“Over my dead body!” the man inside yelled. In a lower voice, he went on, “Sal, call the militia!”

“Can’t get the operator!” Sal said in despairing tones.

“Las’ chance, ofay!” Gracchus shouted. “We kin hot-wire the truck if we gotta, but we gonna have to shoot you to make sure you don’t start shootin’ your ownself when we takes it away.”

A rifle shot split the night. The bullet didn’t miss Gracchus by much, but it missed. The guerrillas knew what to do. Some of them started banging away to make the people inside keep their heads down. Others, Cassius among them, ran toward the farmhouse. He wished he had a helmet to go with his boots. But a helmet wouldn’t stop a rifle round, either.

The defenders had several firearms. If they raised enough of a ruckus, someone at a nearby farm might telephone the authorities or go out to get help. The guerrillas had to win quickly, take the truck, with luck kill the whites, and disappear before superior force arrived.

“I’ll shift them fuckers,” a Negro called. “Break me a window an’ see if I don’t.”

Cassius was close enough to a window to smash it with the butt of his Tredegar. Had one of the farm family waited on the other side of the glass, he would have caught a bullet or a shotgun blast with his teeth. That crossed his mind only later. He did know enough to get away fast once the stock hit the window.

A few seconds later, a Featherston Fizz sailed in through the opening he’d made. He heard it shatter on the floor inside. That would spread blazing gasoline in a nice, big puddle. “Burn, you goddamn ofays!” he yelled. “Burn in your house, an’ burn in hell!”

Flames lit that room from the inside. They showed a white man standing in the doorway to see if he could do anything about the fire. Cassius snapped a shot at him. He wasn’t the only guerrilla who fired at the white man, either. The fellow went down, either hit or smart enough not to offer a target like that again.

Another Featherston Fizz flew into the farmhouse. Cassius liked the idea of roasting whites with a weapon named for the founder of the Freedom Party. He’d run into a phrase in a book one time-hoist with your own petard. He didn’t know what a petard was (though his father likely would have), but he got the sense of it anyhow. Those Fizzes were petarding the devil out of the family in there.

They stayed in the burning building as long as they could. They stayed a lot longer than Cassius would have wanted to. Then they all charged out the back door at once, shooting as they came. Had they made it to the woods, they might have escaped. But they didn’t. In the light of the fire behind them, they made easy targets. An old man in a nightshirt killed a woman with him before he went down. Another woman, hardly more than a girl, blew off her own head with a shotgun.

They had to fear what the Negroes would have done with them-to them-had they taken them alive. And they had reason to fear that. Revenge came in all kinds of flavors. If you could get some with your dungarees around your ankles…well, why not? It was nothing whites hadn’t done to blacks through the centuries of slavery. Cassius’ own mother couldn’t have been above half Negro by blood. He himself was lighter than a lot of guerrillas in Gracchus’ band. He wasn’t light enough to pass for white, though-not even close. In the CSA, that was as black as you had to be to get reckoned a Negro, as black as you had to be these days to get shipped off to a camp and have your population reduced.

“Let’s get outa here!” Gracchus shouted. “The ofays, they see the fire fo’ sure.”

“We oughta stay, shoot the bastards when they come,” somebody said.

“You dumb fuckin’ nigger, you reckon dey think a fire in the middle o’ the night go an’ happen all by itself?” Gracchus said scornfully. “They don’ jus’ bring the fire engines. They bring the armored cars an’ the machine guns, too-bet your ass they do. I say get movin’, I mean get movin’!”

No one argued any more. Cassius did ask, “We got us the pickup?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Gracchus answered. “Leonidas done drove it off five minutes ago.”

“All right by me,” Cassius said. “I was busy five minutes ago.”

“Lots of us was,” the guerrilla leader allowed. “Ain’t busy now, though, so git.”

Cassius got. Part of him regretted missing the chance to ambush the whites who’d come to the farm family’s rescue. But he knew Gracchus was right: who would ambush whom wasn’t obvious. Best not to tempt fate.

Somewhere up in the northwestern part of Georgia, the Stars and Stripes already flew in place of the Stars and Bars. Sooner or later, the Yankees would break out into the rest of the state. Cassius could see that coming. All the black guerrillas could. If they could stay alive and keep harrying the Confederates till the U.S. Army arrived…

If we can do that, we win the war, Cassius thought.

Then he wondered whether winning the war would be worth it. What did he have to go back to in Augusta? Nothing. His family was gone, his apartment not worth living in. The rest of the guerrillas were no better off. They’d already lost, no matter how the war went.

“Boss?” he said as the guerrillas loped away.

“What you want?” Gracchus asked.

“Suppose the United States lick Jake motherfuckin’ Featherston. Suppose we’re still breathin’ when that happens. What the hell we do then?”

“Don’t know about you, but I got me a big old bunch of ofays I wants to pay back,” the guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon that’ll keep me busy a while.”

Cassius nodded. “Sure enough, we can do that for a while. But what kind of life we gonna have? What kind of country this gonna be? Can’t kill all the damn whites-wouldn’t be nobody left then. Gotta live with ’em some kinda way. But how? How we go on, knowin’ what they done to us?”

“Fuck, I dunno. I ain’t never worried about it. Ain’t had time to worry about it-been too worried about stayin’ alive,” Gracchus said. “Lookin’ down the road…You don’t want to think too goddamn much, you hear what I’m sayin’? Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.”

That made some sense. But Cassius said, “We ain’t old or nothin’. We make it through this goddamn war, we got a lot o’ time ahead of us. Maybe we go on up to the USA. They ain’t so hard on niggers there.”

“That’s a fact-they ain’t,” Gracchus said. “But here’s another fact-they don’t like niggers much, neither. If they did, they woulda let more of us git away when the Freedom Party first took over. But they didn’t. They closed their border so we had to stay in the CSA an’ take whatever Featherston’s fuckers done dished out. Yankees like us better’n they like Confederate sojers, but it don’t go no further’n that.”

He didn’t just make some sense there-he made much too much. “What’re we supposed to do, then?” Cassius wanted to wail the question. Instead, it came out as more of a panting grunt. It was the sort of thing he would have asked his father when he and Scipio weren’t quarreling.

His father would have had a good, thoughtful answer for it. Gracchus just shrugged and said, “We gots to stay alive. We gots to hit the ofays till the war’s done, an’ go on hittin’ ’em afterwards. Past that…Hell, I don’t know nothin’ past that. Find out when I gits there, if I gits that far.”

The way things were, maybe that was a good, thoughtful answer. If you were someplace where you couldn’t make plans, didn’t trying only waste your time? For now, what was there besides fighting and taking whatever vengeance you could? Cassius trotted on. He couldn’t see anything besides that now himself.