Short Stories (4 page)
Sergei said, I haven't smoked any hashish lately, and even if I had, it couldn't make me see that. Bozhemoi! Vladimir sounded like was a man shaken to the core. Not even chars would make me see that. Sergei wasn't so sure he was right. The local narcotic, a lethal blend of opium and, some said, horse manure, might make a man see almost anything. But Sergei had never had the nerve to try the stuff, and he saw the scarlet dragon anyhow. He was horribly afraid it would see him, too. Sergeant Krikor rattled off something in Armenian. He made the sign of the cross, something Sergei had never seen him do before. Then he seemed to remember his Russian: The people in this land have been fighting against us all along. Now the land itself is rising up. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Vladimir demanded. Just then, the dragon flamed the last bumblebee out of the sky, which made a better answer than any Krikor could have given. The dragon looked around, as if wondering what to do next. That was when the Katyusha crews launched their next salvos straight at the beast. Sergei had never known them to reload their launchers so fast. That didn't fill him with delight. Noooo! he screamed, a long wail of despair. You fools! Krikor cried. Vladimir remained foulmouthed to the end: Fucking shitheaded idiots! How the fuck you going to shoot down something the size of a mountain? Katyushas weren't made for antiaircraft fire. But, against a target that size, most of them struck home. And they must have hurt, too, for the dragon roared in pain and fury, where it had all but ignored the helicopter gunships' weapons. But hurting it and killing it were very different things. With a scream that rounded inside Sergei's mind as much as in his ears; the dragon flew down toward the Ural trucks. It breathed flame again, once, twice, three times, and the trucks were twisted, molten metal. A couple of the men who'd launched the Katyushas had time to scream. Somebody from the trench near Sergei squeezed off a banana clip at the dragon. If that wasn't idiocy, he didn't know what was. Noooo! he cried again. If Katyushas couldn't kill it, what would Kalashnikov rounds do? Nothing. Less than nothing. No. More than nothing. Much more than nothing. The Kalashnikov rounds made the beast notice the Red Army men in the trench. Its head swung their way. Its great, blazing eyes met Sergei's, just for a moment. Its mouth, greater still, opened wide. Sergei jerked his assault rifle up to his shoulder and fired off all the ammunition he had left in the clip. It wasn't that he thought it would do any good. But how, at that point, could it possibly hurt? Fire, redder and hotter than the sun. Blackness.
Truly, Satar said to his father, there is no God but God. Truly, the older man agreed. His left foot, his left leg halfway up to the knee, were gone, but the wound was healing. The Russian medic now among the dead had done an honest job with it. Maybe Satar's father could get an artificial foot one day. Till then, he would be able to get around, after a fashion, on crutches. Satar said, After the dragon destroyed the Shuravi at the edge of the village, I thought it would wreck Bulola, too. So did I, his father said. But it knew who the pious and Godfearing were, or at least He chuckled wryly. who had the sense not to shoot at it. Well . . . yes. Satar wished his father hadn't said anything so secular. He would have to pray to bring him closer to God. He looked around, thinking on what they had won. Bulola is ours again. This whole valley is ours again. The Russians will never dare come back here. I should hope not! his father said. After all, the dragon might wake up again. He and Satar both looked to the mountainside. That streak of reddish rock . . . That was where the dragon had come from, and where it had returned. If Satar let his eyes drift ever so slightly out of focus, he could, or thought he could, discern the great beast's outline. Would it rouse once more? If it is the will of God, he thought, and turned his mind to other things.
The dragon slept. For a while, till its slumber deepened, it had new dreams.
The black tulip roared out of Kabul airport, firing flares as it went to confuse any antiaircraft missiles the dukhi might launch. Major Chorny whose very name meant black took a flask of vodka from his hip and swigged. He hated Code 200 missions, and hated them worst when they were like this. In the black tulip's cargo bay lay a zinc coffin. It was bound for Tambov, maybe three hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. It had no windows. It was welded shut. Major Chorny would have to stay with it every moment till it went into the ground, to make sure Sergei's grieving kin didn't try to open it. For it held not the young man's mortal remains but seventy-five kilos of sand, packed tight in plastic bags to keep it from rustling. As far as the major knew, no mortal remains of this soldier had ever been found. He was just . . . gone. By the time the black tulip crossed from Afghan to Soviet airspace, Chorny was very drunk indeed. —«»—«»—«»—
Early on a cold and dark December morning—a day after I bought this tale from Harry Turtledove, and long after he’d written it—I was startled by the morning news. The synchronicity of the story on the radio about an arrest stemming from an event of decades past and the unsettling story in this magazine seems to prove that some historical incidents will haunt us for years to come. Harry’s newest book,
Settling Accounts: Drive to the East
will be out in August from Del Rey. He recently edited
The Enchanter Completed
, a tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that has just been published by Baen Books.
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.
It shouldn’t have ended this way. He knew that, though he couldn’t say how or why. He couldn’t even say what
this way
was, not for sure. He just knew it was wrong. He’d always understood about right and wrong, as far back as he could remember.
How far back was that? Why, it was ... as far as it was. He didn’t know exactly how far. That seemed wrong, too, but he couldn’t say why.
Darkness lay heavily on him, unpierced, unpierceable. It wasn’t the dark of night, nor even the dark of a closed and shuttered room at midnight. No light had ever come here. No light ever would, or could. Not the darkness of a mineshaft. The darkness of ... the tomb?
Realizing he must be dead made a lot of things fall together. A lot, but not enough. As far back as he could remember ... He couldn’t remember
dying
, dammit. Absurdly, that made him angry. Something so important in a man’s life, you’d think he would remember it. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.
He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways
. Again, he would have laughed if he could.
Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world
.
* * * *
Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward
A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like ... like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self?
A dream
, he told himself.
Must have been a dream
.
Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.
He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.
Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in
He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
“You all right, Cecil?” That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in
“I’m okay,” Cecil Price answered.
I’m okay now
, he thought.
I know who I am. Hell, I know
that
I am
. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
“We get to
“Sure,” Cecil said. “Sure.” The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now...
Now they had to get through
were
Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern
Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from
Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. “What do I do?” he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
“Pull over.” Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. “Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us.”
“You sure of that, man?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
“This is all about the rule of law,” Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. “For us, for them, for everybody.”
He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.
The black-and-white pulled up behind the Ford. A great big Negro in a deputy sheriff’s uniform got out and swaggered up toward the station wagon. Cecil Price watched him in the mirror, not wanting to turn around. That arrogant strut—and the pistol in the lawman’s hand—spoke volumes about the way things in
Coming up to the driver’s-side door, the sheriff peered in through sunglasses that made him look more like a machine, a hate-driven machine, than a man. “Son of a bitch!” he exploded. “
You
ain’t Larry Rainey!”
“No, sir,” Price said. Part of that deference was RACE training—don’t give the authorities an excuse to beat on you. And part of it was drilled into whites in the South from the time they could toddle and lisp. If they
didn’t
show respect, they often didn’t live to get a whole lot older than that.
Larry Rainey was older than Cecil Price and smarter than Cecil and tougher than Cecil, too. He’d been in RACE a lot longer than Cecil had. The Black Knights of Voodoo probably hated him more than any other white man from this part of the state.
But the way they hated Larry Rainey was like nothing next to the way they hated what they called the black agitators from the North. Even behind the deputy sheriff’s shades, Cecil could see his eyes widen when he got a look at Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Well, well!” he boomed, the way a man with a shotgun will when a couple of big, fat ducks fly right over his blind. “Looky what we got here! We got us a couple of buckra-lovin’ ragheads!”
“Sheriff,” Muhammad Shabazz said tightly. He didn’t wear a turban, and never had. Neither did Tariq Abdul-Rashid, who nodded like somebody trying hard not to show how scared he was. Cecil Price was scared, too, damn near scared shitless, and hoped the black man with the the gun and the Smokey-the-Bear hat couldn’t tell.
The deputy went on as if the Black Muslim hadn’t spoken: “We got us a couple of Northern radicals who reckon they’re better’n other folks their color, so they can hop on a bus and come down here and tell us how to live. And we got us one uppity buckra, too, sneakin’ around and stirrin’ up what oughta be damn well left alone. Well, I got news for y’all. That don’t fly, not in
“We were looking at what’s left of
“Yeah, I just bet you were. Fat lot your kind cares about churches,” the big black deputy jeered.
“We care about justice, sir.” Muhammad Shabazz spoke with respect that didn’t come close to hiding the anger underneath. “I do, and Mr. Abdul-Rashid does, and Mr. Price does, too. Do you, sir? Does justice mean anything to you at all?”
“It means I know better’n to call a lousy, lazy, no-account buckra
Mister
. Ain’t that right, Cecil?” When Price didn’t answer fast enough to suit the deputy sheriff, the man stuck the pistol in his face and roared, “
Ain’t
that right, boy?
”
Muhammad Shabazz had nerve. If he didn’t have nerve, he never would have ridden down to
To Cecil Price’s amazement, the deputy smiled the broadest, nastiest, wickedest smile he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus. “What do you reckon I’m doin’?” he said. “What the hell do you reckon I’m doin’? All three of you sons of bitches are under arrest for suspicion of arson. A charge like that, you can rot in jail the rest of your worthless lives. Serve y’all right, too, you want to know what I think.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Muhammad Shabazz exclaimed.
“We wouldn’t burn a church,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid agreed, startled out of his frightened silence. “That
is
crazy.”
“We’ve got no reason to do anything like that. Why would we, sir?” Cecil Price tried to make the deputy forget his comrades didn’t stay polite.
It didn’t work. He might have known it wouldn’t. Hell, he had known it wouldn’t. “Why? I’ll tell you why,” the Negro in the lawman’s uniform said. “So decent, God-fearing folks get blamed for it, that’s why. You agitators’ll try and pin it all on us, make us look bad on the TV, give the Federal government an excuse to stick its nose in affairs that ain’t none of its business and never will be. So hell, yes, you’re under arrest. Suspicion of arson, like I said. I’ll throw your sorry asses in jail right now. You drive on into
Cecil Price didn’t need to be a college-educated fellow like the two blacks in the car with him to know what that meant.
You do anything but drive straight to jail and I’ll kill all of you
. “I won’t do anything dumb,” he told the deputy.
“Better not, boy, or it’s the last fuckup you ever pull.” The big black man threw back his head and laughed. “Unless you already pulled your last one, that is.” Laughing still, he walked back to the black-and-white. He opened the door, got in—the shocks sagged under his bulk—and slammed it shut.
“Let him jail us on that stupid trumped-up charge,” Muhammad Shabazz said as Price started the Ford’s engine. “It’ll do just as much to help the cause as the church bombing.”
“I hope you’re right,” Price said, pulling back onto the highway, “but he’s a mean one. The Neshoba County Sheriff’s meaner, but the deputy’s bad enough and then some.”
“You think he’s BKV?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
“Black Knights of Voodoo?” Price shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes night-riding with a mask and a shield and a spear.”
In
Another black deputy sat behind the front desk when Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked into the jail. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he asked the man who’d arrested the civil-rights workers.
“Suspicion of arson,” the first deputy answered. “I reckon they must’ve had somethin’ to do with torchin’ the white folks’ church over by Longdale.”
“That’s the—” What was the man behind the desk about to say?
That’s the silliest goddamn thing I ever heard
? Something like that—Cecil Price was sure of it. But then the other Negro’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck me,” he said, and pointed first to Muhammad Shabazz and then to Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Ain’t these the raghead bastards who came down from the North to raise trouble?”
“That’s them, all right,” said the deputy who’d arrested them. “And this here buckra’s Cecil Price. I thought at first I got me Larry Rainey—you know how all these white folks look alike. But what the hell? If you can’t grab a big fish, a little fish’ll do.”