Short Stories (6 page)
“All right,” the deputy muttered, and the black-and-white moved forward again. Now that he wasn’t chasing people at top speed, the deputy sheriff acted like a careful driver. He flicked the turn signal before making a left back onto Highway 19.
Click! Click! Click!
The sound seemed very loud inside the passenger compartment. What went through Price’s mind was,
Measuring off the seconds left in my life
.
As soon as the deputy finished the turn, of course, the clicking stopped. Price wished his mind had been going in some other direction a moment before. The deputy drove toward
Click! Click! Click!
Cecil Price cherished and dreaded the sound of those passing seconds, both at the same time. He grimaced when the deputy finished the new left turn and the indicator fell silent again.
“Where the hell are we?” Muhammad Shabazz muttered.
Before Price could answer him, the deputy did: “This here is
“Oh, shit,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. Price couldn’t have put it better himself.
The deputy wasn’t kidding. Looking out the car’s dirty windows, Price saw nothing but a narrow red dirt road and weed-filled fields to either side. Behind the black-and-white, car doors slammed as the Black Knights of Voodoo got out and advanced.
“I’m gonna open the door and let y’all out now,” the deputy said. “You don’t want to do anything stupid, you hear?”
“What the hell difference does it make at this stage of things?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
“Well, some things are gonna happen. They’re gonna, and I don’t reckon anything’ll change that,” the deputy sheriff said seriously. “But they can happen easy, you might say, or they can happen not so easy. You won’t like it if they happen not so easy. Believe you me, you won’t, not even a little bit.”
He got out of the car.
Can we jump him when he opens the door?
Price wondered. He shook his head. Not a chance in church. Not a chance in hell.
One more
click!
: the door opening. Heart racing a mile a minute, legs feather-light with fear, Cecil Price got out of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department car. The dirt scraped and crunched under the soles of his shoes.
Is that the last thing I’ll ever feel?
It didn’t seem like enough.
Two Black Knights of Voodoo grabbed Tariq Abdul-Rashid. Two others seized Muhammad Shabazz, and two more laid hold of Cecil Price. Another BKV man walked up to Tariq Abdul-Rashid, pistol in hand. The headlights of the cars behind the black-and-white picked out the globe and anchor tattooed on his right bicep.
“Go get ‘em,
“I will, goddammit. I will,” answered the BKV man with the pistol. Price happened to know that Wayne Roberts, in spite of the tattoo, had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps. In the Black Knights of Voodoo, though, he could be a big man.
He scowled at Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “No,” the Black Muslim whispered. “Please, no.”
“Fuck you, man,” Roberts said. “You ain’t nothin’ but a stinkin’ buckra in a black skin.” He thumbed back the revolver’s hammer and pulled the trigger.
The roar was amazingly loud. The bullet, from point-blank range, caught Tariq Abdul-Rashid in the middle of the forehead. He went limp all at once, as if his bones had turned to water. “Way to go,
“You see?” the black deputy said. “Hard or easy. That there was pretty goddamn easy, wasn’t it?”
The BKV men who had hold of Muhammad Shabazz dragged him forward. Even as they did, he was trying to talk sense to them. “I understand how you feel, but this won’t help you,” he said in a calm, reasonable voice. “Killing us won’t do anything for your cause. You—”
“Shut up, asshole.” Wayne Roberts cuffed him across the face. “You bet this’ll do us some good. We’ll be rid of
you
, won’t we? Good riddance to bad rubbish.” He shot Muhammad Shabazz the same way he’d killed the other Black Muslim.
“Easy as can be,” the deputy sheriff said. “Easier’n he deserved, I reckon. Fucker never knew what hit him.” The hot, wet air was thick with the stinks of smokeless powder, of blood, of shit, of fear, of rage.
Easy or not, Cecil Price didn’t want to die. With a sudden shout that even startled him, he broke loose from the men who had hold of him. Shouting—screaming—he ran like a madman down
He didn’t get more than forty or fifty feet before the first bullet slammed into his back. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his face, dirt in his mouth, more dirt in his nose. Something horrible was happening inside him. He felt on fire, only worse. When he tried to get up, he couldn’t.
Big as a mountain, hard as a mountain, the deputy sheriff loomed over him. “All right, white boy,” he ground out. “You coulda had it easy, same as your asshole buddies. Now we’re gonna do it the hard way.” He crouched down beside Price, grabbed his right arm, and broke it over his thigh like a broomstick. The sound the bones made when they snapped was just about like a breaking broomstick, too. The sound Cecil Price made ... How the BKV men laughed!
With a grunt, the sheriff got to his feet. With the arrogant strut he always used, he walked around to Price’s left side. With the coldblooded deliberation he’d shown before, he broke the white man’s left arm. Price barely had room inside his head for any new torment.
Or so he thought, till one of the Black Knights of Voodoo kicked him in the crotch. “Ain’t gonna mess with no black women now, are you, buckra?” he jeered. More boots thudded into Price’s balls. That almost made him forget about his ruined arms. It
almost
made him forget about the bullet in his back, except he couldn’t find breath enough to scream the way he wanted to.
After an eternity that probably lasted three or four minutes, the deputy sheriff said, “Reckon that’s enough now. Let’s finish him off and get rid of the bodies.”
“I’ll take care of it. Bet your sweet ass I will,” Wayne Roberts said. He fired at Price again, and then again. Another gun barked, too, maybe once, maybe twice. By that time, Price had stopped paying close attention.
But he didn’t fall straight into sweet blackness, the way Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid had. He lingered in red torment when the BKV men picked him up and stuffed him into the trunk of one of their cars along with the Black Muslims’ bodies.
The car jounced down the dirt road, every pothole and every rock a fresh stab of agony. At last, it stopped. “Here we go,” somebody said as a Black Knight of Voodoo opened the trunk. “This ought to do the job.”
“Oh, fuck, yes,” somebody else said. Eager gloved hands hauled Cecil Price out of the trunk, and then the corpses of his friends.
“Hell, this dam’ll hold a hundred of them.” That was the deputy sheriff, sounding in charge of things as usual. “Go on, throw ‘em in there, and we’ll cover ‘em up. Nobody’ll ever find the sons of bitches.”
Thump!
That was one of the Black Muslims, going into a hollow in the ground.
Thump!
That was the other one. And
thump!
That was Cecil Price, landing on top of Tariq Abdul-Rashid and Muhammad Shabazz. An Everest of pain in what were already the
“Fire up the dozer,” the deputy said. “Let’s bury ‘em and get on back to town. We done us a good night’s work here, by God.”
Somebody climbed up onto the bulldozer’s seat. The big yellow Caterpillar D-4 belched and farted to life. It bit out a great chunk of dirt and, motor growling, poured it over the two Black Muslims and Cecil Price. Price struggled hopelessly to breathe. More dirt thudded down on him, more and more.
Buried alive!
he thought.
Sweet Jesus help me, I’m buried alive!
But not for long. The last thing he knew was the taste of earth filling his mouth.
* * * *
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth seemed to fill his mouth.
He sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, heart sledgehammering in his chest as if he’d run a hundred miles. He looked around wildly. Tiny stripes of pale moonlight slipped between the slats of the Venetian blinds and stretched across the bedroom floor.
Beside him on the cheap, lumpy mattress, someone stirred: his wife. “You all right, Cecil?” she muttered drowsily.
A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. Was he all right? That was a different question, a harder question. “I guess ... I guess maybe I am,” he said, wonder in his voice.
“Then settle down and go on back to sleep.
I
aim to, if you give me half a chance,” his wife said. “What ails you, anyhow?”
“Bad dream,” he answered, the way he always did. He’d never said a word about what kind of bad dream it was. Somehow, he didn’t think he
could
say a word about what kind of bad dream it was. He’d tried two or three times, always with exactly zero luck. The words wouldn’t form. The ideas behind the words wouldn’t form, not so he could talk about them. But even if he couldn’t, he knew what the dreams were all about. Oh, yes. He knew.
He still lived in the same brown clapboard house he’d lived in on that hot summer night in 1964, the brown clapboard house he’d lived in for going on forty years. It wasn’t more than a block away from
He’d been Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price then. He ran for sheriff in ‘67, when Larry Rainey didn’t go for another term, but another Klansman beat him out. Then he spent four years away, and after that he couldn’t very well be a lawman any more. Once he came back to
But the dreams never went away. If he hadn’t seen that damn Ford station wagon that afternoon ... He had, though, and what happened next followed as inexorably as night followed day. Two Yankee busybodies: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. One uppity local nigger: James Chaney.
At the time, getting rid of them seemed the only sensible thing to do. He took care of it, with plenty of help from the Ku Klux Klan.
He wondered if the others, the ones who were still alive, had dreams like his. He’d tried to ask a couple of times, but he couldn’t, any more than he could talk about his own. Maybe they’d tried to ask him, too. If they had, they hadn’t had any luck, either.
Dreams. His started even before the damn informer tipped off the FBI about where the bodies were buried. At first, he figured they were just nerves. Who wouldn’t have a case of the jitters after what he went through, when the whole country was trying to pull
Well, the whole country damn well did it. Back in June 1964, who would have dreamt a Mississippi jury—a jury of Mississippi white men—would, could, convict anybody for violating the civil rights of a coon and a couple of Jews? But the jury damn well did that, too. Price got six years, and served four of them in a Federal prison in
He went on having the dreams up there.
Sometimes weeks went by when they let him alone, and he would wonder if he was free. And he would always hope he was, and he never would be. It was as if hoping he were free was enough all by itself for ... something to show him he wasn’t.
Did the dreams make him change? Did they just make him pretend to change? Even he couldn’t say for sure. Ten years after he got convicted, he told a reporter—a
Roots
and liked it. When he talked about integration, he said that was how things were going to be and that was all there was to it.
He spent years rebuilding his name, rebuilding his reputation. And then, in 1999, everything fell to pieces again. He got convicted of another felony. No guns this time, no cars racing down the highway in the heat of the night: he sold certifications for commercial driver’s licensing without doing the testing he should have. A cheap little money-making scheme—except he got caught.
They didn’t jug him that time. He drew three years’ probation. But you could stay a hero—to some people—for doing what you thought you had to do to people who were trying to change the way of life you’d known since you were born. When you got busted for selling bogus certifications, you weren’t a hero to anybody, even yourself. You were just a lousy little crook.
A lousy little crook with ... dreams.
Two years later, a season after the turn of the century, he climbed up on a lift at an equipment-rental place in
He woke in darkness, not knowing who he was. The taste of earth filled his mouth.
Copyright © 2005 by Harry Turtledove.
The Imperial Palace stood at the center of a hundred square miles of greenery. In normal times, even in abnormal times, such insulation was plenty to shield the chief occupant of the palace from the hurly-burly of the rest of the metaled world of Trantor.
Times now, though, were not normal, nor even to be described by so mild a word as “abnormal.” They were disastrous. Along with magnolias and roses, missile launchers had flowered in the gardens. Even inside the palace, Dagobert VIII could hear the muted snarl. Worse, though, was the fear that came with it.
A soldier burst into the command post where the Emperor of the Galaxy and his officers still groped for ways to beat back Gilmer’s latest onslaught. Without so much as a salute, the man gasped out, “ Another successful landing, sire, this one in the Nevrask sector.”
Dagobert’s worried gaze flashed to the map table. “Too close, too close,” he muttered. “How does the cursed bandit gain so fast?”
One of the Emperor’s marshals speared the messenger with his eyes. “How did they force a landing there? Nevrask is heavily garrisoned.” The soldier stood mute. “ Answer me!” the marshal barked.
The man gulped, hesitated, at last replied, “Some of the troops fled, Marshal Rodak, sir, when Gilmer’s men landed. Others” He paused again, nervously licking his lips, but had to finish: “Others have gone over to the rebel, sir.”
“More treason!” Dagobert groaned. “Will none fight to defend me?”
The only civilian in the room spoke then: “Men will fight, sire, when they have a cause they think worth fighting for. The University has held against Gilmer for four days now. We shall not yield it to him.”
“By the space fiend, Dr. Sarns, I’m grateful to your students, yes, and proud of them too,” Dagobert said. “They’ve put up a braver battle than most of my troopers. “
Yokim Sarns politely dipped his head. Marshal Rodak, however, grasped what his sovereign had missed. “Majesty, they’re fighting for themselves and their buildings, not for you,” he said. Even as he spoke, another sector of the map shone in front of him and Dagobert went from blue to red: red for the blood Gilmer was spilling allover Trantor, Sarns thought bitterly.
“Have we no hope, then?” asked the Emperor of the Galaxy.
“Of victory? None.” Rodak’s military assessment was quick and definite. “Of escape, perhaps fighting again, yes. Our air- and spacecraft still hold the corridor above the palace. With a landing at Nevrask, though, Gilmer will soon be able to bring missiles to bear on it--and on us.”
“Better to flee than to fall into that monster’s clutches,” Dagobert said, shuddering. He looked at the map again. “I am sure you have an evacuation plan ready. Implement it, and quickly.”
“Aye, sire.” The marshal spoke into a throat mike. The Emperor turned to Yokim Sarns. “Will you come with us, professor? Trantor under Gilmer’s boots will be no place for scholars.”
“‘Thank you, sire, but no.” As Sarns shook his head, strands of mouse-brown hair, worn unfashionably long, swirled around his ears. “My place is at the University, with my faculty and students.”
“Well said,” Marshal Rodak murmured, too softly for Dagobert to hear.
But the Emperor, it seemed, still had one imperial gesture left in him. Turning to Rodak, he said, “If Dr. Sarns wishes to return to the University, return he shall. Detail an aircar at once, while he has some hope of getting there in safety. “
“Aye, sire, “ the marshal said again. He held out a hand to Yokim Sarns. “ And good luck to you. I think you’ll need it.”
By the time the aircar pilot neared the University grounds, Yokim Sarns was a delicate shade of green. The pilot had flown meters--sometimes centimeters--above Trantor’s steel roof, and jinked like a wild thing to confuse the rebels’ targeting computers.
The car slammed down on top of the library. Dr. Sarns’s teeth met with an audible click. The pilot threw open the exit hatch. Sarns pulled himself together. “Er--thank you very much,” he told the pilot, unbuckling his safety harness.
“Just get out, get under cover, and let me lift off,” she snapped. Sarns scrambled away from the aircar toward an entrance. The wash of wind as the car sped away nearly knocked him off his feet.
The door opened. Two people in helmets dashed out and dragged Sarns inside. “How do we fare here?” he asked.
“Our next few graduating classes are getting thinned out,” Maryan Drabel answered somberly. Till Gilmer’s revolt, she had been head librarian. Now, Sarns supposed, chief of staff best summed up her job. “We’re still holding, though--we pushed them out of Dormitory Seven again a few minutes ago. “
“Good,” Sarns said. He was as much an amateur commander as she was an aide, but the raw courage of their student volunteers made up for much of their inexperience. The youngsters fought as if they were defending holy ground--and so in a way they were, Sarns thought. If Gilmer’s men wrecked the University, learning all over the Galaxy would take a deadly blow.
“What will Dagobert do?” asked Egril Joons. Once University dietitian, he kept an army fed these days.
Sarns had no way to soften the news. “He’s going to run.”
Under the transparent flash shield of her helmet, Maryan Drabel’s face went grim, or rather grimmer. “Then we’re left in the lurch?”
“Along with everyone else who backed the current dynasty.”
Two generations, a dynasty!
Sarns thought. The way the history of the Galactic Empire ran these past few sorry centuries, though, two generations
was
a dynasty. And with a usurper like Gilmer seizing Trantor, that history looked to run only downhill from here on out.
Maryan might have picked the thought from his mind. “Gilmer’s as much a barbarian as if he came straight from the Periphery,” she said.
“I wish he
were
in the Periphery,” Egril Joons said. “Then we wouldn’t have to deal with him.”
“Unfortunately, however, he’s here,” said Yokim Sarns.
The thick carpets of the Imperial Palace, the carpets that had cushioned the feet of Dagobert VIII, of Cleon II, of Stannell VI--by the space fiend, of Ammenetik the Great!--now softened the booted strides of Gilmer I, self-proclaimed Emperor of the Galaxy and Lord of All. Gilmer kicked at the rug with some dissatisfaction. He was used to clanging as he walked, to having his boots announce his presence half a corridor away. Not even a man made all of bell metal could have clanged on the carpets of the Imperial Palace.
He tipped his head back, brought a bottle to his lips. Liquid fire ran down his throat. After a long pull, he threw the bottle away. It smashed against a wall. Frightened servants scurried to clean up the mess.
“Don’t waste it,” Vergis Fenn said.
Gilmer scowled at his fleet commander. “Why not? Plenty more where that one came from. “ His scowl stabbed a servant. “Fetch me another of the same, and one for Vergis here too.” The man dashed off to do his bidding.
“There, you see?” Gilmer said to Fenn. “By the Galaxy, we couldn’t waste everything Trantor’s stored up if we tried for a hundred years. “
“I suppose that’s so,” Fenn said. He was quieter than his chieftain, a better tactician perhaps, but not a leader of men. After a moment, he went on thoughtfully, “Of course, Trantor’s spent a lot more than a hundred years gathering all this. More than a thousand, I’d guess.”
“Well, what if it has?” Gilmer said. “That’s why we wanted it, yes? By the balls Dagobert didn’t have, nobody’s ever sacked Trantor before. Now everything here is mine!”
The servant returned with the bottles. He set them on a table of crystal and silver, then fled. Gilmer drank. With all he’d poured down these last couple of days, he shouldn’t have been able to see, let alone walk and talk. But triumph left him drunker than alcohol. Gilmer the Conqueror, that’s who he was!
Vergis Fenn drank too, but not as deep. “ Aye, all Trantor’s ours, but for the University. Seven days now, and those madmen are still holding out.”
“No more of these little firefights with them, then,” Gilmer growled. “By the Galaxy, I’ll blast them to radioactive dust and have done! See to it, Fenn, at once.”
“As you would, sir--sire, but--” Fenn let the last word hang.
“But what?” Gilmer said, scowling. “If they fight for Dagobert: they’re traitors to me. And smashing traitors will frighten Trantor.” He blinked owlishly, pleased and surprised at his own wordplay.
To his annoyance, Fenn did not notice it. He said, “I don’t think they
are
fighting for Dagobert any more, just against us, to hold on to what they have. That might make them easier to deal with. And if we--if you--nuked the University, scholars all over the Galaxy would vilify your name forever.”
“Scholars all over the Galaxy can eat space, for all I care,” Gilmer said. But, he discovered, that wasn’t quite true. Part of being Emperor was acting the way Emperors were supposed to act. With poor grace, he backpedaled a little: “If they acknowledge me and stop fighting, I suppose I’m willing to let them live. “
“Shall I attempt a cease-fire, then?” Fenn asked.
“Go ahead, since you seem to think it’s a good idea,” Gilmer told him. “But not if they don’t acknowledge me, understand? If they still claim that unprintable son of a whore Dagobert’s Empire, blow ‘em off the face of the planet.”
“Yes, sire.” This time, Fenn did not stumble over the title.
He’s my servant too,
Gilmer thought.
The new Emperor of the Galaxy took a good swig from the bottle. He made as if to throw it at one of the palace flunkies, then, laughing, set it down gently as the fellow ducked.
Gilmer went down to the command post in the bowels of the Imperial Palace, the command post from which, until recently, poor stupid Dagobert VIII had battled to keep him off Trantor. Gilmer’s boots clanged most satisfactorily there. Whoever had designed the command post, in the lost days of the Galactic Empire’s greatness, had understood about commanders and boots.
The television screen in front of Vergis Fenn went blank. He swiveled his chair, nodded in surprise to see Gilmer behind him. “Sire, we have a cease-fire between our forces and those of the University,” he said. “It was easy to arrange. Our troops and theirs will both hold in place until the final armistice is arranged. “
“Good,” Gilmer said. “Well done.”
“Thank you. The leader of the University has invited you to meet him on his ground to fix the terms of the armistice. He offers hostages to ensure your safety, and says he knows what will happen to everything he’s been fighting to keep if he plays you false. Shall I call him back and tell him no anyhow?”
“‘No, I’ll go there,” Gilmer said. “‘What d’you think, I’m afraid of somebody without so much as a single starship to his name? Besides”--he smiled a greedy smile--”like as not I’ll get a look at whatever treasures they’ve been fighting so hard to hang on to. If I can’t beat ‘em out of him, I’ll tax ‘em out--that’s what being Emperor is all about. So go ahead and set up the meeting with this--what’s his name, Vergis?”
“Yokim Sarns.”
“Yokim Sarns. What do I call him when I see him? General Sarns? Admiral? Warlord?”
Fenn’s expression was faintly bemused. “The only title he claims is ‘Dean,’ sire.”
“‘Dean?” Gilmer threw back his head and laughed loud and long. “ Aye, I’ll meet with the fierce Dean Yokim Sarns, the scourge of the lecture halls. Why not? Set it up for me, Vergis. Meanwhile”--he turned away--”I’1l check how we’re doing with the rest of the planet.”
Banks of televisor screens, relaying images from all over Trantor, told him what he wanted to know. Here he saw a platoon of his troopers carrying plastic tubs full of jewels back toward their ships; there more soldiers looting a residential block; somewhere else another squad, most of the men drunk, accompanied by twice their number of Trantorian women, some scared-looking, others smiling and brassy.
Gilmer grinned.
This
was why he’d taken Trantor: to sack a world unsacked for fifty generations, even more than to rule it after the sack. Watching his dream unfold made that came after seem of scant importance by comparison.
Watching...His gaze went back to that third screen. All the women there would have been heart-stopping beauties on a lesser world, but they were just enlisted men’s pickings on Trantor. With so many billions of women to choose from, the ones less than spectacular were simply ignored.
Smiling in anticipation, Gilmer took the spiral slidewalk up to the Imperial bedchambers. Not even in his wildest dreams had he imagined anything like them. Thousands of years of the best ingenuity money could buy had been lavished there on nothing but pleasure.
Billye smiled too, when he came in. Her tawny hair spilled over bare shoulders. Disdaining all the elaborations the bedchamber offered, Gilmer took her in his arms and sank to the floor with her. There he soon discovered an advantage of thick carpeting he had not suspected before.
She murmured lazily and lay in his arms through the afterglow. She’d been his woman since he was just an ambitious lieutenant. He’d always thought her splendid, both to look at and to love.
He did still, he told himself. He even felt the truth of the thought. But it was not complete truth, not any more. The televisor screen had shown him that, by Trantorian standards, she was ordinary. And how in reason and justice could the Emperor of the Galaxy and Lord of All possess a consort who was merely ordinary?
He grunted, softly. “A centicredit for your thoughts,” Billye said.
“Ahh, nothing much,” he said, and squeezed her. Her voice was not perfectly sweet either, he thought.
“Here he comes.” Maryan Drabel pointed to the single figure climbing down from the aircar that had descended in the no-man’s-land between Gilmer’s lines and those held by the student-soldiers of the University.
“He’s alone,” Yokim Sarns said in faint surprise. “I told him we were willing to grant him any reasonable number of bodyguards he wanted. He has more courage than I’d thought.”
“What difference does that make, when he can’t--or won’t--control his troops?” Maryan Drabel said bitterly. “How many raped women do we have in our clinic right now?”