Walk in Hell

Rodriguez shrugged again. "They try that, they get killed. Is no big never-mind to me." He flashed a big, shiny grin at Jeff. "In Sonora, we don't have no mallates-no niggers-till you Confederates, you buy us from Mexico. You bring in the problem. You should ought to fix it, too."

With some amusement, Pinkard noted that Rodriguez looked down his nose at Negroes, too. In a way, it made sense: if not for them, he would have been on the bottom himself. But the blacks were on the bottom. That made putting them down harder, because they had so little to lose from their rebellion.

Off to one side, a field piece began barking, throwing shells into Albany, Georgia. Captain Co

"Damnyankees do," Stinky Salley said.

Co

He didn't tell them what to do and sit back on his duff. He went out with them and helped them do it. Pinkard had appreciated that in a foundry foreman. He appreciated it even more in an officer. After patting himself to make sure he had plenty of spare clips for the Tredegar, he scrambled to his feet and trudged on toward Albany.

The front hereabouts was too wide, with too few men covering too many miles, for proper entrenchment. You dug foxholes where you happened to be, fought out of them, and advanced some more. The survivors of the new regiment to which he belonged weren't advancing in neat files of men now. They'd learned better. They moved forward in open order, well spread out. More space for the bullets to pass between, Pinkard thought.

A shot rang out-behind him. One of his comrades went down, clutching at the back of his left thigh. Half a dozen men close by went down, too, hitting the dirt at the first sound of gunfire. Pinkard was one of them. He'd developed a tremendous respect for the horrid things flying lead could do to the human body.

Another shot kicked up red dirt and spat it in his face. "It's another one of those hideout sons of bitches," he said unhappily. As their strength faltered, the Reds had formed the nasty habit of digging in with concealed foxholes facing not toward their Confederate foes but away, and holding their fire till the soldiers had gone past them. They'd done considerable damage that way. This fellow looked to have added to it.

Stalking him through the pine woods was a deadly game of hide and seek. He wounded another man before Rodriguez flushed him out of his hole with a grenade and three other soldiers shot him from three different directions. He wasn't quite dead, even after that. Jeff put a round through his head at close range, which made him stop thrashing and moaning.

"What did you go and do that for?" one of the other Confederates asked. "Bastard deserved to suffer, I reckon."

"Yeah, but if we went and left him, he might have found a way to do more mischief, even shot up like he was," Pinkard answered.

"Oh, tactics. That's all right, then," said the other soldier, a hulking Te

Pinkard bristled. He wasn't a hardliner, and nobody could make him one-he was a free white man, with a right to his opinion. "Listen," he said, "there's ten million of 'em in the CSA, or ten million take away however many got themselves killed in this stupid uprising of theirs. We got to figure out what to do with 'em after this part of the shooting's done."

"Put the slave chains back on 'em," Finley snapped. "Serve 'em right."

Not many Confederates wanted to go that far, for which Pinkard thanked God. "They done showed they can fight," he said. "You buy a big buck nigger now, Finley, you think you ever dare turn your back on him?" Finley scowled from under the brim of his helmet. He didn't say anything, which suited Jeff fine.

They emerged from the woods a few hundred yards outside of Albany. Field pieces were still pounding the town. Answering fire came mostly from the big houses on the north side of the main street: from what had been the white section of the city. Red flags still flew defiantly above several of those houses. "Bastards are doing it on purpose, hurting whites as much as they can," Finley said. Now Pinkard was the one who didn't answer.

One of those big houses with a two-story colo

But, however much you might like the notion, you couldn't huddle in a hole forever. When the machine gun chose a different target, he got up and ran for another hole closer to Albany. He got fired on again, but made it safely.

The Confederates were moving on the city from the west and the north. The Red rebels holed up inside did not have the firepower to keep them out. But instead of fading back into the countryside, the Negroes fought house to house, making the government forces clear them out with grenades and, once or twice, with the bayonet.

At last, the Reds were pushed back to the last couple of houses where they still had machine guns up and firing. A flag still flew from one of them. Inside, the Negroes shouted the defiant cry they'd raised through the whole unpleasant engagement: "The people! Fo' the people!"

When gunfire eased for a moment, Pinkard shouted back: "Give up, you lying bastards! We are the people!"

"Liar your own self!" One of those machine guns lashed the rubble in which he lay. He'd expected that, and stayed very low behind the big pile of red bricks that had been a chimney before a shell knocked it down. But his words seemed to have angered the black rebels so much, they didn't just want to kill him. The same fellow who'd yelled before shouted out again: "You ain't the people. You is the dogs o' the aristocracy, is what you is!" He barked derisively.

"The hell you say!" Pinkard answered, a measure of how good his cover was. "Lot more white men than niggers in the CSA."

"Not in the Black Belt Socialist Republic," the Red retorted. "Not in the others, neither." He laughed. "We havin' our own War o' Secession, if'n you want to put it like that."

Jeff didn't want to put it like that, even to himself. It would have made the fight the Negroes were raising seem altogether too legitimate to him. And then another Red let out a dark, nasty laugh and added, "Sure as hell ain't mo' white folks than niggers in the Black Belt Socialist Republic nowadays. We done took care o' that."

From off to the side, a Confederate soldier started pitching grenades into the house where the Red revolutionaries were holed up. Pinkard had no idea whether they wounded any of the Negroes. They did set the house on fire.

That left the Reds a desperate choice. They could stay and burn or flee and get shot down. They fled, disciplined enough to carry the machine gun with them to set up again if they found fresh refuge. They didn't.

One more house and the fighting was done. Captain Co