted to know. All he wanted was to stay alive. If that meant he had to kill somebody else . . . He wished he'd done more thinking about that before he decided to put on Adrian's uniform.
Much too late to worry about it now.
"Come on!" Smitty yelled. Justin couldn't stay behind the trash can forever, even if it would have been nice. He scrambled to his feet and ran on.
He wasn't more than a few blocks from Mr. Brooks' shop. That meant he wasn't more than a few blocks from Mom. If he could slip away . . . But he couldn't. He was caught in the middle of something much bigger than he was. People were watching him to make sure he stayed caught in it, too. What would they do if he tried to duck out? Arrest him if he was lucky, he supposed. Shoot him if he wasn't.
Down toward the river for a few blocks. Then turn left and swing in on the Negro rebels. It all sounded easy when the sergeant laid it out in the truck. But the sergeant went down with a worse leg wound than the first one Justin had seen.
Another soldier went down, too, shot through the face. The back of his head exploded, blown to red mist. He couldn't have known what hit him—he had to be dead before he finished crumpling to the pavement. That didn't make watching it any easier.