Chapter Text
9th of October, 1995
Somewhere on the German Coast, Dixie-Afrikan Border
Of the four people manning the PBRs -literally meaning “Patrol Boat, River” as one ought to expect from the no-longer existing US of A- serving in the New Afrikan Navy, of which there are a good few hundred refitted from Vietnam War-old mothballing, one would have been hard pressed to find a crew as picturesque as the one lead by Chief Petty Officer Buron. In truth, the only real common denominator between the four people -including herself- patrolling up the section of the Mississippi known as the German Coast is the fact that all of their “uniforms” have patches of the New Afrikan Republic’s green-red-black on their arms.
That’s it, really, and it’s obvious enough that even a woman like herself, with little more than three years on her service record, understands how unorthodox that is for a force in North America. Then again, the on-and-off state of constant civil war across said continent for those same three years have left very few with the free time, resources or even regard for such a thing.
As far as she herself cares, uniforms are only necessary insofar as they keep you from shooting your sisters and comrades, and that’s not really a concern in her theater, since everyone holding a gun and -or- being white on the east bank of the Mississippi is the definition of not-friendly.
Indeed, she doesn’t find herself overly concerned about the getups of the three crew members assembled across the slightly cramped fiberglass hull. A fiberglass hull as un-uniform as the people commanding it, considering the snake’s head that its bow is painted to resemble, and the collection of signatures and short messages painted in white across its green-brown sides.
The ship is moving at a low speed, both because it makes their job of spotting suspicious activity on the enemy’s side easier, but also because the Mighty Mississippi isn’t exactly the widest or straightest of rivers around these parts, and trying to navigate its shape and the thousands of tributaries, swamps and oxbow lakes attaches to it at full speed is a reliable way to find oneself an early grave.
And so, as unadvisable as it is, Bernice finds herself relaxing and looking around. The local scenery doesn’t draw her attention, not when she’s been surrounded by it her entire life. Obviously, her gaze ends up landing on the people who’ve been under her command for little more than a month, the result of a battlefield promotion.
The first is Seaman Constantin Lebasque, “Basque” for short, just in front of her, sunning himself and shirtless, lounging with his feet over the lip of the shielded tub that is the boat’s main armament, a turret armed with a twinned set of M2HB machine guns. A Louisiana native, like herself, albeit an obvious white Cajun, and a young recruit at that. Being a “veteran” she’s well aware of the shift he represents. Back, during the first months up to the first year fighting the confeds, one would have needed to be going through a psychotic break to find a white -Cajon or of any other kind- fighting under the RNA.
Nowadays? With the monsters across the Mississippi putting anyone but their own wives to the whip? The Cajuns had not exactly flooded recruitment offices, but horror stories about the fates of their fellow catholics across the river had been a recruitment drive in of itself.
As such, Basque is a rarity that is becoming less rare by the day, a young Cajun willingly serving under a military of near-only colored officers, some, like herself, female colored officers.
She’s professional enough not to stare for too long as the soldier a few years her younger as he suns himself like a pale gator. She might not discriminate as much as some sisters do when drawing up her suitor pool, but she’s already seeing a guy in Baton Rougue, besides Basque is a bit too scrawny for her.
“Hey! Acadian!” She calls out, to which he opens his eyes and cranes his neck back to look at her, even if upside down.
“Yes, ma’am?” He asks back.
“I sure do hope you plan on spending some amount of our patrols awake, seaman.” She smirks down at him.
“Worry not, ma’am, I’ve heard getting shot at does wonders even with the heaviest of sleepers!” He salutes -again, upside down- with a joking tone of his own. But while he does remain in a lounging position, she’s happy enough to catch that he doesn’t go back to sleep, instead fiddling with his camo jackets or a brownish pattern that doesn’t fit their environment at all for most of the year. As mild as Luisiana autumns are, they still get their fair share of cold and leaffall, even if today’s mild heat doesn’t exactly prove it.
The next of Bernice’s wandering senses to pick up something interesting is noise, the conversation being had between the remaining two seamen of her crew, as they simply lean back on the ship’s fiberglass stern, one on each side of the M60 machine gun mounted on it.
“Look kid, all I’m saying is that it never hurts no one to pick up a book and read up on his political theory.” Argues one Oghenekaro Cisse, Black Panther Party “veteran” and what could only be described as a self-appointed soft-commissar. The man is around three years her senior, an immigrant among the thousands of militant BPP members and their families who had started flocking towards the deep south as soon as the republic had been proclaimed, among the first to pick up arms when the shootouts with the slavers had started.
Usually a shoe-in for her rank or one much higher, but political connections or ideological pedigree mean little in the hot border that is the Mississippi, and she’s got him beat by a sadly large margin in the “having been involved in deadly river skirmishes” category. Besides, as obnoxious as the Springfield-bone mechanic may be in the realm of politics, he’s never not been a good sport about her position. Comes with the womanism coded into the BPP, she supposes, even if she finds herself annoyed to realize that she only knows the term through him.
“Look, I’m sorry boss, but I didn’t enlist to read no books written by Karl-fucking-Marx okay?” Answers the last -and youngest- member of their merry crew, Seaman Trevor Banks.
“Marx is hardly the only author I’d recommend, as truncal Das Kapital , I understand that his work could hardly be appealing to someone who is offended by the idea of reading.”
“First, rude, I do read. I buy the newspaper whenever I have a chance, including the party one you nag me so much about.” The Georgia-born black represents yet another segment of the RNA’s eclectic makeup, the son of refugees who had spent two years fleeing the deep south at any cost, a kid who had gone as far as to tell them that he’d had his eighteenth birthday inside the false floor of a barge manned by activists of the underground canals, and who had enlisted as soon as his family had been settled down in one of the refugee-ladened communities up in the northwest. “Second, I don’t think I’d read much Marx or whoever else even if I was into it. Don’t have the time.” The young man busies himself with trying to keep his cigarette from getting blown away or ruined by the speed and humidity of their context.
“My proudest victory with you, the newspaper has been. And I actually was hoping to recommend some more publications to you. But now I need you to tell me what exactly keeps you so busy, considering that you and I work in the boat, and I’m the only one constantly getting grease up to his elbows trying to get this old machine to keep getting us where we need to get.” Even as he says that, a vague hand gesture tells Trevor to share his cigarette with the older soldier, something he does readily as he answers.
“Kill confeds, what fucking else?”
“I’ll say amen to that.” Cisse smiles. “Amen to that!”
The comment -and the shared smoke- devolves into their argument becoming much less heated, as both end up sharing in the struggle of not wasting the tobacco.
Bernice’s focus, instead, returns to her actual piloting, as she catches a glimpse of some kind of movement on the side of the river, ripples on the water under the opposing riverbank’s trees, large enough to be picked up among the usual perturbations of the flowing brown water. Exactly what they are meant to be keeping an eye on. The first thing she does is lower speed and start a very wide turn, but that’s already enough for the three Seamen to pick up on the change and indeed alter their demeanour.
She might be the most experienced of them all -her purposefully nameless PBRs long history of patch-ups can attest to that- but that doesn't make rookies out of any of them. The most obvious one is Basque, who indeed retreated into his tub-shaped turret like a 3rd Amendment-loving hermit crab. Banks, for his part, checks his hull-mounted machine gun, even if he doesn’t make any moves to aim it yet, while Cisse moves the most, killing the cigarette against the hull, pocketing the rest of it and moving to lean out starboard-side while grabbing hold of his AR-15, positioning himself to be the one with the easiest eye into what might have caught her attention.
“Something spooked us, ma’am?” Basque is the first to speak as his turret noisily starts to swing.
“Not sure, yet. Keep your eyes peeled.” She answers, raising up the binoculars slung from her neck. “Didn’t see any glint of metal or glass or plastic, could just be an animal.” She offers, slowing the boat down further without even looking.
She certainly hopes it's such a thing. These days, the Underground Canals have slowed down -mostly, because almost all the colored people and other such people in danger who could get out, already have, fleeing from the nightmare that are their nextdoor neighbours- but one could never know. And if it’s a case of fleeing refugees, they’ll need to move them out fast , even if they will do so even if they will be happy to do so.
Or it could be worse, could be a hiding counter patrol, and that’d inevitably end with a patrol boat joust of the kind that usually meant total casualties for one or both sides. Or it could be the worst case scenario, the one involving them catching some stage of confederate preparations for a cross-riverine raid, the kind that’d end up with a trail of blood covering multiple parishes if the people on solid ground aren’t warned soon enough or fail to check.
She’s only ever met one of those, the survival of which -by the skin of her teeth- being the reason she commands a boat at all.
“I’ll be happy if it’s an animal.” Trevor mumbles. “As long as it's not a gator, I hate gators, one ate my aunt’s dog when I was a kid. I loved that dog.”
“Tastes great, though.” Dryly adds Lebasque.
“Dog or Gator?”
“Well-”
“I don’t want to hear the answer to that.” Oghenekaro interrupts, making Bernice chuckle.
“Gators…” Trevor continues to mumble. “Have you all been hearing the rumors?”
“About them eating people?” Oghenekaro responds. “I hardly would be surprised by a carnivorous reptile eating carrion floating in the river it lives in.” He assesses.
“Yeah, but I mean-?”
“The part where people think they’ve developed a taste for blood and are going around actively hunting people?” The officer herself answers. “Yeah, I’d draw the line at serial killer gators. This isn’t Florida.”
“Yeah.” The Cajun agrees, all four of them talking as they keep their eyes peeled on the opposite side of the river. “We don’t need radioactive gators here, we already got Uktena for that.”
“Not that again.” Oghenekaro huffs. “Superstition is half the reason why our people have struggled so much, we ought not to further spread it.”
“Come on, the natives all know about it, and us Arcadians have been seeing it ever since we settled around these parts. Besides, you were okay with me painting its face on the hull, weren’t you?”
“Decorations raise morale, it’s not the same thing.”
“Sure, whatever you say. I still say that, with the kinds of Kaiju people keep talking about all over the world, a big snake with horns shouldn’t be that hard to believe.”
“Talking horns.” Bernice interrupts the squabble. “I think what I saw might have been a deer, I’m pretty sure I saw antlers just a moment ago while you all were arguing.”
“Coast is clear then, ma’am?”
“Sure hope so.” She lets the binocular hang once more and rubs her eyes. Remembering that it is indeed not late enough into the year for such animals to shed their antlers. “Let's get going, we still have a whole day’s route to go through, I don’t want to waste daylight on false leads.”
Her words are met with various sounds of affirmation. Minutes later, the snake-faced river patroller is already once more making its way up the Mighty Mississippi.
“Wow, that was close uh? Wasn’t it, pah’?” An over-eager Rusty Sammons says for the fifth time today.
“Yeah, yeah…” His father waves as he unties their small rowboat. “Now come over and start helping me push.”
The teenager does as ordered, still extremely excited about not only what has already happened to him today, but the prospects of what is to happen soon. Who would have told him that he’d be dodging nigger patrols like a freaking ninja! He’d even done that cool thing of wading under water and hiding under some floating weeds. Sure, his father had still slapped him hard across the back of the neck for getting himself smelling like rank riverwater, but it had still been cool, and things would only be getting cooler from now on.
“Come on, boy.” His father, the coolest ex-marine ever, grumbles as they push the boat all the way into the water. “We got a short window before the night patrols start.”
“The ones with the big flashlights mom always complains about?”
“Those ones.” His father grunts, not stopping as they both start hauling their kits into the boat and setting the oars up. “We need to have the boat hidden on the other side before they start looking around, and crossing the Mississippi without an overboard isn’t exactly fast.”
“Then why aren’t we taking the one with the motor, pah?”
“Because they’d hear us, RR.”
RR, or Rusty the Retard, a nickname that his siblings had started, and that he’d hoped his father didn’t find so funny.
“Ah, uh, sure. Yeah that makes sense.”
“And remember,” His father lectures. “We gotta be inconspicuous. Just as I told you from before the reds ruined the marine core, we go in, find out as much as we can about the local settlements and get back. If anyone talks to us…?” The man leads him on to answer as the boat starts being pulled downstream while they mainly try to just make sure they go downstream and across at the same time.
“If people ask, we visiting family that we lost contact with when we crossed the river. We ask around for the Sammons, nicely, and say thanks whatever people tell us.”
“And what else?”
“No calling anyone coons, shitskins, gator bait, slaves, Jim Crow, negro, nigger or nigglet, or-”
“Atta boy. I know it's hard mingling with escaped property like this. But the boys back home really need good intel on the runaway property if they want the mission they are cooking up to work well, and people like us are best for getting it. We blend in easy, since we sound just like the enslaved whites just across the river.”
“Will we get to kill any niggers?”
“Hopefully not.” His father chastises. “We will if they make us, but we want to go unno-”
Rusty is seated closer to the stern, facing his father and the opposing riverbank. Which means that when the explosion of blinding light occurs behind his back -accompanied by the sound of the grand shocking sound a log would make while splashing into the water- he friendly goes from being shrouded in total darkness other than the light of the scars, to being able to see every last detail in his father’s face, cast in white light and harsh shadows.
Rusty freezes and remains locked in looking at his dad, hoping for guidance even as the man swears, squints and covers his eyes. His immediate assumption is that they have been indeed found out by an specially sneaky nigger patrol and are about to be riddled with holes -eaxctly what his father’s friends in the militia would do, where things to occur the other way around- and as such, Rusty remains frozen in fear, only proceeding to piss himself.
It is, of course, as the light dims slightly and his father’s neck begins to crane upwards, that he starts thinking that the case may not be as simple, but no less worthy of pissing oneself about.
“What… What on God’s blessed earth…?” The man audibly gulps.
Finally, Rusty turns around. Into a facefull of scales as wide as rubber tires and shining a light as white as the most powerful LED’s, all wrapped around the underside of a neck -no, a body- the width of a tree trunk and the length of a…
Rusty’s neck -taking after his father’s- cranes up, up and up, until he finds what he’s looking for. The massive head of a snake drooling something that makes his nose bleed, shaped like a rattlesnake’s but bigger than the largest gator he’s ever seen, all of it crowned with a set of seven-tipped antlers that would put an elk to shame.
And Rusty doesn’t get to observe much else, for the animal lunges downwards, cracking the boat like a twig and shredding and pulling both father and son alike for a ride to the bottom of the Mighty Mississippi
Maybe, one ought to realize, one of the reasons why Uktena remains a cryptic myth in a place as clogged with patrols as this river, is that -much like the men and women using the waterway- it knows better than to leave survivors
Its patrols are much more fruitful than anyone else's around these parts, that’s for certain…