American War(24)



That’s what you Northerners will never understand. The real insurrectionists never fired a single shot.

Q: Did you fight any other battles during the course of the war?

A: No. I hiked east two days, hitched a ride near Cross Lake and ended up back in my hometown in southern Alabama. Waited out the rest of the war there, and the plague that followed. By the time it was all done, most everyone I’d ever known was dead.

Q: Do you feel any lasting resentment, bitterness, or ill will toward the Union or the Northern states?

A: [Laughter].





II


July, 2081

Iuka, Mississippi





CHAPTER FIVE


The layout of Camp Patience resembled that of a circle drawn into quarters. The Mississippi slice occupied the northwest quadrant, Georgia the southwest, Alabama the northeast, and South Carolina the southeast. Refugees were assigned tents according to their native state. The Chestnuts, interlopers, had lived in the Mississippi quadrant since they first arrived, six years ago.

The camp’s four sectors met at a focus composed of administrative offices: the camp intake, the school, the chapel, the medical clinic, and the cafeteria hall. Outward from the buildings, a centrifugal flare of tents blanketed the land.

To the west, Camp Patience bordered the blistered remains of the Tishomingo County Game Refuge. To the north, beyond the highest, most daunting fences, lay Tennessee. On a clear winter’s day the occupants of the northernmost tents could make out the vague tree-camouflaged towers of the Blues in their forward operating bases, and at night hear the taunts and curses of the Union-aligned militias, stalking from the brush, hunting those who dared make a break for the North.

Some tried anyway, and were shot down. Others came and went, opting instead to take their chances in the city slums surrounding the Southern capital of Atlanta. The only exceptions were the refugees from South Carolina, who made something akin to a permanent life in Patience. South Carolinians had no hope of ever going home, because the South Carolina they knew was no more. Infected by Union agents with a stunting virus early on in the war, part of an effort to quell the fierce secessionist uprising in that state, it was now a walled hospice. The sick remained, imprisoned behind the quarantine wall, and the healthy could never go home again.



MARTINA’S NEIGHBOR Lara knocked on the door of the Chestnuts’ tent and stepped inside. She found Martina where she usually was, seated at a salvaged plastic patio table. The table anchored the makeshift office in which Martina spent most of her days typing letters of appeal and myriad requests on behalf of illiterate refugees.

“How did the interview go?” Martina asked.

“Same,” Lara replied. “You know those journalists from the Blue, they always ask the same questions. Insurrectionists this, secessionists that. Made a few bucks for the cantina, though. Can’t complain about that.”

“Come, sit a while,” Martina said. “Get some water in you, it’s burning up out there.”

Lara opened the small refrigerator by Martina’s desk and took from it two bottles of water. The water bottles arrived in boxfuls on the tenth of every month, a few days after the aid ships docked in Augusta. Their crumpled remains were the most ubiquitous form of litter in the camp.

“What is it this time?” Lara asked, taking a seat on a folding chair beside Martina and looking over her shoulder at the screen of an old, barely functional tablet.

“New girl in Alabama 36:12 wants to ask Atlanta to let her husband out of jail a year early,” Martina replied. “Says he was recruited to the Copperheads at gunpoint, never fired a weapon his whole life.”

“You trying to time it with Independence Day?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it going to work?”

“Of course not. But she offered a whole pack of Yuxis for it, I ain’t gonna say no.”

“That reminds me,” Lara said. “That girl Madison I told you about in the Georgia slice, turns out she changed her mind about getting you to write that appeal to Mr. Sharif.”

“She find some other way to get her boy’s cleft lip fixed?”

“Nah. She said she came around here looking for you the other day and saw that thing.” Lara pointed to the cracked statue of the Virgin that rested on a couple of water bottle boxes near the front of the tent.

“What about it?” Martina asked.

“Guess she don’t like Catholics.”

“You kidding?”

“No ma’am.”

Martina shook her head. “Some people,” she said. “Fine by me. Let her get that snake-kisser from Birmingham to fix her son, if she’s so devout.”

Lara laughed. “They don’t let him in here no more. Too hot for their taste. Got some soft-boiled Baptist from Atlanta instead. You know the kind—God’s heavenly plan this, God’s heavenly plan that.” Lara checked the time on Martina’s tablet. “That reminds me,” she said. “You coming to the service?”

“No time,” Martina said. “Gotta finish this one then get started on the Buckhorns’ one.”

“The hell the Buckhorns want now?”

“Guess the fighting’s died down in east Georgia along the border. Atlanta declared their town safe again.”

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