“Next town ahead is Rosenfeld!” yelled somebody with a loud, authoritative voice. “Canucks ran the Frenchies out of there, and they hold the train station. We’re going to take it back from them. Rosenfeld sits at a railway junction, so we need the place if we’re going to be able to use both lines. You got that?”
“Goddamn Frenchies,” Armstrong muttered. The soldiers from the Republic of Quebec showed no enthusiasm for fighting their former countrymen. He’d heard Mexican troops in the CSA didn’t jump up and down at the idea of shooting at-and getting shot by-the spooks down there. Both sets of soldiers from small countries probably figured they didn’t really want to do big countries’ dirty work for them. Well, the hell with ’em, he thought. I don’t want to get my ass shot off, either.
Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, summed things up in half a dozen words: “This is where we came in.” Armstrong grunted and nodded. They’d got off the train and fought their way forward in Utah, too.
He hoped the Canadians wouldn’t be as fanatical as the Mormons. He had trouble imagining how they could be, but a soldier’s life was full of nasty surprises. The men in green-gray shook themselves out into skirmish lines and moved forward. A woman with hair once red but now mostly gray stood outside her farmhouse staring at them as they tramped past.
“She saw Americans come this way in 1914, too,” Yossel murmured.
“Yeah, and her husband probably made bombs or something,” Armstrong said. Yossel trudged on for another couple of paces, then nodded.
One good thing, as far as Armstrong was concerned: this flat, flat ground offered far fewer ambush points than Utah’s rougher terrain. The first gunfire came from a farmhouse and its outbuildings. The American soldiers went after the strongpoints with practiced ease. Machine guns made the Canadians stay down. Mortar teams dropped bombs on the buildings and set some afire. Only then did foot soldiers approach. A few Canucks opened up on them. More mortar and machine-gun fire silenced the position.
Then something new was added to the mix. A beat-up old pickup truck bounced across the fields. It turned broadside to the American soldiers. “Get down!” Armstrong yelled to his men. Whatever the bastard driving that truck was doing, it didn’t look friendly.
And it wasn’t. Two Canucks in the pickup’s staked bed served a machine gun on a tall mount. The gun chattered. Bullets sprayed toward the Americans. Wounded soldiers shouted and screamed. A few men in green-gray had the presence of mind to shoot back, but only a few. Leaving a trail of dust in the distance, the truck bucketed away.
“Jesus!” Armstrong said, and then, “Well, I will be damned.”
“How come?” Yossel Reisen asked.
“Because here’s a way to make our lives miserable the fucking Mormons never thought of,” Armstrong answered. He pointed toward the pickup, which was long out of range. “It’s not as good as a barrel, but they can sure as shit chew us up from long range if they’ve got more than one or two of those stinking things. And they will. Bet your ass they will.” He spoke with a veteran’s ingrained pessimism.
Yossel didn’t tell him he was wrong. The other sergeant did say, “A couple-three rounds through the engine block and those trucks won’t go anywhere fast.”
“Sure-if we can do it,” Armstrong said. “What about this guy, though? We never laid a glove on the mother.”
“He surprised us,” Yossel said.
“Sure as shit surprised me,” Armstrong agreed. “Damn near punctured me besides.” He’d lasted two years with nothing worse than cuts and bruises and scrapes. He wanted to go on lasting, too. He’d seen too many horrible things happen to other people. He knew much too well that they could also happen to him.
“Now we know they’ve got ’em,” Yossel said. “We’ll spread our machine guns out more or whatever the hell. No soft-skinned trucks are going to make monkeys out of us.”
“Ook,” Armstrong said, and scratched under his armpits. Yossel gave him the finger, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was dead right. That damn machine gun must have wounded eight or ten men. The Americans were flabbling as if it was going out of style, but they weren’t doing anything except flabbling. One lousy pickup truck knocked them back on their heels.
They needed most of an hour to start moving forward again. Half a mile closer to Rosenfeld, another defended farmhouse held them up. As soon as they went to the ground, two pickup trucks showed up. They stayed at extreme range and blazed away. Most of their bullets were bound to go wild. A few, though-a few would wound or kill.
Somebody with an antibarrel cannon made either a lucky shot or a great one and set a pickup on fire. The other truck zoomed up alongside, picked up the men who got out, and roared off. Despite all the U.S. bullets and shells that flew toward it, it got away.
“How many little trucks do you suppose the Canucks have?” Yossel asked.
Armstrong gave that the only possible answer: “Too goddamn many.” His buddy nodded.
They fought their way into Rosenfeld a couple of hours later. The Canadian fighters didn’t try to hold the little prairie town with the fanatical determination the Mormons showed over every inch of ground in Utah. But Canada had a hell of a lot more inches than Utah did. The defenders headed north, toward Winnipeg. They would make another stand somewhere else. Only at the train station and a diner called Pomeroy’s did they put up much of a fight.
The Canucks wrecked the tracks in the station, blew up the building, and escaped. Pomeroy’s was a different story. The rebels who holed up there didn’t run and didn’t give up. The only person who got out of the burning, battered building was a little boy about six years old. He’d lost the last joint of his left little finger. Otherwise, he didn’t seem badly hurt.
“What’s your name, kid?” Armstrong asked as he bandaged the boy’s hand.
“I’m Alec.” The boy looked at him. “You must be a goddamn Yank.”
“Yeah, well, I love you, too.” Armstrong pulled a squashed chocolate bar out of his pocket. “Here. Want it?”
“Thank you,” Alec said gravely. “But you’re still a goddamn Yank.”
“You better believe it, you little bastard,” Armstrong told him, not without pride.
Vienna, Georgia, was as far as east as Spartacus’ guerrilla band had gone since Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella joined them. Spartacus insisted on pronouncing the name of the place as Vie-enna. So did everybody else who talked about it. From everything Moss heard, it probably didn’t hold two thousand people. But its name was proudly distinct from that of the capital of Austria-Hungary.
Mexican soldiers and overage white men patrolled the roads. The Negroes moved cross-country, past the ghosts of what had been their lives till the Freedom Party turned on them. The countryside was achingly empty: so many people either gone to towns to look for work or just gone, period.
Nick Cantarella was chortling over an article in a three-day-old copy of the Albany Gazette somebody had brought into camp. “Listen to this,” he said, nudging Moss with his elbow. “‘Brave Canadian patriots with machine guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks have inflicted heavy casualties on the brutal U.S. occupiers in a series of lightning-like hit-and-run raids.’ Isn’t that terrific?”
Moss gave the U.S. infantry captain a quizzical glance. “Well, I guess it depends on whose side you’re on.”
“Oh.” Cantarella laughed some more. “Yeah, sure. But it’s a terrific idea. We could do that right here. We should do it. And I was just laughing on account of Jake Featherston’s propaganda asswipe told me about it.”