Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set by Scott Nicholson

breeding of maggots. Ragsdale looked away as the new prisoner squatted at the edge of the soiled water.
    The front gate opened, and a half-dozen Rebels slouched in, their guns lazily angled toward the ground. They were near-corpses themselves, gray-faced and war-weary and noses wrinkled against the constant fecal rot of the camp. A captain accompanied them, head high, wearing leather leggings and his brass polished and gleaming in the dawn. Ragsdale cursed under his breath.
    This was the man whose pockets were filled by the mass misery. But Ragsdale knew he was no more honorable himself. He only begrudged the captain skimming off the profits, and avoided all reflections on morality. Now, with the guard coming, he thought of nothing but the tradesmen waiting outside, the smugglers and dealers waiting along the route to the dead-house and the grave ditch.
    And he had first opportunity. Sure, it cost him a good thirty percent of his take, but he was making a killing inside the stockade. He was fat, which was a prisoner's true sign of wealth. He had clean water and cotton blankets and molasses and pipe tobacco. He had a pillow. And no one would touch him, because to cross Ragsdale meant getting no smuggled goods, subsisting on the meager camp rations, and likely a slow death.
    The Rebel captain gave the command for the detail to move out. Ragsdale lifted his corpse with ease. The fellow was hardly more than a skeleton. That was another advantage of a disease victim. With fresh ones like Tibbets, two men had to carry the corpse on a makeshift stretcher, which split the profits.
    Ragsdale dragged the corpse past the open dead line toward the gates. The guards watched, hollow-eyed, not even joyful about the goods that the hucksters would slip them upon the return trip. They were as much prisoners of war as the Union troops. All were bound to this boiling swamp of disease and death, and sometimes Ragsdale could imagine the war never ending, their ghost-like daily struggles extending into an afterlife of misery.
    He never imagined anything for long, though. In the camp, dreams were dangerous. If you dreamed, you were apt to lose your reason. That was one of the few differences between the living and the dead: only the dead could afford to dream.
    So he shook his head and damned himself for dreaming. All one had to do was look back toward the camp, at the pathetic shebangs made of old coats and tent scraps and dry tree limbs, with not even enough of a breeze to flutter a stray thread. And in front of the makeshift tents, or dying inside them, were men. Men who had letters from home folded carefully in their pockets, men with children waiting, men with hearts swollen by religious faith and patriotism and all false hopes.
    Ragsdale smiled to himself. He wouldn't cling to bravery. He would survive. He pulled the corpse through the gates.
    The captain nodded as Ragsdale passed.
    “Morning, Johnny,” Ragsdale said, using the only term of address that the prisoners were allowed.
    “Going to be a dandy one, Yank. Don't ya'll forget me on the way back in.”
    “No, suh,” Ragsdale said, imitating a Southern accent. He kept his grin plastered on, and wondered if that was how the Negroes felt, smiling and smiling as the lash came down across their backs. He didn't know, because he'd never met one.
    The haul to the dead-house was about a hundred yards. The corpse-bearers passed the cookhouse on the way, and a charred smell drowned out the rot of corpses. A gaunt civilian came from the cookhouse and dumped a thick greasy liquid into the stream. Ragsdale watched the gray slick make its way down the creek towards the stockade.
    When Ragsdale reached the dead-house, which was an open covered area, he laid the corpse down and went into the shade of the high Georgia pines. The other hucksters laid out their corpses as well. In the dead-house, Confederate officials tried to determine the names and units of the dead and keep careful records. But as