Cantarella winced. Moss groaned. The Negroes broke up. Moss looked at them with new eyes from then on. Anyone who made puns that bad was-damn near had to be-a real live human being, and deserved to be slapped down just like anybody else.

And the mount the blacksmiths came up with was beautifully simple. They fastened a short length of upright iron pipe to the truck bed. If they lost the truck, they would lose it, too. Into it they stuck a longer pipe whose outer diameter matched the inner diameter of the bottom part of the mount. And on top of that they fixed the machine gun.

Jonathan Moss admired the result. “If you were going to make these as a regular thing, you couldn’t do any better,” he said. “Where did the pipe come from?”

“Reckon some plumber wonder where the pipe go, suh,” Caligula answered with another sidelong grin.

All the Negroes were eager to take their new toy out on the road, so eager that they almost came to blows. They all knew how to serve the machine gun. Only a handful of them, though, could drive. That was funny, in a frightening way. Spartacus sidled up to Moss and asked, “How you like to be our driver?”

How would I like that? Moss wondered. He was less useful to the guerrillas than Nick Cantarella, simply because he knew less about the infantryman’s trade. But he damn well could drive a truck. “Sure,” he said after no more than a second’s hesitation. “Put somebody who knows where he’s going in the cab with me, though. I didn’t grow up around here, so I don’t know all the little back roads that’ll get me out of trouble.”

“I go with you my ownself,” Spartacus said. “Reckon I knows this country tolerable good.” He let out a nasty chuckle. “Reckon we gonna give the ofays a little bit of a surprise, too. Yeah, jus’ a li’l bit.”

What will the Confederates do to me if they recapture me fighting alongside the black guerrillas? Moss decided he didn’t want to know, not in any detail. He also decided he couldn’t afford to be taken, not any more. “Let me have a pistol,” he said, and mimed shooting himself in the head.

“Oh, yes. We takes care o’ dat,” Spartacus promised, and he did. The.45 he handed Moss the next morning was an officer’s sidearm. It would do the job, all right.

Strategy was simplicity itself. About an hour after sunup, they set off up the road from Vienna, heading north toward the even smaller town of Pinehurst about ten miles away. Anything they passed, they shot up. The first auto they came up to was driven by a fat, gray-haired white man. He started to give Moss a friendly smile as the pickup truck passed his beat-up gray Birmingham. The smile changed to a look of horror when he saw Spartacus on the seat beside Moss. A moment later, a burst of machine-gun fire finished him and set his motorcar on fire.

Spartacus and the blacks in the back all whooped. “Do Jesus!” the guerrilla leader yelled. “This here gonna be fun!”

That white man wouldn’t think so. But then, if he was one of the yahoos who went around yelling, “Freedom!” he was helping the Confederate States’ government visit wholesale slaughter on their blacks. If he happened to get in the way of a little retail slaughter coming the other way-well, too damn bad.

A tractor sat in a cotton field not far from the side of the road. “Stop the truck!” Spartacus told Moss. He followed the black man’s order. Spartacus pointed out the window. “Put some holes in that fucker!” he yelled. The gun crew obeyed. The tractor sent a plume of black, greasy smoke up into the sky.

They wrecked two more tractors and a combine. Jonathan Moss nodded to himself. Those were the tools that let white farmers get along without black sharecroppers. They were handy, yes, but they were also expensive. How would those whites like watching them go up in flames?

The gunners sprayed an oncoming automobile with bullets. It went off the road, flipped over, and burned like a torch. “This is fun!” Spartacus shouted. Moss nodded. Destruction for the sake of destruction brought a nasty thrill with it, almost as if he were a staid married man visiting a whorehouse.

There was a checkpoint outside of Pinehurst: a sleepy one, manned by three or four Great War veterans too old or too infirm to do anything more strenuous. They were just going through the motions. They didn’t expect any trouble as the pickup truck drew near. Spartacus ducked down so they couldn’t see him next to Moss.

When the machine gunners in the back of the pickup opened fire, the guards toppled like tenpins. “Git!” Spartacus told Moss. “Go left, then left again soon as you can.”

The road up to Pinehurst was paved; the one onto which Spartacus put Moss was nothing but a dirt track. Red dust rose in choking clouds, for it hadn’t rained lately. “The dust will let them track us,” Moss said.

“So what?” Spartacus answered. “We be long gone by the time they catch up to us-an’ if we ain’t, they be sorry.” He probably wasn’t wrong about that. Pursuers-even riflemen-coming up against a machine gun would get a lethal surprise.

He sent Moss and the pickup bouncing along back roads and tracks nobody who hadn’t known these parts for years would have been able to follow. Moss’ teeth clicked together more than once. They weren’t necessarily good tracks. One of them had a hog wallow right in the middle. Spartacus pointed straight ahead. Moss gunned the engine and leaned on the horn. The machine gunners solved the problem a different way. As hogs scrambled out of the muck, the gunners shot them.

The truck sprayed stinking mud as it went through. “Stop!” Spartacus yelled when it got to the other side. Moss hit the brakes. The machine-gun crew hopped out and threw three carcasses into the back of the pickup. “We don’t just shoot up the ofays,” Spartacus said happily. “We eats good today, too.”

A white man with a shotgun charged out of a farmhouse a couple of hundred yards away. He didn’t want to yield his porkers without a fight. The machine gunners sprayed a burst in his general direction. He ran away even faster than he’d come out.

“We don’t take shit from nobody!” Spartacus roared as Moss put the pickup in gear again. Riding around with a machine gun in the back of your truck worked wonders for your confidence.

Those side roads brought the pickup almost back to where its rampages had begun. The machine gun and the top part of the mount came off neat as you please. One of the gunners carried the weapon. The other shouldered the long pipe. More guerrillas emerged from the undergrowth to take charge of the dead pigs.

Roast pork and a ten-mile stretch of road shot to hell and gone made for a celebration that evening. So did a couple of jugs of raw corn whiskey. The stuff tasted like paint thinner and burned its way down like a lighted kerosene lamp. After a few swallows, Moss started forgetting things. A few more, he knew, and he’d have trouble remembering his name.

But he needed to remember something. “You’ve got to tell people,” he said to Spartacus, the homemade hooch adding urgency to his voice.

“Tell which people?” the guerrilla leader asked. “Tell ’em what?” He was drinking harder than Moss.

“Got to tell the other colored fighters.” Moss was proud of himself. He did remember! “Got to tell them what these pickup trucks can do.”

“Don’t you worry none about dat,” Spartacus said. “Be all over Georgia day after tomorrow. Be all the way to Louisiana this time nex’ week. Yes, suh. You best believe it will. We done hit the ofays hard. Folks is gonna hear about it. You best believe folks is gonna hear about it.”

Moss turned to Nick Cantarella. “You’re a hero.”

“My ass,” Cantarella said. “I didn’t even get to drive the truck.” But he hadn’t drunk himself fighting mad, for he went on, “What I really like about this is that their own damn propaganda upped and bit ’em. I never woulda thought of mounting a machine gun on a pickup and raising hell. But since those stupid pricks went and told me how-”