Ashes by Haunted Computer Books Page B

"You
don't have to surrender, son. Why, the war's over."
    "Over?" Wilkie knew the South was getting
beat, after Chattanooga and Gettysburg everybody recognized it was
just a matter of time, but there was still plenty of Confederate
pride and bodies yet to be used up. He couldn't imagine Lee handing
over his sword without playing a last trump card or two.
    "It's over for all of us," Tibbets said,
waving his arm to indicate the entire camp that seemed to stretch
on toward the stars.
    "But you're dead."
    The laughter fell away. Wilkie looked around,
expectant, a sheen of fear on his cool skin.
    "How many did you see die?" the officer asked
quietly and not unkindly, like a wise uncle explaining something to
a wayward nephew. "How many did you help kill?"
    Wilkie looked at Tibbets.
    "The bullet bites both ways," said Tibbets.
"Doesn't matter whether you're breathing or not. You're still
dead."
    "This is a war," Wilkie said.
    "War's over now," the cavalry officer said.
"A civilized camp is in the best interest of both sides."
    The officer sat and pulled a stick from the
fire. It bent with the weight of a hunk of cooked ham. He passed
the stick to Wilkie.
    Someone strummed the guitar chords to "The
Battle Hymn Of The Republic." The officer began singing in a rich
bass voice. The Confederates wiped their lips with their sleeves
and added their voices to the chorus that rose across the camp.
Wilkie didn't know the words, so he listened as he ate, listened,
listened, as the night fell on, forever.
    ###

    MURDERMOUTH

    If only they had taken my tongue.
    With no tongue, I would not taste this world.
The air in the tent is buttered by the mist from popcorn. Cigarette
smoke drifts from outside, sweet with candy apples and the liquor
that the young men have been drinking. The drunken ones laugh the
hardest, but their laughter always turns cruel.
    If they only knew how much I love them. All
of them, the small boys whose mothers pull them by the collar away
from the cage, the plump women whose hair reflects the torchlight,
the men all trying to act as if they are not surprised to see a
dead man staring at them with hunger dripping from his mouth.
    “ Come and see the freak,”
says the man who cages me, his hands full of dollar
bills.
    Freak. He means me. I love him.
    More people press forward, bulging like
sausages against the confines of their skin. The salt from their
sweat burns my eyes. I wish I could not see.
    But I see more clearly now, dead, than I ever
did while breathing. I know this is wrong, that my heart should
beat like a trapped bird, that my veins should throb in my temples,
that blood should sluice through my limbs. Or else, my eyes should
go forever dark, the pounding stilled.
    “ He doesn’t look all that
weird,” says a long-haired man in denim overalls. He spits brown
juice into the straw that covers the ground.
    “ Seen one like him up at
Conner’s Flat,” says a second, whose breath falls like an ill wind.
“I hear there’s three in Asheville, in freak shows like
this.”
    The long-haired man doesn’t smell my love for
him. “Them scientists and their labs, cooking up all kinds of crazy
stuff, it’s a wonder something like this ain’t happened years
ago.”
    The second man laughs and points at me and I
want to kiss his finger. “This poor bastard should have been put
out of his misery like the rest of them. Looks like he wouldn’t
mind sucking your brains out of your skull.”
    “ Shit, that’s nothing,” says
a third, this one as big around as one of the barrels that the
clowns use for tricks. “I seen a woman in Parson’s Ford, she’d take
a hunk out of your leg faster than you can say ‘Bob’s your
uncle.’”
    “ Sounds like your ex-wife,”
says the first man to the second. The three of them laugh
together.
    “ A one hundred percent
genuine flesh-eater,” says my barker. His eyes shine like coins. He
is proud of his freak.
    “ He looks like any one of
us,” calls a voice from the crowd.