In at the Death Read Free Page B

what they needed to fight a real army.
    Mel Scullard machine-gunned a kid who was running up to the barrel with a Featherston Fizz. The youngster fell. The burning gasoline from the bottle made his last minutes on earth even worse than they would have been otherwise.
    With cold eyes, the gunner watched him die. “You want to play against the first team, sonny, you better bring your best game,” he said.
    “That’s about the size of it,” Pound agreed. “And most of
their
first team is in Atlanta, and it’s doing them less and less good the longer it sits there. In the meantime, by God, we’ll just clean up their scrubs.”
             
    C assius began to think he might live through the war. Black guerrillas who took up arms against the CSA and the Freedom Party always hoped to live, of course. But hoping and believing were two different things. Sooner or later, he’d figured, Gracchus’ band would run out of luck. Then he’d either die on the spot or go to a camp the way his mother and father and sister had. Quick or slow, it would be over.
    Now…Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t. He’d already watched U.S. fighter-bombers stoop on a truck convoy the Negroes stalled with a land mine planted in a pothole. What followed wasn’t pretty, which didn’t mean he didn’t like it. Oh, no—it meant nothing of the sort.
    And the rumble and growl of artillery in the northwest wasn’t distant or on the edge of hearing any more. Now it grew into an unending roar, louder by the day and as impossible to ignore as a toothache. Whenever the guerrillas camped for the night, the same phrase was on their lips: “Damnyankees comin’ soon.”
    They wanted the U.S. soldiers to get there soon. They would likely die if the U.S. soldiers didn’t. They called them damnyankees anyhow. There as in so many other things, they imitated Confederate whites. They found yellow women prettier than brown ones and much prettier than black ones. They liked straight hair better than kinky, sharp noses better than flat. In all of that, they were typical of the Confederacy’s Negroes.
    The main way they weren’t typical was that they were still alive.
    Not far away, trucks rattled through the darkness, bringing C.S. troops forward to try to stem the U.S. tide. The guerrillas let most convoys go. They couldn’t afford to get into many real fights with real soldiers. Gracchus had enough trouble scraping up new recruits as things were. Except for the scattered, harried rebel bands, not many Negroes were left in the Georgia countryside.
    “Suppose the damnyankees come,” Cassius said, spooning up beans from a ration a Mexican soldier would never open now. “Suppose they come, an’ suppose they kill the Confederate sojers an’ the ofays who put on white shirts and yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time.”
    Gracchus was gnawing on a drumstick from a chicken liberated from a white man’s coop. “Then we wins,” he said, swallowing. “Then we starts puttin’ our lives back the way they was ’fo’ all this shit happen.”
    In a way, that sounded wonderful. In another way…“How? How we do dat, boss?” Cassius asked. “All the Yankee sojers in the world ain’t gonna give me my ma an’ pa an’ sister back again. They ain’t gonna bring back all the niggers the ofays done killed. We is like ghosts of the folks what used to be here but ain’t no more.”
    Gracchus scowled as he threw the leg bone aside. “
We
ain’t ghosts,” he said. “The ones who got killed, they’s ghosts. I bet this whole country have more hants’n you kin shake a stick at, this war finally done.”
    Cassius didn’t exactly believe in hants. He didn’t exactly not believe in them, either. He’d never seen one, but so many people were sure they had, he had trouble thinking they were all crazy or lying. He did say, “Hants ain’t slowed down the ofays none.”
    “Might be even worse without ’em,” another Negro said.
    “How?” Cassius asked,