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didn't want to listen. Is that what's going on?"
Beckie didn't say yes. But she didn't have to. Once Mr. Brooks got hold of the
ball, he didn't have any trouble running with it.
He clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oh, for the love of... Mike. Does he think
he can con the soldiers into giving him a lift? They won't do that, not unless
. . ." He hit himself in the head again, harder this time so hard, in fact, it
was a wonder he didn't knock himself flat. He'd done his best not to cuss
before. What he said now almost peeled the paint off the walls in the front
hall. "I'm sorry," he told Beckie when he ran down, though he obviously didn't
mean it.
"It's okay," she said. "I want to remember some of that for later, though."
Mr. Brooks smiled a crooked smile. "Hope you never get mad enough to need it,
that's all I've got to say. One of the soldiers who got sick was about his
size. Did he tell you that?"
Again, Beckie didn't say yes. Again, she didn't need to.
"Okay, the good news is, he didn't go off somewhere and then come down with
the disease. The gypsies didn't steal him, either though right now they're
welcome to him." Mr. Brooks didn't sound as if he was joking. "The bad news
is, he doesn't know thing one about what being a soldier means."
"And you do?" Beckie asked.
She regretted the question as soon as the words were out of her mouth. The
ordinary-seeming bald man looked at her looked through her, really. All of a
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sudden, she had no trouble at all imagining him much younger, and very tired,
and scared to death. "Oh, yeah," he said softly, his eyes still a million
kilometers or maybe twenty or twenty-five years away. "Yeah, as a matter of
fact, I do."
"I'm sorry," she whispered. Then she wondered what she was sorry for. That
she'd doubted him? Or that, a long time ago, he'd seen and done some things
he'd likely tried to forget ever since? Both, maybe.
He shook himself, almost like a dog coming out of cold water. "Well, as a
matter of fact, so am I," he said. "But I'm afraid I'm not half as sorry as
Justin's going to be. The question is, will he be sorry because he did
something dumb and got caught, or will he be sorry 'cause he did something
dumb and got killed?"
"K-Killed?" Beckie had trouble getting the word out.
"Killed," Mr. Brooks repeated. "If he's going back to Charleston . . . Well,
there's still fighting there. Those soldiers weren't doing much up here. The
powers that be might have decided to get some use out of them after all. You
learn to fight same as you learn anything else: you practice, and then you do
it for real. Justin's never had any training. He knows how to load a gun, and
that's about it. If he doesn't give himself away, he's liable to stop a bullet
because he doesn't know how not to."
"What can you do?" Beckie asked.
"Good question. If I had a good answer, I'd give it to you, I promise," Mr.
Brooks said bleakly. "He's been gone since some time in the night. I don't
know when I was asleep. He could be in Charleston already. Or he could be in
the stockade already, if they figure out he's no more a soldier than the man
in the moon. I hope he is. If he's in the stockade, I have time to figure out
what happens next. If they just throw him into a firefight. . . Nobody can do
anything about that."
"Why would they even think he was only pretending to be a soldier?" Beckie
asked. "Nobody would look for anyone to try something like that. Most people
don't want to be soldiers, and the ones who do join their state's army for
real."
"Right the first time. Right the second time, too. You're a smart kid, Beckie.
Only thing is, I wish you weren't," Mr. Brooks said. "Because if you are
right and I'm afraid you are Justin's in a lot more trouble than if you're
wrong."
"We've got to be able to do ... something." Beckie wished she hadn't faltered
there at the end. It showed she didn't know what that something might be.
"Yeah," Mr. Brooks said. "Something." His tone of voice and the worried look
on his face said he didn't know what, either.
The convoy of trucks and armored fighting vehicles from around Elizabeth was
getting close to Charleston. They'd already been waved through two checkpoints
outside of town. The sergeant in charge of this squad? was listening on an
earpiece and talking into a throat mike. He wore three chevrons on his sleeve,
the way a U.S. Army sergeant would have. So what if they were upside down?
Justin still knew what they meant. Virginia officers' rank badges were a
different story. But if an officer told him what to do, he knew he had to do
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