American War(32)

“You know what they want in return when they start giving the kids round here gifts, right?”

“Mama, I just stole it, is all. I swear. It’s not like it was really stealing, anyway. It was just sitting there—nobody was ever gonna come back for it.”

Martina sighed. “If that’s what you tell me, that’s what I’ll believe,” she said. “But just the same, you’re getting old enough that I won’t have much of a say in what you’re doing or where you’re going anymore, so let me say it now: If you want to fight, if that’s where you’re headed, go to Atlanta when you turn seventeen and sign up with the Free Southerners. Put on a uniform, fight by the rules. I won’t like it, but you’ll be a man then and the decision’s yours to make. But not the rebels. I don’t care what they give you, I don’t care what they promise or how they make it sound, you and I both know what they recruit the camp people to do, and I won’t have you do that, you understand?”

“Mama, c’mon. I’m not gonna join any rebels, I’m not gonna blow myself up, I won’t do nothing like that.”

“No matter what they tell you, some things are just wrong, war or no war.”

“I know, Mama.”

Martina hugged her son. Then she smacked him on the back of the head.

“And it is stealing. Don’t do it again.”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

She kissed her son good night and tiptoed past the sleeping twins in the next room. She reclined on the mattress into which her scent and shape had seeped over the years. She closed her eyes. Sleep came easy.





Excerpted from:

NEITHER BREATHE NOR HOPE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA WARTIME QUARANTINE


In Cairo, the capital of the Bouazizi Empire, the old gray buildings of the Students’ Quarter loom over alleyways of stone and brick. They are tired, pre-revolution buildings, their roofs laden with pigeon coops and thatched janitors’ shacks and cracked solar panels. It is frighteningly hot, even in January. For much of the year it is too hot to be outside; soon even the hardest-bitten residents will retreat northward to the Mediterranean seaside, or to the burgeoning indoor and underground cities that have largely replaced the ancient ones above the ground. It is too hot to live the old way. But traditions die hard and, at least in the coolest winter months, many still try.

The cacophony of the alleyway bazaars rises from below: the dangling din of the silversmiths; the embers exploding off soot-lacquered grills; the indignant howls of tourists haggling for a bargain. And beyond that, the sounds of the greater metropolis: the airplanes circling Mathlouthi Airport, the Bouazizi Empire’s largest hub; a symphony of horns from the unmoving cars along the August 14 Bridge. Old and new Cairo endlessly colliding.

It was in this very neighborhood, three quarters of a century earlier, that the students rushed the alleys of Khan El Sisi and the soldiers met them with rifles drawn. Today, there is little to commemorate that massacre but a tired, sputtering fountain whose alabaster tiles leach the rust from the tourists’ coins.

In his small apartment overlooking the Martyrs’ Fountain, Mahmoud Abd-el-Ghafur sits and listens to these sounds coming through the arabesque window coverings. This is not his real name, and this not his real country. His name is Gerry Tusk, and his country is America. He is a traitor.



On January 14, 2075, the day after Southern rebels killed 38 federal workers in Lexington, the President called a half-dozen government researchers to the Executive Building in Columbus. They were tasked with devising a way of pacifying the population of the country’s first rebel state. Three months later, a group of War Office agents (who were themselves told the effects of the sickness would end harmlessly in a few months) arrived at a rebel rally at the South Carolina statehouse with canisters of invisible disease tucked under their jackets. Along the state’s northern border, the Blues formed a phalanx larger than any seen during the war. Everyone in the besieged state expected an incursion, but it was in fact a quarantine. Within a month, the sickness had spread across the state, and the fiery core of the Southern rebellion had been cooled. The rest of the Free Southern State, after seeing the effects of the virus, quickly put up a quarantine wall of its own.

By the time Gerry Tusk arrived at the government labs in Lynchburg ten years later, the war had turned in the North’s favor. And the rebel state whose induced coma turned the tide for the Blues was now a glaring embarrassment, the shame of a nation. The young virologist, still new to his work and enthusiastic, was tasked with finding a cure.

Unlike most Americans, he would have seen the effects of “the Slow” firsthand. On the last Friday of every month, an armored convoy traveled five hours south from Lynchburg to the Carolina quarantine wall. Once across, they found themselves among the comatose.

For his guinea pigs Tusk picked both children in whom the sickness had yet to manifest, and adults fully consumed by it. In this way he was able to test both cure and inoculation; an alchemist in search of living metal.

Most came willingly, ushered into the isolation vehicle by soldiers in thick protective suits. The younger Carolinians, who knew full well what they would soon become, begged to be chosen. The older ones, who were by the age of thirty barely able to do anything more than breathe, eat, and breed, sometimes cursed the Northerners, but were easily compelled. And the eldest were wheeled without protest into the bus, their limbs paralyzed, stiff as stone.