Drive to the East (54 page)

“He shoot himself, too?” Rodriguez asked with a certain horrid fascination.

“Nope.” The veteran guard shook his head. “Chick must’ve got sick of guns. He ran a hose from his auto exhaust into the passenger compartment and fired up the motor. Sure as hell wish we’d’ve had those trucks back then. You don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing when you load one of them.”

“The trucks, they came after this fellow kill himself?” Rodriguez said.

“That’s right.” The guard who was talking didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about that. Maybe there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. To Rodriguez, the timing seemed . . . interesting, anyhow.
Señor
Jeff was good at getting ideas from things that happened around him.

Rodriguez almost remarked on that. Then he thought better of it. He couldn’t prove a thing, after all—and he couldn’t unsay something once he’d said it. Better to keep his mouth shut.

And keeping his mouth shut proved a good idea, as it usually did. A few days later, an officer tapped him for special duty, saying, “The commandant tells me you won’t screw this up no matter what. Is that a fact?” He sent Rodriguez a fishy stare.

“I hope so, sir,” Rodriguez answered. He recognized that stare. He’d seen it before on white Confederates. They looked at him, saw a Mexican, and figured he wasn’t good for much. He asked, “What do I got to do?”

“Well, we’re going to test out one of those buildings,” the officer answered. “We’re going to pick about a hundred niggers and run ’em through it.”

“Oh, yes, sir. I do that. Don’t you worry,” Rodriguez said.

His confidence seemed to relieve the officer. “All right,” the man said. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the side of his leg. His right sleeve was pinned up short, as his right arm ended just below the shoulder—he too came out of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade. He went on, “This has to go good, mind you. We got bigwigs from Richmond comin’ out to watch the show.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Maybe it go good. Maybe it go wrong. I dunno. All I know is, it don’t go wrong on account of me.”

The other man considered that. He finally nodded. “Fair enough. Make sure all the ordinary guards you’re in charge of feel the same way.”

“
Sí, señor.
I do that,” Rodriguez promised.

Because they were trying things out for the first time—and because bigwigs from Richmond were watching—they used far more guards than they normally would have to deal with a hundred black men. They got the Negroes formed up in a ten-by-ten square. The inmates carried whatever small chattels they intended to take away to the new camp where they thought they were going.

That was part of the plan. As long as they thought they were going somewhere else, they would stay docile. They wouldn’t cause trouble unless they figured they were going on a one-way trip. The one-armed officer worked hard to keep them unsuspecting: “You men, we want y’all to be clean and tidy when we ship you out of Camp Determination. We’re going to get you that way before you leave. You’re gonna take baths. You’re gonna be deloused. No horseplay, or we will make your black asses sorry. Y’all got that?”

“Yes, suh,” the Negroes chorused. Black heads bobbed up and down. The Negroes didn’t think anything was wrong. They were dirty. Most if not all were lousy. They probably wanted to get clean, and they could see why the men who ran the camp would want them to be that way before they left. Oh, yes—everything made perfect sense to them. But it made a different kind of sense to the guards and their superiors.

“Come on, then,” the one-armed officer said. “Keep in formation, now, or you’ll catch it.” The Negroes had no trouble obeying. They often marched here and there through the camp in formation.

Guards opened the barbed-wire gate separating the main camp from that building. In the Negroes went. Two guards waited in an antechamber. One of them said, “Strip naked and stow your stuff here. Everybody remember who put what where. You get in a fight over what belongs to who, you’ll be sorry. You got that?” Again, the Negroes nodded.

So did Hipolito Rodriguez, watching as the black men shed their rags and set down their sorry bundles. This was a very nice touch. It convinced the prisoners they’d come back. The large contingent of guards was hardly necessary. A handful of men could have done the job. But Rodriguez understood why Jefferson Pinkard had assigned so many men to the prisoners. The more ready for trouble you were, the less likely you were to find it. And with visiting firemen watching, you couldn’t afford it.

A sign on the wall above an onward-pointing arrow said
DELOUSING AHEAD
. The Negroes who could read went that way without hesitation. Most of the others followed. “Move along, move along,” the guards said, and chivvied the rest of the men into the room at the end of the corridor.

It could hold a lot more than a hundred people—but this was, after all, only a test. Even here, the deception continued. A doorway was set into the far wall. A sign above it said
TO THE BATHS
.

At the officer’s nod, Rodriguez shut the door through which the Negroes had gone in. That door didn’t match the rest of the scene. It was thick and made of steel, and had rubber gasketing all around the edge to make an airtight seal. Rodriguez spun the wheel in the center of the door’s back, making sure it fit snugly against the frame and locking it in place.

Above the wheel, a small window with rounded corners let him look into the chamber he’d just sealed off. More rubber gasketing, inside and out, made sure what was inside that chamber would stay there.

Other windows were set into the chamber’s walls. They too were protected with rubber inside and out. Guards took their places at some of them. Higher-ranking camp officials and the delegation from Richmond already stood by the rest. They wanted to see how this building worked out.

Near the center of the chamber stood half a dozen steel columns, painted the same gray as the walls. The bottom two or three feet of them were not solid metal, but a grillwork too fine to poke a finger through. The naked Negroes in there milled about. Some of them went up to one column or another. A man rapped on a column with his knuckles. Rodriguez heard the dull clang.

He knew exactly when guards up above the ceiling poured the Cyclone into the columns. All the Negroes sprang away from them as if they’d become red-hot. Men started falling almost at once. Not all of them fell right away, though. Some ran for the doorway marked
TO THE BATHS
. They pounded on it, but—what a surprise!—it didn’t open.

And some ran back to the door through which they’d come. Desperate, dying fists battered against the steel. An agonized face looked out at Rodriguez, with only glass and the gasketing between them. Startled, he took a step away from the door. The Negro shouted something. Rodriguez couldn’t make out what he said. His words were drowned in the chorus of yells and screams that dinned inside the chamber.

As the insecticide took hold, the black man’s face slid down and away from the window. The frantic pounding on the door eased. One by one, the shouts and screams faded and stopped. Rodriguez looked in again. A few of the huddled bodies in the chamber still moved feebly, but only a few. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they all lay still.

A bell rang. Several heavy ceiling fans came on; he could feel their vibration through his feet. They sucked the poisoned air out of the chamber. After about ten more minutes, another bell chimed. Now the door marked
TO THE BATHS
opened—from the outside. Guards went in and carried corpses out to the waiting trucks.

Rodriguez nodded to himself. This would work. Those hundred black men hadn’t come close to filling the chamber. Of course, this was only a practice run. Now that they knew things really went about the way they’d expected, they could load in a lot more
mallates.
Load them in, take them out, load in the next batch . . . You could use ordinary trucks to haul away the bodies now, too, and you could pack them much tighter with dead men than you could with live ones. Yes, the scheme would definitely do what it was supposed to.

“Attention!” the one-armed officer called.

Automatically, Rodriguez stood stiff and straight. Here came Jefferson Pinkard with one of the men from Richmond: a burly fellow with a tough, square, jowly face. Rodriguez recognized him right way. It was the Attorney General, Don Fernando Koenig, the biggest man in the Freedom Party except for Jake Featherston himself! No wonder everything had to go just right today!

Pinkard and the Attorney General stopped. “Sir, this here’s my buddy, Hip Rodriguez,” the camp commandant said. “He helped give me the notion for this whole setup.”

“Well, good for him, and good for you, too, Pinkard. This is all first-rate work, and I’ll say so to the President.” Koenig stuck out his hand in Rodriguez’s direction. “Freedom!”

Dazedly, Rodriguez shook it. “Freedom,
señor
!”

Then Koenig clapped him on the back—man to man, not superior to inferior. “We’re going to have freedom from these damn niggers, aren’t we? And you’ve helped. You’ve helped a lot.”

“Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said. “Thank you, sir.”

Koenig and Pinkard went on their way. The rest of the guards stared at Rodriguez in awe.

J
ake Featherston had been in Pennsylvania before. During the Great War, the Army of Northern Virginia had pushed up almost to within shelling distance of Philadelphia. That
almost
counted for everything. If the de facto capital of the USA had fallen along with Washington, would the enemy have been able to go on with the fight? No way to know now, but a lot of people in the CSA doubted it. As things were, Jake had survived the grinding retreat through Pennsylvania and Maryland and back into Virginia. He’d survived defeat, and hoped for victory.

Now he was within shelling distance of Pittsburgh, in the western part of Pennsylvania. Confederate 105s boomed in their gun pits, sending shells south toward the Yankee defenders and the factories and steel mills they fought to hold. He wanted to take off his uniform shirt and serve one of those 105s himself. He’d done that before, too, over in Virginia.

His bodyguards were more nervous now than they had been then. “Sir, if we can shell the damnyankees from here, they can reach us here, too,” one of them said. “What do we do then?”

“Reckon we jump in a hole, just like the gunners.” Jake pointed to the foxholes a few feet away from each 105.

“Yes, but—” the bodyguard began.

“No, no buts,” Featherston said firmly. “Chances are I’m safer here than I am back in Richmond, and that’s the God’s truth.”

The guard looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. The man was young, brave, and good at what he did. He also had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam. Most of the time, the lack didn’t affect the way he did his job even a dime’s worth. Every once in a while . . . “Sir, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice couldn’t have been any stiffer if he’d starched and ironed it.

“Hell I don’t,” Jake said. “Difference is, here I know where the enemy’s at. I know what he can do, and I know what I can do about it.” He pointed to the foxholes again. “In Richmond, any goddamn son of a bitch could be kitted out with explosives. If he’s got the balls to blow himself up along with me, how you gonna stop him?”

All his bodyguards looked very unhappy. Featherston didn’t blame them. He was very unhappy about people bombs himself. A man willing—no, eager—to die so he could also kill made a very nasty foe. War and bodyguarding both assumed the enemy wanted to live just as much as you did. If he didn’t give a damn . . .

If he didn’t give a damn, then what would stop a rational soldier or assassin wouldn’t matter a hill of beans to him. That seemed more obvious to the President of the CSA than it did to his guards. They didn’t want to admit, even to themselves, that the rules had changed.

This one said, “Mr. President, there’s no evidence anyone in the CSA has thought of doing anything like that.”

Jake Featherston laughed in his face. “Evidence? First evidence’ll be when somebody damn well does blow himself up. It’s coming. Sure as shit, it’s coming. I wish like hell we could stop it, but I don’t see how. We can’t jam all the U.S. wireless stations—too many of ’em. And they can’t hardly talk about anything else. Fucking Mormons.” He shook his head in disgust.

“Good thing there aren’t hardly any of them in our country,” the bodyguard said, proving he’d missed the point.

If he were smarter, if he were able to think straighter, he probably wouldn’t want to be a bodyguard. You couldn’t get all hot and bothered because people weren’t the way you wanted them to be. Oh, you could, but a whole fat lot of good it would do you. Taking them as they were worked better.
Will this fellow see it if I spell it out in small, simple words?
Jake wondered.

The decision got made for him. He knew what that rumbling, rushing sound in the air was. “Incoming!” he shouted, and was proud his yell came only a split second after the first artilleryman’s.

He sprang for the foxholes, and was down in one before the first shells landed. The men who fought the 105s were just as fast, or even faster. Some of his bodyguards, though, remained above ground and upright when shells burst not far away. They didn’t know any better—they weren’t combat troops. Here, ignorance was expensive.

“Get in a hole, goddammit!” he yelled. Some of the artillerymen were shouting the same thing. And the bodyguards who hadn’t been hit did dive for cover, only a few seconds slower than they should have. But a barrage was a time when seconds mattered.

Till things let up, Jake couldn’t do anything. If he came out of his foxhole, he was asking to get torn up himself. He wasn’t afraid. He’d proved that beyond any possible doubt in the last war. But he knew too well the CSA needed him. That kept him where he was till the U.S. bombardment moved elsewhere.

That bombardment wasn’t anything that warned of an attack. It was just harassing fire, to make the Confederates keep their heads down and to wound a few men. During the Great War, Jake had fired plenty of shells with the same thing in mind.