Seneca Driver was listening to the wireless when Cincinnatus came back to the house where he’d grown up. The Confederates and the Yankees were jamming each other’s stations extra hard these days, and most of what came out of the wireless set’s speakers were hisses and unearthly whines.

“What you doin’ home so quick, Son?” Seneca had been born a slave, and still spoke with the broad accent of a black man who’d never had a chance to get an education. “Reckoned you’d stay down at de saloon longer.”

“No.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “Can’t get away from bad news anywhere.” After so many years in Iowa, his own speech sounded half-Yankee, especially by comparison to what he heard around himself here. He laughed bitterly. And a whole fat lot of good not sounding ignorant was likely to do him!

“These is hard times,” Seneca said. “We gots to be like turtles an’ pull our heads into our shell an’ not come out till things is better.”

Most of the time, that would have been good advice. Cincinnatus was sure it had worked for his father many times before. But what were you supposed to do when those troubling you wanted to smash the turtle’s shell to get at the meat inside? What then? Cincinnatus had no answers, and feared no one else did, either.

Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun started chattering. Armstrong Grimes threw himself flat. Bullets cracked past overhead. Any time you could hear bullets cracking, they came too damn close.

Armstrong shared a stretch of brick wall near the southern outskirts of Salt Lake City with Yossel Reisen. “Don’t these Mormon maniacs ever give up?” he demanded-more of God, probably, than of the Congresswoman’s nephew.

God had nothing to say. Yossel did: “Doesn’t look like it. Long as they’ve got guns and people to shoot ’em, they’re going to keep fighting.”

“People.” Armstrong made it into a swear word. Yossel was too right. Some of the Mormons who carried rifles, pistols, and grenades were women. Some of the Mormons who crewed mortars and machine guns were women, too. From everything Armstrong had seen, they fought just as hard and just as well as their male counterparts. He didn’t know if that old saw about the female of the species’ being more deadly than the male was true, but in Utah she sure wasn’t any less deadly.

Mormon women usually fought to the death whenever they could. They had their reasons, most of them good. U.S. soldiers who captured women in arms were inclined to take a very basic revenge. That went against regulations. Officers lectured about how naughty it was. It went on happening anyway. Armstrong didn’t see how to stop it. If he caught some gal who was trying to kill him… It was more interesting than thinking about shooting a guy the size of a defensive tackle, that was for sure.

Down in the Confederate States, some of the black guerrillas were of the female persuasion. The bastards in butternut who caught them served them the same way. U.S. propaganda said that only went to show what a bunch of cruel and miserable bastards the Confederates were. Armstrong didn’t doubt the Confederates were cruel and miserable bastards; they’d come too close to killing him too many times for him to doubt it. But raping captives wasn’t one of the reasons he didn’t, not anymore. He understood the enemy in ways he hadn’t before.

That sparked a new thought. He turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “You ever get the idea we’re more like the assholes on the other side of the line who’re trying to kill us than we are like the fancy-pants fuckers back in Philly who give us orders?”

He realized he could have picked somebody better than the Jew to ask. Yossel’s aunt was one of those fancy-pants folks. If he’d wanted to, he almost certainly could have got out of being conscripted. That he hadn’t either spoke well for him or said he was a little bit nuts, depending.

But he nodded now. “Oh, hell, yes. I wonder how many guys in the War Department have ever had lice. Maybe a few in the last war, when they were lieutenants or something.”

“Not many, I bet,” Armstrong said. “People like that, they would’ve found cushy jobs back then, too.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Reisen took a pack of cigarettes out of a tunic pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and offered the pack to Armstrong. Once they were both smoking, he went on, “Did I ever tell you my Uncle David only has one leg?”

There weren’t a whole lot of families in the USA that didn’t have a wounded or mutilated male relative. Armstrong said, “Maybe you did. I think so, but I’m not sure.”

“Aunt Flora could have kept him out of the Army if he’d wanted her to. Same with me,” Yossel said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, how can you stand yourself?” After a moment, he added, “Did I ever tell you Uncle David’s a fire-breathing Democrat?”

“Yeah, I think you did,” Armstrong answered. Because Reisen seemed to expect him to, he asked, “How does your aunt like it?”

“She doesn’t,” Yossel said, as matter-of-factly as before. “They still get along with each other well enough, but they argue whenever they talk about politics.”

Before Armstrong could say anything, a horrible screech filled the air. “Screaming meemies!” he yelled, and folded himself as small as he could, down there in the foxhole that was now suddenly, horribly, on the wrong side of the fence. Yossel Reisen did the same.

The spigot mortar burst with a roar like the end of the world. A lot of the rounds from the Mormons’ weird makeshift artillery were duds. The ones that weren’t packed a hell of a wallop. The ground shook under Armstrong. For a horrid moment, he thought the foxhole would collapse and bury him alive.

What if it did? The headline would be FORMER FIRST LADY’S NEPHEW KILLED IN COMBAT! Armstrong would make a one-sentence add-on to the story-Another soldier also died-if that.

When he could hear anything but the thunder of the explosion, he heard people screaming. There in the bottom of the hole, his eyes met Yossel Reisen’s. He knew exactly what Yossel was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing himself. Oh, hell, or words to that effect.

He wanted to come out of the safety of the foxhole about as much as he wanted to dance naked in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City wagging his pecker at the gilded statue of the Angel Moroni. That might get him shot faster than this. On the other hand, it might not.

But you had to pick up your buddies. That had been drilled into him since day one of his abbreviated basic training. He’d seen the sense of it in the field, too, which wasn’t true of a lot of the crap they’d fed him in basic. If you didn’t help your buddies when they needed it most, they wouldn’t help you if you did-and you were liable to.

“Come on, dammit.” He and Yossel said the same thing at the same time, as if they were an old married couple. They’d both been around this particular block often enough, that was for damn sure.

Up they went, keeping their bellies rattlesnake-low on the ground. Rex Stowe was out there, too. The sergeant made no bones about disliking several of the new men in his section. He came to help them anyway. They were part of his job-and, again, he expected them to do the same for him.

That damned Mormon machine gunner opened up again after the spigot-mortar round went off. He knew there’d be wounded-and that there’d be guys trying to do what they could for them. Spray enough bullets around and you’d get some more wounded, maybe even some dead.

Armstrong and Sergeant Stowe reached the closest injured man at about the same time. They looked at him and then looked at each other. Armstrong was pretty sure his face wore the same horrified expression as Stowe’s. That a man could make so much noise when so little of him was left… War was full of nasty surprises, and it had just pulled another one on Armstrong Grimes.