The Rift

ONE

The sound of drumming and chanting rolled down from the old Indian mound as the school bus came to a halt. Jason Adams wanted to sink into his seat and die, but instead he stood, put his book bag on one shoulder, his skates on the other, and began his walk down the aisle. He could see the smirks on the faces of the other students as he headed for the door.

He swung out of the bus onto the dirt road. Heat blazed in his cheeks.

“Wooh!” one of the kids called out the window as the bus pulled away. “I can feel my chakras being actualized!”

“Your mama’s going to Hell,” another boy remarked with satisfaction. Jason looked after the bus as it lurched down the dirt road, thick tires splashing in puddles left by last night’s rain.

Another few weeks, he thought, and he wouldn’t have to put up with them anymore. Not for the length of the summer, anyway.

The drumming thudded down from the old overgrown mound. Jason winced. Aunt Lucy must have let his mother off work early. There wasn’t going to be a lot of business at the greenhouse till Memorial Day. It was bad enough that his mom was a loon. She had to drum and chant and advertise she was a loon. Jason hitched the book bag to a more comfortable position on his shoulder and began the short walk home.

Green shoots poked from the cotton field to the north of the road. The furrows between the green rows were glassy with standing water. Swampeast, they called this part of Missouri, and the name was accurate.

The inline skates dangled uselessly off Jason’s shoulder. Gravel crunched under his shoes. He could put up with the drumming, he thought, if only he were back in L.A. Drumming was even sort of normal there—well, not normal exactly, but there were other people who did it, and most other people didn’t make a point of telling you that it qualified you for eternal damnation.

Jason passed by the Regan house, a new brick place on the lot next to where Jason lived with his mom. Mr. Regan was as usual puttering around Retired and Gone Fishin’, his bass boat parked inside his carport. So far as Jason could tell, Mr. Regan spent more time polishing and tinkering with his bass boat than he did actually fishing. The old man straightened and waved at Jason.

“Hi.” Jason waved back.

“Found a place to skate yet?” Mr. Regan asked.

“No.” Other than the outdoor basketball court at the high school, which was usually full of kids playing basketball.

Mr. Regan tilted his baseball cap back on his bald head. “Maybe you should take up fishin’,” he said. Jason could think of many things he’d rather do with his life than sit in a boat and wait for hours in hopes of hauling a wet, scaly, smelly, thrashing animal into the boat with him. He really didn’t even care for fish when they were cooked and on a plate.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I could give you some lessons,” Regan said, a bit hopefully.

Regan had made this offer before. Jason supposed that he sympathized with his neighbor’s being retired and maybe a bit lonely, but that didn’t mean he had to assist him in his rustic amusements.

“Maybe after school’s out,” Jason said.

After he finally went crazy from living in the Swampeast, he thought, sitting in a boat next to a stack of dead fish might not seem so bad.

The drum boomed down from the mound behind the houses. Jason waved to Mr. Regan again and cut across the soggy lawn to the old house where he and his mother lived. Batman, the dog that belonged to the Huntleys on the other side of his house, ran barking toward Jason in order to warn him off. Jason, as usual, ignored the dog as he walked toward his front porch.

Jason’s house was very different from the four modern brick homes that shared its short dirt road. A dozen or so years ago, when the farmer who owned this area decided to retire, he sold the cotton fields to the north of the dirt road and created a small development south of it—two new brick homes built on either side of his own house, four altogether. When his widow died, Jason’s mother had bought the old farmhouse, and when Jason first saw it, four months ago, he thought it looked like the house that Dorothy lived in before she went to Oz. It was a turn-of-the-century frame farmhouse, large and spacious, painted white. There were a lot of things that Jason liked about the house: the funky old light switches, which had pushbuttons instead of toggles. The crystal doorknobs and the old locks on all the bedroom doors, some of which still had their skeleton keys. He liked the sashes that made a rustling sound inside the window frames when he lifted the windows, and he liked the screened-in front porch with its creaking floorboards. He liked the tall windows with the old, original window glass that had run slightly—he remembered his science teacher telling him that glass was really a liquid, just a very slow liquid—and which gave a slightly distorted, yellowish view of the world. He liked the extra room, because the house was intended for a much bigger family than the two people who lived in it now, and he liked having more space than he’d had in L.A., and having a room up on the second floor with a view. But the view was of the wrong part of the world, and that was what spoiled everything. Jason bounded across the porch, unlocked the front door with its fan-shaped window, and dumped his book bag on the table in the foyer. The house welcomed him with the smell of fresh-cut flowers that his mom brought home from Aunt Lucy’s greenhouse. He passed through the dining room—Austrian crystals hung in the window, spreading rainbows on the wallpaper—and into the small, old kitchen that his mother was always complaining about. More crystals dangled in the windows there. Jason opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water from the plastic jug, careful not to pour out the large quartz crystal that his mother had placed in the jug.

“The crystal expands the energy field of the water from one foot to ten feet,” his mother had explained, “and then you can drink the energy.”

He had never asked why he would want to drink energized water. The explanation would only have made his eyes glaze anyway.

He drank half the glass of water and refilled it, then returned the jug to the refrigerator. He took an orange from the refrigerator drawer, used a knife to cut it into quarters on the ancient zinc countertop, dropped the knife in the sink, and then—his stomach presumably radiating powerful metaphysical energy ten feet in all directions—he went up the narrow back stair from the kitchen to the second floor. He went into the corner room he thought of as his study, with his computer, desk, and skating posters, and flicked the switch on his computer’s power strip. The sound of his mother’s drumming came faintly through the closed windows. Jason sucked the juice from a slice of orange while he looked out the side window.

To the east, the dirt road dead-ended against the green wall of the levee, the huge dike that kept the Mississippi from flooding into their front yard. The river was normally invisible, hidden by the cottonwood thicket that stretched almost a half-mile from the levee to the riverbed, but the river was unusually full right now, with the spring melt and a long series of rains, and had flooded partway up the levee. Through the tangled trees, Jason could glimpse an occasional patch of gray water.

He had thought, when told he would be living near the Mississippi, that he would at least be able to watch the boats go by, maybe even big white stern wheelers like on television, but the combination of the impenetrable underbrush and the levee’s big green barricade had blocked any view from the flat ground. Even when he climbed onto the old Indian mound behind the house to see well over the levee, he could see water only here and there.

He turned his eyes to the north window, where the rain-soaked cotton field stretched on to a distant row of trees on the horizon. The cotton field was mostly brown earth marked by the wide rows of young green cotton, but here and there the soil was stained with circular pale blooms, as if God with a giant eyedropper had splashed white sand down onto the rich soil. Jason had sometimes wondered about those circular patches, but he hadn’t thought to ask anyone.

The land was so flat that the trees at the end of the cotton field seemed to mark the edge of the world, hedging it to the north just as the levee did to the east. The only thing he could see past the trees was the tall water tower in Cabells Mound, the town where he went to school. The modern tower, all smooth curved metal, looked like a toilet plunger stuck handle-first into the ground. He narrowed his eyes. He had plans for the water tower.

He wanted to climb the spiral metal stair that wound to the top, put on his skates, hop on the metal guard rail, and wheelbarrow down to the bottom: back skate in the royale position, crosswise on the rail, front skate cocked up so he was rolling only on its rear wheel.

He’d go down the spiral rail, fast, with centrifugal force, or whatever it was called, threatening to throw him off the tower at any second.

And then he wanted to do something cool and stylish on landing, like landing fakie, a 180-degree spin on the dismount to land moving backward; act as if zooming at high speed a couple hundred feet to the ground, right on the edge of wiping out the whole time, wasn’t anything, was just something he did every day, and required a little flourish at the end to make it special.

That, he thought, was Edge Living. Edge Living was something to aspire to. His mouth went dry at the thought of it.

The only question, of course, was whether he’d ever dare try it. He’d done the wheelbarrow on rails before, but the rails were all straight, not curved outward, and he’d never wheelbarrowed more than a single story.

Three metal-guitar chords thrummed from the computer. “I am at your service, master,” it said. Jason turned his attention to the screen. His friends in California, he thought, wouldn’t be back from school for another couple hours.

He’d browse the Web, he thought, and check out all the chat lines devoted to skating. For most of the eleven hundred years since the time of the Sun Man, the old Temple Mound had seen little change. The area remained a wilderness, lowlying and marshy and flooded every few years. The Mississippi flung itself left and right like a snake, carved a new course with every big flood. Every time it shifted course, it deposited enough silt over the next few years to raise the area through which it traveled. Then another flood would spread the river wide, and the river would find an area lower than that which it had built up, and carry its silty waters there.

Over the years the Mississippi had carried away the Sun Mound, the big mound where the Sun Man had built his long lodge and where he had lived with his family. Many of the smaller mounds had also been flooded away during inundations, and the rest had been plowed under by farmers, who saw no reason why some aboriginal structure should impede the size of their harvest.

Only the Temple Mound remained, the huge platform structure from which the Sun Man had witnessed the destruction of his people. The Mississippi had spared it, and the white men and their plows, daunted by its size, had spared it as well. The Cabell family, who had grown corn and wheat on the land for three generations, gamely holding on through deluge and drought and civil war, had built their home on one of the mound’s terraces, safe from the floodwaters that regularly covered their corn fields. But even they had given up in the end, abandoning their home in the 1880s after too many floods had finally broken their spirit. The Swampeast had finally defeated them, just as it had defeated so many others. Nothing was left of the home now, nothing but some old foundation stones and a broken chimney covered with vines, and the mound was overgrown, covered with pumpkin oak and slippery elm and scrub. It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who finally made the Swampeast habitable. Just south of Cape Girardeau the levee line began, to continue 2,200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The long green walls, supported by a mammoth network of reservoirs, floodways, flood gates, flood walls, pumping stations, dikes, cutoffs, bendway weirs, and revetments, were unbroken save for where tributaries entered the Mississippi, and the tributaries were walled off as well, some for hundreds of miles. The levees kept the flood-waters out and finally permitted the farmers to clear the land and till their soil in peace. Cotton replaced wheat and corn in the 1920s, and the farmers grew wealthy on the rich alluvial soil. During the decades of prosperity, the farmers had forgotten that the conditions under which they had prospered were artificial. The natural state of the land was a swampy, tangled hardwood forest, subject to periodic inundations. The People of the Sun, whom the whites later called “Mississippians” or “Mound Builders,” had altered the land for a while, had changed its natural state from a nearly impenetrable hardwood thicket to corn fields dominated by huge earthen monuments, but the land reverted swiftly to its natural state once the Sun Man’s time had passed. Now the cotton fields, graded to perfect flatness by laser-guided blades, stretched west from the levees, but they had been imposed on the land, and so had the titanic earthworks that protected them. The condition of southeastern Missouri was as artificial as that of the Washington Monument, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, or the space shuttle, and, like these, existed as a monument to the infinite ingenuity of humankind. The land, like the space shuttle, had been manufactured.

But that which is artifice occupies a precarious position in the world of nature. Artificial things, particularly those on the scale and complexity of the space shuttle, or of the levee system of the Mississippi, are manufactured at great cost, and must be maintained with great vigilance. Their existence is dependent on the continuation of the conditions under which they were designed. The space shuttle Challenger was destroyed when one of its systems was unable to react with sufficient flexibility to an unseasonable frost. The levee system, on the other hand, was built with the understanding that two things would remain constant. It was understood that flood waters would not rise much higher than they had in the past, and that the land on which the levees were built would not move of its own accord. If either of these constants were removed, the levee system would not be able to prevent nature from returning to the highly artificial landscape which the levees were built to preserve.

The first of these constants was violated regularly. The epic flood of 1927 made obsolete the entire levee system, which was reengineered, the levees being built higher, wider, and with greater sophistication. The flood of 1993 again sent water to a record crest right at the juncture of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and briefly threatened to make St. Louis an island. The inevitable result was a greater commitment to reinforced levees.

The second constant, the requirement that the earth not move, had not been tested. Though such a test, as history showed, was inevitable.

Where, Jason typed, is here?

He was almost holding his breath. Assuming that Dood S was female, which was likely if the online handle was intended to be pronounced “dudess,” Jason might have found himself a potential girlfriend. So far Jason discovered that he and Dood S were the same age. They agreed on bands, on skate brands, and on the study of history (“sux”). They were both reasonably advanced skaters. They could royale and soyale, they could backside and backslide, they could miszou, they could phishbrain and Frank Sinatra. They were both working on perfecting various alley oop maneuvers, but Dood S was making more progress because she, or possibly he, had a place to skate.

The answer flashed on the screen.

Jason’s answer was heartfelt.

Good question, Jason thought.

Between Sikeston and Osceola, he typed, feeling sorry for himself. If he were feeling better about living here, he might have mentioned St. Louis and Memphis.

Jason heard the door slam downstairs. His mom must be home.

RU a girl? he typed. Flirtation was fairly useless if they lived a thousand miles away from each other, but what the hell. He was lonely. It never hurt to stay in practice.

Your pixels look female to me is what Jason wanted to type, but he couldn’t quite remember how to spell “pixel,” so he typed, I think you are a girl.

This was not lightening Jason’s mood. He heard his mother’s footsteps on the front stair, and turned as she passed by the door. She was wearing jeans and a tank top. Her cheeks glowed, and there was a sheen of sweat on her chest and throat.

“Hi,” Jason said. “Have fun?”

“It was exhilarating!” she said. “I really felt actualized this time! I could feel the energies rising from the mound!”

“Great,” Jason said.

Catherine Adams was tall and trim and blonde. One of Jason’s friends had once described her as a babe, which had startled him. He hadn’t thought of his mother in those terms. But once it was pointed out to him, he had realized to his surprise that she was, indeed, an attractive woman. At least compared to the mothers of most of his friends.

Catherine walked into the room, her drum balanced on her hip. “Talking to your friends?” Her voice was husky from chanting.

“Yes.” He turned and saw Dood S’s last statement.

Jason looked at the screen and concluded that this really wasn’t his day. Catherine looked over his shoulder at the screen and he could hear a frown enter her voice. “Is this anyone I know?”

“No,” Jason said. He was tempted to say, He’s a pedophile in Montana, but instead said, “Someone I just met. Some little town in Montana. Don’t worry, she’s not going to sell me any grass.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Catherine said. There was an ominous degree of chill finality in her tone.

“Right,” Jason said.

Supper was not a good experience. Jason ate chicken soup left over from the weekend and day-old homemade bread while his mother quizzed him on the temptations of the Internet. “You spend too much time online,” she said.

“My friends are online,” Jason said. “It’s cheaper than calling them long distance.”

“You need to make new friends here,” Catherine said. “Not hang out with druggies on your computer.”

“I can’t get high online,” Jason pointed out. He could feel anger biting off his words. “I was just waiting in the chat room for Abie and Colin. I can’t ask everyone in the chat room whether they do drugs before I talk to them.”

“Drugs are a black hole of negativity,” Catherine said. “I don’t want you around that scene.”

“I’m not into drugs!” Jason found himself nearly shouting. “I couldn’t skate if I took drugs, and all I want to do is skate!”

“What’s on the Web that’s so wonderful?” Catherine demanded, her own anger flaring. “Drugs and porn and advertising. Nothing but commercialism and materialism—”

“Talk!” Jason waved his hands. “Conversation! Information! My friends are online!”

“You need to make friends here,” she said. “We live in Missouri now.”

“I don’t need to make friends here! I’ve already got friends! And the second I can get back to them, I will!”

She looked at him from across the table. The anger faded from her expression. She looked at him sadly.

“You can’t go back to California,” she said. “You know why.”

“I know, all right,” Jason said.

Concern filled her eyes. “If you go back to California,” she said, “you’ll die.” Jason looked at the framed photograph of Queen Nepher-Ankh-Hotep that sat on the side table between two sprays of Aunt Lucy’s irises. The Egyptian queen looked back at him with serene kohl-rimmed eyes.

“So I hear,” he said.

Back in 1975, an Oregon housewife named Jennifer McCullum was informed by a vision that in a previous life she had been Queen of Egypt. So benevolent and spiritual had been her reign that she had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.

In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.

Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.

Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.

Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business. And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.

“Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”

“How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”

Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?

They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.

“And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”

“So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”

His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”

Jason could feel his brain “de-focusing under this onslaught—he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios—but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.

“What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had slavery here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.

It had rained.

Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.

“I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.

“I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”

“We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online—I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”

Jason was aghast. “An hour!”

“One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”

“I don’t want to know anyone here!”

“There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”

“How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”

“You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”

“I don’t radiate hostility!” Jason shouted.

“You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway—”

“I am not interested! I am not interested at all! One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.

His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”

Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even looked like a prison.

And now he was in a prison cell, on the second floor of his house.

And the worse thing about this cell, he realized, was that he had turned the key on himself. He had to get out of here somehow.

As he paced, his eye lighted on the telephone, and he stopped in his tracks.

Ah, he thought. Dad.

“Well,” Jason said, “I’m bummed. I sort of had a fight with Mom.”

“Have you apologized?” said Frank Adams.

This was not the initial response that Jason had hoped for. “Let me tell you what it was about,” he said.

“Okay.” Frank sounded agreeable enough, but over the phone connection Jason could hear his father’s pen scratching. The pen was a Mont Blanc, and had a very distinctive sound, one loud enough to hear over a good phone connection. Frank was working late at the office, which was normal, and Jason had called him there.

“Mom says I have to restrict my Internet access to one hour per day. But the Internet is where all my friends hang out.”

“Okay.”

“Well,” Jason said, “that’s it.”

“That’s what the whole fight was about?”

“There was a lot more about karma, and how yours sucks so bad you’re going to get washed out to sea along with my friends, but keeping me offline is what it all came down to.”

“Uh-huh.” There was a pause while the pen scratched some more. Then the pen stopped, and Frank Adams’s voice brightened, as if he decided he may as well pay attention, “It wasn’t about your grades or anything?” he asked.

“No. My grades are up.” The Cabells Mound school was less demanding than the academy he’d been attending in California. Also far more boring—but that, he’d discovered, applied to the Swampeast generally and not just to school.

“So if it’s not interfering with your schoolwork, why is she restricting your Internet access?” Jason’s dad was very concerned with grades and education, not for themselves exactly, but because they led to success later on. Frank was big on hard work, dedication, and the rewards the two would bring. Jason’s mom, by contrast, thought of this goal-oriented behavior as “worshiping false, non-integrative values.”

“She wants me to spend more time doing stuff here. But there’s nothing to do here, so—”

“She wants you to try to make friends in Missouri.”

Jason could not understand how his parents knew these things about each other. Were they telepathic or something?

“Well, yeah,” Jason said. “But there’s, like, no point to it. Because the second I’m eighteen, I’m checking out of this burg.”

“You’ve got a few years till then,” his father pointed out.

“But I’m going to be spending as much time in L.A. as I can between now and then.”

“Jason.” His father’s voice was weary. “Where are you going to be spending most of your time between now and your graduation?”

Jason glared out the window and realized he was trapped. “Here,” he said. “In Missouri.”

“So isn’t it, therefore, a good idea to get to know some people where you live? Maybe date a few girls, even?”

Jason never liked it when his father started using words like therefore. It meant he was doing his whole lawyer thing, like he was talking to a witness or something. It was as bad as when his mother talked about negative thoughtforms.

“I don’t mind making new friends,” he said. “But I want to keep the ones I’ve got, too, and I can’t do that unless I stay in touch with them.”

“I will speak to your mother about your Internet privileges, then. But I won’t do it for another week or ten days, because I want you to soften her up between now and then, okay? Try to make an effort? Take someone home? Play a game of baseball? Something?”

Jason glared at his reflection in the blank computer screen. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Good.”

Jason made a grotesque face into the computer screen. Snarled, bared his canines, made his eyes wide. His distorted reflection grimaced back at him like a creature out of a horror film. “I was wondering,” Jason began, “if I could come and stay with you after you and Una get back from China.” Jason heard a page turn over the phone, and then heard his father’s pen scratching again. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Frank said. “I’m going to be working sixteen-hour days to catch up on the work I’ve missed. I wouldn’t really have a chance to spend time with you. It wouldn’t be fair to Una to have to spend all her time looking after you.”

“I wouldn’t bother her. I can just hang with my friends.”

“You’ll still be able to visit in August, like we planned.”

“I could house-sit for you, while you’re gone.”

Frank’s pen went scratch, scratch. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t want to leave you alone in the city all that time. What if you got into trouble?”

What if I didn’t? Jason wanted to respond. “Or I could fly to China and join you there,” he said instead. His father gave a sigh. Jason could hear the pen clatter on the desktop. “This is my first vacation in almost ten years,” Frank said. “I’m a partner now. It used to be that partners took it easy and waited for retirement, but that’s not how it works anymore. Partners work harder than anyone else.”

“I know,” Jason said. He remembered the last vacation, ten years ago in Yosemite. He didn’t remember much about the park, he could only remember being sick to his stomach and throwing up a lot.

“Una and I have never had much time alone together,” Frank said. “We’re going to be meeting her family, and that’s important.”

And a step-kid, Jason thought, would just get in the way. Una, whom Frank had finally married a few months ago, was half Chinese. The Chinese part of the family was scattered all through Asia, and Frank and his new bride were going to travel to Shanghai, Guangzhong, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur, seeing the sights and meeting the relatives.

Jason made another grotesque face into the computer screen.

He did not dislike Una, who had made a determined effort to become his friend. But she troubled him. For one thing, she was young enough, and pretty enough, for him to view as desirable. That she sometimes figured in his fantasies made him uncomfortable. For another, her moving in with his dad made it that much less likely that Jason would himself be able to move in with Frank. And thirdly, she was monopolizing Frank’s first real vacation in a decade, and going to places Jason very much wanted to see.

“I wouldn’t get in your way,” Jason said. “I’d just go off and, like, see stuff.” Frank’s pen kept scratching on. “You don’t do that in Asia,” he said. “Besides, we’re going to be spending most of our time with a lot of old people who don’t speak English, and you’d be bored.”

“No way.”

Frank sighed again. “Look,” he said. “We need this trip, okay? But we’ll go to Asia another time, and maybe you can come along then.”

In another ten years maybe, Jason thought. He made a screaming face into the video monitor, mouth open in a hideous mask of anguish.

“Okay,” he said. “But you’ll talk to Mom about the Internet, okay? Because if I can’t visit China, I want at least to visit their homepage.”

“I’ll do that,” Frank said. His tone lightened. “By the way, I bought your birthday present today. It’s sitting right here in the office. I think you’re going to like it.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing it,” Jason said. Perhaps the only benefit of the divorce had been that, in the years since, the size and expense of Jason’s presents had increased. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it is.”

“That would spoil the surprise.”

Jason could hear his father’s pen scratching again, so he figured he might as well bring the conversation to an end. After he hung up, he sat in his chair and stared across the sodden cotton field to the line of trees on the distant northern horizon.

No Shanghai, no Hong Kong, no Internet. No California till August.

The Cabells Mound water tower stood beyond the line of trees, the setting sun gleaming red from its metal skin.

Jason looked at the tower for a moment, then at the Edge Living poster on the wall, the extreme skater, armored like a medieval knight, poised on the edge of a gleaming brushed aluminum rail. He turned his eyes back to the water tower.

Yes, he thought.

If he couldn’t escape his fate, he could at least make a name for himself here.

TWO

The ringing signal purred in Nick Ruford’s ear. He felt adrenaline shimmer through his body, kick his heart into a higher gear. He felt like a teenager calling a girl for the first time. It was Manon who answered. His nerves gave a little leap at the sound of her voice. Stupid, he thought. The divorce was two years ago. But he couldn’t help it. She still did that to him.

“Hey,” he said. “It’s me.”

“Hey, yourself,” she said. There was always that sly smile in her contralto voice, and he could tell from her intonation, the warmth in her tone, exactly the expression on her face, the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes, the broad smile that exposed her white teeth and a little bit of pink upper gum. With the gum exposed like that it should not be an attractive smile, but somehow it was.

“You finished with the move?” Manon asked.

Nick looked around the room with its neatly stacked boxes under the eye of Nick’s father, who gazed in steely splendor from his portrait on the wall, and for whose spirit no stack of boxes would ever be neat enough. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m moved in. I just don’t have a place for everything yet.” Don’t have a place for myself yet, he thought. That’s the trouble.

“Is it a nice apartment?”

Nick looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk, the people hanging out on the streets. The windows were closed, and the air-conditioning unit in the window turned up high, so that Manon couldn’t hear the boom box rattling away from the front porch. “Well,” he said, “it’s urban, you know, but it isn’t squalid. And my building is nice.”

And would be nicer. Once he finished wallpapering Arlette’s room, he could move her furniture in there, the mattress and frame that were now occupying most of the living room.

“It was Viondi found it, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I can just imagine.”

Sudden resentment sizzled along Nick’s nerves. Manon always knew how to get to him. I can just imagine. His friends weren’t good enough, his apartment wasn’t good enough, his job wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t good enough.

And it wasn’t like she even meant to put him down, not really. Her damn spooky family had been royalty so long in their little part of Arkansas that it was natural for her to judge other people, judge them without even thinking about it. There wasn’t any malice in it, not really.

“Can I talk to Arlette?” he asked.

“She’s in her room. I’ll get her.”

Over the phone he heard Manon’s heels clacking on the polished cypress floor of their old house. Nick paced up and down next to the dinette set, working off his aggravation. Was it his fault he’d been laid off at McDonnell? Or that a weapons systems engineer was a useless occupation in the aftermath of the Cold War?

He looked at the portrait of his father: Brigadier General Jon C. Ruford, U.S. Army, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in Vietnam and the Soldier’s Medal for service out of it. Author of Sun Tzu and the Military Mind (1985), and one of the first dozen or so black men to rise in the Army to the rank of general officer, clearly destined for higher rank until forced to resign by the multiple sclerosis that finally killed him, four years later, in the V.A. hospital here in St. Louis. You didn’t tell me, Nick silently told the portrait, that I was going to be made obsolete. That I was going to be as much a dinosaur as you are.

Arlette’s young voice brightened his thoughts. “Allo, papa! J’ai des nouvelles merveilleuxl line situation vai a devenu libre!”

Nick tried to find his way through this torrent of half-understood words. His last real exposure to French had been years ago, when his father was stationed at NATO head-quarters in Brussels. “Good news?” he said. “Uhhh… bien.”

“Je vais a Vecole d’ete apres tout! Je vais passer I’ete a Toulouse!” Nick’s heart sank as he deciphered Arlette’s phrases. He glanced into the room he was preparing for her, at the stack of wallpaper and the giltedged mirror… his hand automatically touched the pocket where he carried the gift he’d bought her today, and which he really couldn’t afford. A gold necklace in the shape of a lily, sprinkled with diamonds and rubies, and matching earrings. A real grown-up gift. He had imagined her eyes lighting up as she opened the gift-wrapped box. He had imagined the way she’d gasp in delight and wrap her arms around his neck and breathe her warm thanks against his neck. And now he’d never see it. Now he’d just have to give the package to Federal Express and experience his daughter’s joy only in his imagination.

“That’s great, baby,” Nick said. “That’s wonderful.” He tried hard to keep the disappointment from his voice. “When does summer school start?”

“Right after school ends here,” Arlette said, switching—Nick was grateful—to English. “The school in Toulouse doesn’t open right away, but Mrs. Rigby said she’d take some of us to France for ten days of travel beforehand.”

“That’s wonderful, honey,” Nick said. His hand clenched into a fist, and he wanted to drive it through the newly papered wall.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter shouldn’t spend the summer in France. It was a wonderful opportunity, and she would be staying with a French family and getting a lot of exposure to a world she hadn’t seen, which could only do her good after Manon decided their daughter was going to grow up as African-American royalty in some little half-assed village in Arkansas.

Manon’s family, the Davids, had been royalty for generations. Back before the Civil War they’d been Free Men of Color in New Orleans, and they’d spoken French at home, pronounced their name

“Dah-veed,” and sent their sons to France to be educated. After the war the Freedmans’ Bureau had created a Utopian colony of freed slaves in Arkansas, and the Davids had condescended to be put in charge of it.

Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation—none of their white neighbors really wanted the land—and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.

And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.

But Nick wanted her here. He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone. And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.

He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the giltedged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders. All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.

“How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.

“Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”

If only, he thought, we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a bad war, he immediately corrected, not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.

“You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.

“Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.” I hear Burger King is hiring, he thought.

And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon. Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will. Trying to ignore the constant whirring and buzzing of the cameras, which sounded louder than the cicadas in the surrounding blackjack oaks, Omar put his hand on the judge’s well-worn Bible and swore to uphold the laws of the State of Louisiana and Spottswood Parish, and added a “So help me God!” for the benefit of his friends and of the media. Rebel yells rang out from the crowd. Confederate flags waved in the air, the sunshine turning their color a brilliant red. Judge Moseley held out his hand.

“Good luck there, Omar,” he said.

Omar shook the hand. “Thank you kindly, Mo,” he said. Moseley’s little waxed white mustache gave a twitch. Only certain people in the parish were high enough in caste to call the judge by his nickname, and Omar had just announced that he considered himself among them.

Omar put on his hat and turned to face the crowd of people. He waved to Hutch and Jedthus and a few of the others, and then turned to kiss Wilona on the cheek. People in the crowd cheered. He beamed down at the crowd, and waved some more, and encouraged Wilona to wave with a white-gloved hand. He looked into the lens of a network cameraman.

Got you all, you bastards, he thought.

After the media storm and the court challenge and the recount, after the governor had called him a reptile and the Party had disavowed his very existence, Omar Bradley Paxton had finally taken the oath of office and was ready to begin his term as sheriff of Spottswood Parish.

“Do you plan to make any changes in the department?” a reporter shouted up. Omar smiled down at him. Little weevil, he thought. “I don’t anticipate any major changes,” he said.

“Maybe we’ll save the people some tax dollars by putting regular gas in the patrol cars, ’stead of premium.”

The locals laughed at this. Omar’s predecessor had been prosecuted, though not convicted, for taking kickbacks for keeping Pure Premium in all the county’s cars.

The next question was shouted up by a little red-haired lady reporter with a voice like a trumpet. “Will there be any change in the style of law enforcement here in Spottswood Parish?”

“Well, ma’am,” tipping his hat to the lady, “we do plan to continue giving tickets to speeders and arresting drunks.”

More laughter. “What I meant,” the woman shouted up, “was whether the department will change its racial policy?” Omar’s ears rang with her shrill tones.

“Ma’am,” Omar said, and tried not to clench his teeth, “the racial policies of the department and the parish are determined by law. You have just heard me swear to uphold and enforce that law. I would be in violation of my oath were I to make any changes upholding illegal discrimination.” Take that, you little red-haired dyke, he thought.

“Do you plan,” shouted a foreign-accented voice, “to resign your position as King Kleagle of Louisiana?” Omar recognized a German reporter, one of the many foreigners who were putting their pfennigs into the local economy as they covered his story. He couldn’t help but smile.

“The voters of Spottswood Parish knew I belonged to the Klan when they elected me,” he said.

“Obviously they decided that my membership in the world’s oldest civil rights organization was not an important issue. I can think of no reason why I should resign at this point, not after the voters and the courts have validated my candidacy. My family has lived in this parish for seven generations, and people knew what they were getting when they elected me.”

Rebel yells whooped up from the crowd. Confederate flags waved at the election of the first admitted Klan leader of modern times.

Up your ass, you kraut-eating Dutchman, Omar thought, and smiled.

“God damn,” Judge Chivington muttered. “Where did all these good-looking Klansmen come from?

Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the women.”

The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.

“David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news,

“I believe he just has good genes.”

“The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.

“He was made for givin’ us shit,” the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”

“We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.

“We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”

The President sat with his two closest friends in one of the private drawing rooms in the second floor of the White House. He had never been comfortable with the formal displays of antiques and old paintings so carefully arranged in much of the public White House—he felt uneasy living in a museum, and privately cursed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had found most of the antiques and furniture in storage and spread them throughout the house, so that every time he turned around he was in danger of knocking over a vase once owned by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, or a pot that James Monroe might have pissed in. So he had filled his own apartments with far less distinguished furniture, comfortable pieces which, even if they might date from the Eisenhower Administration, were scarcely refined. Even Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t reproach him for putting his feet up on this couch.

The President settled comfortably into his sofa and reached for his Pilsner Urquell. “So,” he said, “how do you stop Party members from bolting to Omar Paxton?”

“Discredit him,” Stan said.

The judge cocked an eye at the younger man. “Son,” he said, “we’re talkin’ ’bout Louisiana. Nothing makes the Louisiana voter happier than casting a ballot for someone he knows is a felon. If Jack the Ripper had been born in Plaquemines Parish, they’d have a statue to the son of a bitch in the statehouse in Baton Rouge.”

Stan was insistent. “There’s got to be something that’ll turn his people against him.”

“Maybe if you get a photo of Omar there in bed with Michael Jackson,” the judge said, then winked.

“But I don’t guess he’s Michael’s type.”

“What part of Louisiana is he from, anyway?” Stan asked.

The President smiled. “The part where they name their children ‘Omar,’” he said. It was one of the President’s rare free nights. Congress was in recess. Nobody in the world seemed to be dropping bombs on anybody else. There was little on the President’s schedule for the rest of the week other than a visit to an arts festival at the Kennedy Center. The First Lady was in Indiana making speeches against drunk drivers, a cause with which she had become identified—and a politically safe issue, as Stan had remarked, as there were very few voters who were actually in favor of drunk driving, and most of those were too inebriated to find a polling place on election day. Since everything could change in an instant, the President reckoned he should take advantage of the opportunity to relax while it was offered.

It was characteristic of him, though, that his idea of relaxation consisted of spending an evening watching CNN, drinking Bohemian beer, and talking politics with two of his cronies.

The President removed a briefing book on economics that sat on his couch—the G8 economic summit in London was coming up in a few weeks—and then he put his feet up and raised his beer to his lips. “We can hope that Omar over there is just a fifteen-minute wonder,” he said. “He’s just some deputy lawman from the sticks, you know—he’s not used to this kind of scrutiny. He could self-destruct all on his own.” Stan’s spectacles glittered. “So I suppose you won’t be discussing Sheriff Paxton when you have that meeting at Justice next week.”

“I don’t believe I said that.” The President smiled.

“Oh God, you’re not gonna investigate the boy, are you?” the judge interrupted. “You’ve already halfway made him a martyr.” He waved one arm. “What you want to do, hoss, is buy the next election for his opponent, even if the man belongs to the other party. Then Omar there will be a loser. That’ll tarnish his damn badge for him.”

The President looked at the Judge and smiled. Chivington was one of his oldest allies, the heir to an old Texas political family that had once controlled fifty thousand votes in the lower Rio Grande Valley—a hundred thousand, if you counted the voters in the cemeteries. He had spent ten terms in the House of Representatives, and then, having lost his seat in one of those vast political sea-changes that swept the country every dozen years or so—that in his case swept even the graveyards—he’d been a federal judge known for outspokenness on the bench, extravagant behavior off it, and the highest number of calls for impeachment since the glory days of Earl Warren. Since his retirement he’d joined a law firm in D.C. and become an advisor to the powerful—including the young telegenic fellow he’d helped to win the White House.

“I am keeping all my options open in regard to Sheriff Paxton,” the President said.

“That’s fine for now.” The judge nodded. “But you’ve got to take care of that problem before the next election. Trust me.”

The President nodded. “He’s on the agenda.”

Stan looked at the television again, at the picture of Omar Paxton taking the oath. “Made for television,” he said, and his voice was wistful.

“There’s a thousand reporters here,” Omar said later, addressing his deputies in the little high-ceilinged lounge the parish pretended was something called a “squad room.”

“Most of them are going to go home before long, but there’s still going to be a lot of attention placed on this parish.”

“So,” Merle said as he stood by the machine and poured himself coffee. “No incidents.”

“Particularly no incidents that could be described as racially motivated,” Omar said.

“We don’t get to have no fun at all?” Jedthus asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the air conditioner that rattled in the window. “We don’t even get to knock the heads of the niggers we’re used to knocking?”

“We live in a video world,” Omar said. “Let’s remember that half the people in this state have camcorders, and they’d just love a chance to earn ten grand selling the tabloids pictures of one of us whacking some coon upside the head. And then you’d be on network news, and we’d all be so surrounded by federal agents and judges and lawsuits we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

“Damn.” Merle grinned. “For ten grand, I’d sell pictures of y’all.” Merle settled with his coffee onto the cheap sofa. Cracks in its orange plastic had been repaired with duct tape.

“Just take it easy for now,” Omar said.

“By the way,” said Merle, “I heard from D.R. at the Commissary. He was afraid that the election might scare all the little niggers away from the camp meetings this summer.”

“Awww.” Jedthus moaned with mock sympathy.

“Well,” Merle said defensively, “they bring a lot of money into this parish. And a lot of it gets spent at the Commissary. It ain’t like D.R.’s got that much money to spare.”

The Commissary was the general store in Shelburne City, and had retained its name from the time when it was the company store of the Shelburne Plantation, which had once occupied much of the parish. Now it was owned and run by D.R. Thompson, who had married Merle’s sister Cordelia. D.R. was all right, Omar figured. He had slipped Omar some under-the-table contributions during Omar’s campaign and was a prominent business leader, for all that his business was just a general store. So he deserved some reassurance.

Omar nodded. “Tell D.R. we’re not fixing to do anything to the tourists. In fact,” he added, “I’ll talk to him myself.”

“But Omar.” Jedthus looked pained. “When are we going to get to do something, you know, special?” Omar fixed Jedthus with a steely eye. “Wait for the word,” he said. “We’ve got to get these bloodsucking reporters out of here first.”

“Churches and meeting halls burn up real nice,” Jedthus said.

“One damn church,” Omar scowled, “and we’d have the FBI moving in with us for the next five years.” It was one of his nightmares that someone—possibly someone he hardly knew—was going to get overenthusiastic and create what would literally be a federal case.

The whole point of the Klan, he knew, was violence. The Klan often gave itself the airs of a civic organization, interested in charities and betterment—but the truth was that if people wanted civic betterment, they’d join the Rotary.

You joined the Klan because you wanted to be a part of an organization that stomped its enemies into the black alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta. And what Omar had to do now was restrain his followers from doing just that.

“Concentrate on lawbreakers,” Merle advised. “Just do your regular job.” Jedthus scowled. Omar looked at his deputy and sucked his teeth in thought.

The problem was, he had been elected by people looking for change. And change wasn’t exactly in his power. He couldn’t change the last fifty years of history, he couldn’t repair the local economy, he couldn’t alter the power of the liberal media or the Jews or the federal government. He couldn’t change Supreme Court rulings, he couldn’t deny black people the welfare that guaranteed their independence from white control. Least of all, he couldn’t alter the situation by cracking heads. Cracking heads would only make the situation worse. Getting himself or one of his deputies thrown in jail wasn’t going to help anybody.

“Jedthus,” Omar said, “don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the six o’clock news. Remember Rodney King, for God’s sake. That’s all I’m saying.” He winked. “Things’ll change. Our time will come. You know that.”

“Reckon I do,” said Jedthus, still scowling. He cracked his big knuckles. Omar looked at Merle with a look that said You’ll speak to Jedthus about this little matter, won’t you?, and Merle gave an assuring nod.

“I’ve got an interview with somebody from the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “Guess I’ve kept the little prick waiting long enough.”

He left the squad room with a wave. “See you-all at the shrimp boil,” he said. Omar lived in Hardee, twelve miles from Shelburne City, just north of the Bayou Bridge. The house he shared with Wilona was of the type called a “double shotgun,” two long, narrow shiplap homes that shared a single peaked roof. Early in his marriage, when Wilona had first got pregnant, he’d borrowed some money from his father and his in-laws, bought both halves of the house, knocked down some of the walls separating the two units, and created a spacious family home. They’d raised their son David here, and saved enough money to send him to LSU.

Though he and Wilona—chiefly Wilona—had created a pleasant little oasis on their property, with a lawn and garden and a pair of huge magnolias to shade it all in summertime, the rest of the neighborhood was less impressive. The asphalt roads were pitted and badly patched, with grass and weeds springing up here and there. The houses were a mixture of old shotgun homes and newer house trailers, with an occasional clapboard church. Cars and trucks stood on blocks in front yards. Some of the vehicles had been there so long they were covered by vines, and fire ants had piled conical mounds around the deflated tires. Cur dogs lolled in the shade, dozens of them. Laundry hung slack on lines. Old signs were still pegged on front lawns: Omar Paxton for Law and Decency. Confederate flags hung limp in the still air.

Omar waved to everyone as he drove slowly through the neighborhood in his chief’s cruiser. People waved back, shouted out congratulations.

These were the people who had turned out in droves to see him elected, who had overturned the local establishment and put him in office.

Maybe now, he thought, we can get the roads resurfaced.

He pulled into his carport and stepped from its air-conditioned interior into the Louisiana heat. The air was so sultry, and hung so listlessly in the still afternoon, that Omar thought he could absolutely feel the creases wilt on his uniform. He sagged.

People used to work in this heat, he thought. He himself had spent one whole day chopping cotton when he was a teenager, and by the end of the day, when he’d quit, he knew he’d better finish high school and get a job fit for a white man.

Sweat prickled his forehead as he walked the few paces from the carport to his front door. Inside, chill refrigerated air enveloped him, smelling of chopped onion and green pepper. He stopped inside the door and breathed it in.

“Is that potato salad I smell?” he said cheerfully. He took off his gun belt—damned heavy thing—and crossed the room to hang it from the rack that held his .30-’06, his shot-gun, his Kalashnikov, and the Enfield his multi-great grand-father had carried in the War Between the States. Wilona—who pronounced her name “Why-lona”—came from the kitchen, an apron over her housecoat.

“Enough potato salad for twenty people,” she said. “There aren’t going to be more, are they?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t do the invitations.” He kissed her.

Wilona’s expression brightened. “Look!” She almost danced to the coffee table, where she picked up a cream-colored envelope. “Look what else we got!”

Omar saw the address engraved on the envelope and smiled. “I was wondering when this was going to come.”

“Mrs. Ashenden invited me to tea on Wednesday!” Wilona’s eyes sparkled. She was happy as a child at Christmas.

Omar took the envelope from her, slipped the card out of the envelope, opened it. Looked at the elegant handwriting. “Very nice,” he said. “Guess we’re among the quality now.”

“It’s so exciting!” Wilona said. “We finally got an invitation to Miz LaGrande’s! It’s just what we’ve wanted!”

What Omar wanted, actually, was for Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden to die, choke on one of her little color-coordinated petit fours maybe, and for her big white house, Clarendon, to burn to the ground. She was the last of the Shelburne family, and they’d been in charge of Spottswood Parish for too long.

“I’ll have to find a new frock,” Wilona said. “Thank God I have Aunt Clover’s pearls.”

“Your frocks are fine.” Omar put the invitation back into its envelope and frowned. “You’ll buy a new frock for old Miz LaGrande and you didn’t buy one for my swearing-in?”

She snatched the invitation from his hand. “But I’ll be going to Clarendon! Clarendon is different!”

“I wouldn’t buy a new frock for some old biddy who will never give us the vote,” Omar said. “Is there beer in the ice-box?”

“I bought a case yesterday. There was a sale at the Super-B.”

Omar found some Coors Light in the icebox, twisted off the tops of two bottles, and returned to the living room to hand one to Wilona. She was sitting on the couch, paging through a copy of Southern Accents that she’d probably bought the second she’d received Miz LaGrande’s invitation. Wilona took the beer she handed him and sighed. He had neglected to bring her a glass. Wilona had always harbored ambitions above her station, probably inherited from her mother, who was a Windridge but who had done something disgraceful at LSU and ended up living with her shirttail relatives in Shelburne and had to marry a filling station owner.

Wilona longed for the lost world of mythic Windridge privilege. She longed to have tea at Clarendon and join the Junior League and wear crinolines at Garden Club functions. She wanted to be Queen of the Cotton Carnival and every so often invite a select group of friends to a pink tea, where everything, including the food, was color-coordinated, and even the waiter wore a pink tie. Omar knew that none of this was ever going to happen.

Even Windridge pretentions had never extended that far. Instead of the pink teas, there would be shrimp boils, and fish fries, attendance at Caesarea Baptist, and meetings where people wore hoods of white satin and burned crosses. This was Wilona’s destiny, and his. This was the fate to which their birth had condemned them.

And it was the quality, the people like Miz LaGrande, who did the condemning. Whose gracious lives were made possible by the sweat of others, and who somehow, along with their white houses and cotton fields, had inherited the right to tell everyone else how to run their lives. It was traditional, in Spottswood Parish, for anyone running for office to have tea at Clarendon, explain what they hoped to accomplish, and ask for Miz LaGrande’s blessing on their candidacy. Omar had not gone to tea at Clarendon. He had just announced he was running, and then he ran hard. He beat the Party, and then the official candidate, and then the courts. And all the opposition ever managed to do was make him more popular and more famous.

And he did it all without asking Miz LaGrande for anything. And he never would ask her for anything. Not a damn thing. Not ever.

But now Miz LaGrande was fixing to have that tea, after all. And not with Omar, but with his wife. The old lady still had a few brain cells left, that was clear.

“Miz LaGrande has never been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “No Yankee reporter is ever going to ask her for her opinion, I bet. I reckon German television isn’t gonna send a camera crew to Clarendon.”

“Of course not.” Wilona paged through her magazine, sipped on her beer.

“What’s so great about the Shelburnes?” Omar asked. “They come out here from Virginia, they ship in a couple hundred niggers from Africa to do their work for them, and they build a Greek temple to live in. Would you call that normal?”

Wilona looked up from her magazine, her eyebrows tucked in a frown. “Don’t be tacky,” she said.

“She’s trying to get at you because she can’t get at me. She’s trying to get you on her side.”

“Oh, darlin’, it’s just tea. And I’m always on your side, you know that.” She turned the page, and then showed Omar a picture. “Look at that kitchen! Isn’t that precious?” Omar looked at the polished cabinets and the cooking implements, some of them pretty strange-looking, hanging from brass hooks. “It’s nice,” he said.

“It’s precious,” She looked wistfully at the picture, then looked up at Omar. “Can’t we have a kitchen like this? Can’t we have a new house?”

“Nothing wrong with the house we live in now,” Omar said.

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with it,” Wilona said. “I just think we deserve something better after all these years. You’ve got a much better salary now, and—”

“People voted the way they did for a reason,” Omar said. “They voted for us because they thought we were just like them. Because we lived in their neighborhood, because they saw us in their church, because they knew we were born here, because we didn’t pretend to be anything we weren’t. Because we live in a double shotgun that we fixed up, okay?”

Wilona cast a wistful look at her copy of Southern Accents. “I just want some things in my life to be lovely,” she said.

He fixed her with a look. “Wilona,” he said, “it’s too late to pledge Chi Omega now.” She looked away. “That was a mean thing to say, Omar.”

“It’s true, ain’t it?”

“You should shower and change your clothes. We’ll be late for the shrimp boil.” The phone rang. Omar took a pull from his long-neck, then rose from the couch to answer. It was his son David.

“Congratulations, Dad!” he said. “I’m popping a few brews to celebrate!”

“Thanks.” Omar felt a glow kindle in his heart. David was finishing his junior year at LSU and would be the first Paxton ever to graduate from college. Omar had got David through some rocky years in his teens—the boy was hot-tempered and had traveled with a rough crowd—but now David was safe in Baton Rouge and well on his way to escaping the shabby, tiny world of Spottswood Parish. A place that Omar himself planned to escape, rising from his double shotgun home on the wings of a Kleagle. Once you get the people behind you, he thought, who knew how far you could go?

“This is delicious, Rhoda,” Omar said. He had some more of the casserole, then held up his plastic fork.

“What’s in it?”

Rhoda, a plump woman whose shoulders, toughened to leather by the sun, were revealed by an incongruous, frilly fiesta dress, simpered and smiled.

“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “Green beans with cream of mushroom soup, fried onion rings, and Velveeta.”

“It’s delicious,” Omar repeated. He leaned a little closer to speak above the sound of the band. “You wouldn’t mind sending the recipe to Wilona, would you?”

“Oh no, not at all.”

“This casserole is purely wonderful. I’d love it if Wilona knew how to make it.” Another vote guaranteed for yours truly, he thought as he left a pleased-looking constituent in his wake.

He wasn’t planning on staying sheriff forever. He had his machine together. He had his people. The state house beckoned. Maybe even Congress.

How long had it been since a Klan leader was in Congress? A real Klan leader, too, not someone like that wimp David Duke, who claimed he wasn’t Klan anymore.

Omar waved at D.R. Thompson, the owner of the Commissary, who was talking earnestly with Merle in the corner by the door to the men’s room. D.R. nodded back at him.

Ozie’s was jammed. The tin-roofed, clapboard bar past the Shelburne City corp limit had been hired for Omar’s victory party, and it looked as if half the parish had turned out for the shrimp boil and dance. The white half, Omar thought.

Omar sidled up to the bar. Ozie Welks, the owner, passed him a fresh beer without even pausing in his conversation with Sorrel Ellen, who was the editor and publisher of the Spottswood Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper.

“So this Yankee reporter started asking me about all this race stuff,” Ozie said. “I mean it was Klan this and militia that and slavery this other thing. And I told him straight out, listen, you’ve got it wrong, the South isn’t about race. The South has its own culture, its own way of life. All everybody outside the South knows is the race issue, and the South is about a lot more than that.”

“Like what, for instance?” Sorrel asked.

“Well,” Ozie said, a bit defensive now that he had to think about it. “There’s football.” Sorrel giggled. For a grown man, he had a strange, high-pitched giggle, a sound that cut the air like a knife. Being too close to Sorrel Ellen when he giggled could make your ears hurt.

“That’s right,” he said. “You got it right there, Ozie.” He turned to gaze at Omar with his watery blue eyes.

“I think Ozie has a point, don’t you?”

“I think so,” Omar agreed. He turned to Ozie and said, “Hey, I just wanted to say thanks. This is a great party, and I just wanted to thank you for your help, and for your support during the election. Everybody around here knows that there’s nothing like an Ozie Welks shrimp boil.”

“I just want you to do right by us now you’ve got yourself elected,” Ozie said. He was a powerful man, with a lumber-jack’s arms and shoulders, and the USMC eagle-and-globe tattooed on one bicep and

“Semper Fidelis” on the other. His customers cut up rough sometimes—pretty often, to tell the truth—but he never needed to employ a man at the door. He could fling a man out of his bar so efficiently that the drunk was usually bouncing in the parking lot before the other customers even had time to blink.

“I’ll do as much as I can,” Omar said. “But you know, with all these damn Jew reporters in town, it’s going to be hard.”

“I hear you,” Ozie said.

Sorrel touched Omar’s arm. “I’m going to be running an editorial this Saturday on welfare dependency,” he said. “It should please you.”

Omar looked at the newspaperman. “Welfare dependency, huh?” he said.

“Yeah. You know, how we’ve been subsidizing bad behaviors all these years.”

“Uh-huh.” Omar nodded. “You mean like if we stop giving money to niggers, they’ll go someplace else?

Something like that?”

“Well, not in so many words.” Sorrel winked as if he were confiding a state secret. “You’re going to like it.”

“So I’m going to like it, as opposed to all the editorials you’ve been running which I didn’t like.” Sorrel made a face. “Sorry, Omar. But you know a paper’s gotta please its advertisers. And the folks who pay my bills weren’t betting on you winning the election.”

Omar looked at the publisher. “You betting on me now, Sorrel?”

Sorrel gave his high-pitched giggle. “I reckon I know a winner when I see one,” he said.

“Well,” Omar said. “God bless the press.”

He tipped his beer toward Ozie in salute, then made his way toward the back of the crowded bar. Sorrel, he had discovered, was not untypical. People who had despised him, or spoken against him, were now clustering around pretending they’d been his secret friends all along. A couple of the sheriff’s deputies, and one of the jailers, standoffish till now, had asked him for information about joining the Klan. Miz LaGrande was more discreet about it, with her hand-written invitation on her special stationery, but Omar could tell what she was up to. People were beginning to realize that the old centers of power in the parish were just about played out, and that there was a new force in the parish. They were beginning to cluster around the new power, partly because they smelled advantage, partly because everyone liked a winner.

Omar was perfectly willing to use these people, but he figured he knew just how far to trust them. He stepped out the back door into the dusk. People had spilled out of the crowded bar and onto the grass behind, clustered into the circle of light cast by a yard light set high on a power pole. Wild shadows flickered over the crowd as bats dove again and again at the insects clustered around the light. The day’s heat was still powerful, but with the setting of the sun it had lost its anger. Omar paused on the grass to sip his beer, and Merle caught up to him, “I spoke to D.R. about that camp meeting matter,” he said. “I squared it.”

“Thanks,” Omar said. “I don’t want people scared of losing their incomes just ’cause I got elected.”

“Not our people, anyway.”

“No.”

“And I think I calmed Jedthus down. Though it’s hard to tell with Jedthus.” Omar frowned. “I know.”

Merle grinned. “Hey, wasn’t it nice of the Grand Wizard to turn up?”

“Yep.” Omar tipped his beer back, let the cool drink slide down his throat.

“He said he wanted to speak with you privately, if you can get away.”

“Yeah, sure.” Omar wiped his mouth. “Do you know where he is?”

“Talking to some folks over in the parking lot.”

“Right.” He put a hand on Merle’s shoulder and grinned. “We’re doin’ good, ain’t we?” Merle grinned back. “You bet, boss.”

Omar crossed to the gravel parking lot and found the Grand Wizard perched on the tailgate of his camper pickup, talking to some of the locals. He was a small man, balding, who dressed neatly and wore rimless spectacles. He was not much of a public speaker, and even the white satins he wore on formal occasions did little more than make him look like a grocery clerk decked out for Halloween. He had risen to his position as head of the Klan—this particular Klan anyhow—by virtue of being a tireless organizer. He ran things because it was clear that nobody else would do it as well, or as energetically. In his civilian life, he ran a bail bond agency in Meridian, Mississippi.

“Hi, Earl,” Omar said.

The Grand Wizard looked up and smiled. “Damn if it ain’t a fine day,” he said. “I was tellin’ the boys here how good you looked on television.”

“Knowing how to use the media,” Omar said, “that’s half the battle right there.”

“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard looked down at the ice in his plastic go-cup and gave it a meditative shake. “That’s where the Klan’s always been strong, you know. The uniforms. The burning crosses. The flags. They strike the eye and the heart. They makes you feel something.”

“That’s why I took the oath in front of the statue,” Omar said.

The Grand Wizard gave a sage nod. “That’s right,” he said. “Give everyone something to see and think about. The Mourning Confederate. The Cause that our people fought and died for. The Cause that still lives in our hearts. It speaks to everyone here.”

“Amen,” one of the boys said.

“We send signals to our people,” Omar said. “The media and the others read it however they like, but our people know the message we’re sending.”

“That’s right.” The Grand Wizard nodded.

“Merle said you wanted to talk to me or something?” Omar said.

“Oh, yeah.” The Grand Wizard slid off his tailgate to the ground. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse us…”

Omar and the Grand Wizard walked off to the side of the parking lot, where rusty barb wire drooped under the glossy weight of Virginia creeper. The sound of “Diggy Diggy Low” grated up from Ozie’s, where the fiddler was kicking up a storm.

“I was wondering if you could address our big Klanvention on Labor Day,” the Grand Wizard began.

“Sure,” Omar said.

For years, white supremacists had a big Labor Day meeting in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But the Grand Wizard had quarreled with the Stone Mountain organizers, and he’d started his own Labor Day meeting in Mississippi. He was always working hard to get more of the troops to turn out to his Klanvention than to the other meeting.

The Grand Wizard did not march to anyone else’s drum. He was the leader, and that was that. And if other people didn’t like it, they could just go to Stone Mountain.

Which brought to mind another problem, Omar thought. Whenever anyone in the Klan had challenged the Grand Wizard’s authority, the Grand Wizard had succeeded in cutting them off or driving them out of the organization.

Omar was now a good deal more famous than the Grand Wizard would ever be. If he wanted to take control of the entire Klan, Omar could probably do it.

But he didn’t want to become the new Grand Wizard. King Kleagle of Louisiana, as far as Omar was concerned, was quite enough work. Earl could stay in his office in Meridian and organize and speechify and push papers forever, and with Omar’s blessing.

Omar wondered if the Grand Wizard understood this. He should find the moment, he told himself, and reassure the man.

“You come to the Klanvention,” the Grand Wizard was saying, “we’ll get our message on TV. And every time we get media attention, we get more members.” The Grand Wizard grinned out into the night. His teeth were small, like a child’s, and perfectly formed. “The liberal media do us a favor every time they run a story on us. It’s only when they ignore us that people lose interest.” Omar nodded. “I noticed that there were a lot of people in this parish that didn’t care to know me till I got on television. It’s like being on TV makes you more real somehow.”

“It’s that symbol thing, like I said earlier. They see you standing up for something.” Omar suspected there was more to it than that, that maybe television had changed people’s ideas of what was real, but he was more interested in what the Grand Wizard was getting to. There wasn’t any reason to take Omar aside just to be talking about speaking engagements.

“I’ve got some other requests for you to speak, but they’re not from our people, so I can’t judge.”

“Just forward ’em to me,” Omar said.

“I’ll do that.”

The Grand Wizard paused, hands in his pockets, and glanced around.

“I met a fella the other day you might want to talk to,” he said. “His name’s Knox. Micah Knox. You ever heard of him?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

The Grand Wizard’s foot toyed with the butt-end of an old brown beer bottle half hidden in the creeper.

“He belongs to a group called the Crusaders National of the Tabernacle of Christ. He’s got some interesting views about, you know, the situation. Very well informed. He’s on a sort of tour of the country, and you might want to have him give a talk to your boys here.”

Omar vaguely remembered hearing about the Tabernacle of Christ—they were some kind of Western group, he thought—but there were so many little groups on his end of the political spectrum that he had trouble sorting one out from another. It was hard enough just keeping track of the sixty-odd groups that called themselves the Klan.

“He doesn’t charge or anything,” the Grand Wizard added, misinterpreting Omar’s hesitation. “He’s just trying to make contacts.”

“He can come by if he wants, I guess,” Omar said.

“This isn’t a matter for an open meeting or anything,” the Grand Wizard said. “No cameras, no reporters. Just you and Knox and Merle and a few of the boys you best trust.”

Omar gave him a sharp look. “Earl, is there a reason this Knox is under cover?” The Grand Wizard gave a little shake of his head as he rolled the old beer bottle under his sole. “No, no. What I’m saying is that this boy is radical. People who haven’t already given their lives completely to the Cause might misunderstand his message. We wouldn’t want that. That’s all.”

“Okay, then,” Omar said. “He can say whatever he likes, as long as he’s not planning on doing anything radical while he’s here.”

The Grand Wizard kicked the beer bottle. Restrained by the creeper, it hopped about three inches, then came to a stop, edge-side up. The Grand Wizard sighed, then began to amble back toward Ozie’s. “I’ll be in touch about him,” he said. “I don’t know what his schedule is, exactly.”

“Fine.”

“By the way,” the Grand Wizard said, “I saw that new sign—Hess-Meier Plantation Farm.”

“Inc.,” Omar added. Then, “Jews. Swiss Jews.”

“They buy the gin, too?”

“Of course,” Omar said. “If they took their cotton to someone else’s gin, they wouldn’t make so many sheckels.” Omar shrugged. “Well, at least there’s another gin in the parish, down to Hardee, and that one’s American.”

The Grand Wizard shook his head. “Wrightson couldn’t at least sell out to Americans?”

“Hess-Meier was top bidder. Now half the agricultural land in the parish is owned by the fuckin’ Swiss.”

“It isn’t our country anymore.” The Grand Wizard sighed.

It never was, Omar wanted to tell him. It’s always been owned by the wrong people, who traded land and money back and forth within their circle, and the people who lived on the land and worked it never figured in their calculations.

Omar and the Grand Wizard walked up to Ozie’s back door. Wilona was there, a plate in her hand. She was talking to Deb Drury, whose husband ran the towing service. “This fruit salad is so special,” she said. “I can taste something different in it.”

“Black cherry Jell-O,” Deb said. “Fruit and pecans, and Co-Cola.” Wilona leaned close to Deb and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to impose,” she said, “but could you send me the recipe?”

Omar looked at his wife and gave her a wink.

Just treat the people like they exist, he thought, and next thing you know, they put you in charge.

THREE

Jason craned his neck up at the water tower and pushed his helmet back to give himself a better view. It looked much bigger now that he stood at its base, a metal mushroom that bulged out over Jason’s head, blocking out a sky filled with low dark clouds. Its surface was painted a glossy shade of vegetable green that Jason had never seen on any object not owned by the government. It was as if Cabells Mound had tried to disguise their water tower as something natural, as a peculiarly shaped tree, and failed miserably. The tower stood in a soggy little park planted with overgrown hibiscus. Pumps whined from the cinderblock wellhouse next to the tower. There didn’t seem to be any human beings in the vicinity. Jason hopped off his bike and examined the metal stair that spiraled to the top of the tower. A tall metal pipe gateway stood at the bottom of the stair, with a gate made of chain link secured by a padlock. There was a half-hearted coil of barbed wire on the top, and more chain link on the side, obviously to keep someone from climbing over the lower part of the stair.

Nothing that would stop a determined, reasonably agile young person. Jason had always thought of chain link as a ladder. The barbed wire had not been extended along the side of the stair, in itself almost an invitation. And from the state of the chain link, it was obvious that he was not the first person to think of climbing the tower.

That gate and the barbed wire, though, would complicate the dismount at the end of his ride. He couldn’t do a fakie or anything fancy at the bottom, he’d just have to jump off the rail. And he’d have to jump off onto the stair, because if he jumped off onto the soft turf under the tower, he might get hung up on the fence that was draped over the side of the stair.

Jumping off onto the stair might be a good thing, he finally decided. He could use the mesh of the gate to brake his remaining momentum. It would be like running into a net.

Jason parked his bike under the stair, hooked his skates around his neck by the laces, and then swarmed up the chain link and dropped onto the metal stair. He ran a hand along the pipe of the guard rail: smooth, round, painted metal, a little scarred by rust. Nothing he hadn’t coped with before. He hiked up the first fifty feet or so, took the rail in his hands, and shook it, tried to find out if it was loose. It was solid. It would make good skating.

Jason’s heart was racing as if he’d run five miles instead of climbed fifty feet. A delicate sensation of vertigo shimmered through his inner ear.

He took a breath and looked out over the town, laid out in perfect, regular rectangles that marched down to the levee. On this dark, cloudy morning, Cabells Mound looked drab. The older buildings were frame and often set on little brick piers, and the newer homes tended to be brick and set on slabs or conventional foundations. There was a little trace of the South in the white porticoes with their little pillars that were grafted onto the front of otherwise unremarkable buildings. Elms and oaks stood in yards. The river ran right up to the levee here because there was a landing, and because a little to the north there was a lumber mill that loaded its product onto barges. The river was an uneasy wide gray mass, very full, at least halfway up the side of the levee. Jason realized with a touch of unease that Cabells Mound, were it not protected by the levee, would be under water.

Because the river was so high it was carrying a lot of junk with it, and Jason could see an entire cypress tree floating past, a splayed clump of roots at one end and still-living foliage at the other. Three crows sat in the green branches and watched the world with curiosity as it moved by. Black against the opalescent surface of the water, a tow of sixteen barges made its way in the opposite direction, heading for St. Louis.

There were very few people to be seen. It was Saturday morning, and many, perhaps most, of the residents were off at the shopping malls of Memphis or Sikeston.

He turned south, saw the green of the old Indian mound beneath its tangle of timber, the peak of his house above the line of trees that marked the end of the cotton field.

Jason was above it all. His heart was racing in his chest like a turbine. He looked down at the ground below, and though he wasn’t even halfway up the tower, the green turf seemed a long distance away. Maybe, he thought, the very first time he went down the rail he shouldn’t start at the very top. He could start partway down, just to get his reflexes back and make sure he could handle the curve that would tend to throw him off the rail as he gathered speed.

He went down a few stairs, until the distance to the ground did not look quite so intimidating, and then sat on one of the metal steps and took off his sneaks. He leaned around the metal center post of the tower and threw his shoes to the bottom of the stairway. They hit the mesh door at the bottom in a ringing splash of metal. Jason checked his skates, make sure the wheels spun freely and the brakes worked, then laced them on. Stood, adjusted his knee, elbow, and wrist armor, put a hand on the rail so that he’d know where it was.

Usually, when he was going to ride a rail, Jason would start on the flat, get some speed and momentum, and then jump onto the rail for his grind to the bottom. But now, on the tower, he was going to have to jump straight up onto the rail from a standing start, which meant that his balance was going to have to be perfect right from the beginning.

His pulse crashed in his ears. His vision had narrowed to the length of that metal rail that spiraled down out of sight to the bottom.

A gull sailed overhead, cawing.

Jason bent, jumped up, kicked. Landed on the rail—yes! —clicked in!—back foot athwart the rail in the royale position, front foot bang on the center of the rail, arms out for balance. And began to move. Down—yes! —arms flailing at first, then steadying. Rear skate grinding down the rail, checking his speed. He leaned opposite to the direction of the curve, enough to counter for centrifugal force that threatened to throw him off—yes! —he needed only a slight lean, he wasn’t going very fast.

The ride was over in mere seconds. Yes! He threw himself off the rail, spun neatly in air, landed fakie—a cool landing after all, even if it was only a few feet—he spread his arms and let himself fall backward into the chain link. It received him with a metallic bang.

“Yes!” he yelled as he bounced off the mesh. He readied himself to spring back to the top.

“Reckon not,” said a very grownup voice.

He told himself afterward that he should have just sprinted for the top, skates and all, hopped on the rail, and wheel-barrowed to the bottom. That would have been Edge Living. That would have been the way to go. Then the experience that followed would have been worth it.

But instead he turned around and caught sight of the policeman, and then he froze.

“Get your ass off public property,” said the cop.

His name was Eubanks, a skinny little bald guy with a big voice, and he seemed to specialize in following Jason around and telling him not to do things. It was Eubanks who told him he couldn’t skate in the courthouse parking lot, or on the streets—old and potholed though they were—or on the sidewalks, which were even more beat up. Eubanks had even chased him off the parking lot at the Piggly Wiggly, and the city didn’t even own the Piggly Wiggly.

“Get your ass over here!” Eubanks yelled.

Jason turned, trudged up a few steps to get clear of the chain mesh, and prepared to hop over the rail to the ground below.

“Get your damn shoes,” said Eubanks.

Jason turned, trudged down the stairs, picked up his sneaks, and headed up the stairs again. He vaulted over the chain link to the ground, and stood waiting for instructions.

“Get into my car.”

Jason walked as directed, went behind some hibiscus, and saw Eubanks’s prowl car just sitting there, in a position to spring out at any speeders racing down Samuel Clemens Street. The car had probably been there all along.

Bastard was probably taking a nap, Jason thought.

“Into the back,” Eubanks said.

“I’ve got my bike over there,” Jason said.

“It can stay there.”

“It’s not locked or anything.”

“Not my problem,” said Eubanks.

Jason got in the back of the prowl car, behind the mesh partition where the real criminals rode. Eubanks got in the front and started the car.

“You’d of broke your neck if you’d fallen off,” Eubanks said. “And your mama would have sued the town.”

“She would’ve said it was karma,” Jason said.

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Eubanks said, and gave a little disparaging laugh. “Your mama’s the New Age Lady.”

My mom’s the New Age Lady, Jason thought in despair. That’s probably what the whole town calls her.

Eubanks pulled out onto Samuel Clemens, then followed it to the highway. Jason recognized some kids from the school at the corner, in the gravel parking lot of the Epps Feed Store. Among them was the boy who, the other day, had taken such pleasure in announcing that Jason’s mom was going to Hell. He spotted Jason in the back of the prowl car, nudged his friends, and pointed.

The kids silently watched as Eubanks waited to make his left turn onto the highway. Jason stared back. Then he raised a gloved hand and waved. Gave a little smile.

Might as well get whatever mileage he could out of the situation.

He wasn’t arrested or anything. Eubanks took him home, past where Mr. Regan was buffing his bass boat, then pulled to a stop in front of Jason’s house. Mr. Regan watched while Jason, still in his helmet, skates, and pads, marched across the lawn to the front porch with Eubanks as his escort. Batman the boxer barked loud enough to call the attention of the entire Huntley family to the spectacle. Jason’s mom met Jason and Eubanks at the door.

Eubanks explained the situation. Violation of public property, he said. Town ordinance against skating in the town, he said. Upsets the elderly residents, he said.

Could of broke his neck, Eubanks said. You’d of sued the town.

After the police officer left, Catherine Adams confiscated Jason’s skates and armor, and locked them in the trunk of her car. On Monday, she said, she would take them to work and leave them there, at the greenhouse, until Jason “demonstrated a more responsible behavioral system.” Then she went up to his room, took down all his skating posters, and threw them in the trash. After which she paused for a moment, trying to think of another privilege she could revoke. It was difficult, because Jason didn’t drive, had no friends here, and never went out.

“No Internet till the end of the month,” she decided. A satisfied smile touched her lips when she saw his stricken look.

“I need to get my bike,” he said.

“Walk,” she said, and left his room in triumph, closing the door behind her, so that he couldn’t even have the satisfaction of slamming it.

Major General J.C. Frazetta rose at dawn to the sound of mockingbirds chattering outside the window and had a hard time resisting the impulse to head for work early. It was the general’s first day on the job, not counting the ceremony the day before, in which command was officially transferred by the outgoing commander. Frazetta was too full of nervous energy to go back to sleep.

So Frazetta prepared herbal tea, fried some boudin that had been purchased while driving through Louisiana to Vicksburg a couple days earlier, and prepared a soufflé cockaigne, with Parmesan and Gruyere cheese. It was too aggravating simply waiting for the soufflé to rise, so the general sautéed some Italian squash, fried some leftover boiled potatoes with onions and green pepper, and threw some popovers in the oven along with the soufflé. Made coffee for Pat, the spouse, and sniffed at it longingly as it bubbled from the Braun coffeemaker. And thought about making coffee bread, because excess energy could be usefully employed in punching down the dough as it rose.

The general looked at the clock. No, not enough time.

Pat, who was not a morning person and who generally ate nothing before 11:00 A.M., was nevertheless sensitive to Frazetta’s moods and ate a full share of the preposterous meal.

The only comment offered by Pat on all this activity was to retire to the workshop and pluck out “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” on his fiddle.

Which was all, General Jessica Costanza Frazetta had to conclude, that she deserved. Exactly on time, to the minute, 0900 hours exactly, General Frazetta greeted her secretary. Her driver, the experienced Sergeant Zook, seemed to know to the second how long it would take to deliver her to her new headquarters.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, General Frazetta.” The secretary smiled. “Can I get you some coffee?”

“Not exactly.” The general opened her briefcase, produced a box of tea bags, Celestial Seasonings Caribbean Kiwi Peach. She handed the box to her secretary. “Would you mind bringing me a cup of this?”

“Not at all, General.”

Major General Jessica C. Frazetta, U.S. Army, closed her briefcase, thanked her secretary, and walked into her office. Closed the door behind her.

And grinned like a chipmunk. She walked to the map of the Mississippi Valley that hung on one wall. Her domain. She had just been appointed to command of the Mississippi Valley Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The President had appointed her to the presidency of the Mississippi River Commission, the outfit that with the MVD ran all federal projects on the river, but that would wait on the approval of Congress.

It was a great job. She was, for all intents and purposes, in charge of the entire Mississippi River and its 250 tributaries. The drainage basin included all or part of thirty-one of the lower forty-eight states—and also a part of Canada, which was a bit outside of her jurisdiction. All of the federal works on the river—the cutoffs, levees, dikes, revetments, spill-ways, and reservoirs were in her charge. All the dredges, the dams, the floodwalls, and locks.

All the responsibility. Which didn’t bother her at all—she liked being in charge. Where she told the water to go, it would go, or she would know the reason why. She turned to the photograph of the President on the wall behind her desk and gave it a wave.

“Thanks, boss,” she said. And tossed her hat across her desk and onto the brass hat stand behind. By the time her secretary came with the tea, Jessica was seated behind the desk and was halfway through the stack of congratulatory messages and faxes that had arrived from all over the world: from Bob in Sarajevo, from Janice in Korea, from Fred in some place called Corrales, New Mexico.

“Thanks, Nelda,” she said, and sipped at the tea.

“Does it taste okay?”

“Tastes fine. It’s only weeds and water, after all.”

Nelda smiled. “We’re mostly Java drinkers around here.”

“Never cared for it myself.” Jessica preferred not to explain that she avoided caffeine on the theory that it might exaggerate her hyperkinetic manner, which she had been told, occasionally at length, was not her most attractive characteristic.

“Anything else I can do?”

“Can you get me Colonel Davidovich?”

“He’s out at the Riprap Test Facility at the moment, but I can page him if you like.” Jessica considered. She wanted private meetings with all her senior staff, as well as the officers who commanded the six districts that made up the division. Davidovich was her second-in-command, and she wanted a meeting with him first.

“No—don’t bother. You wouldn’t happen to know when he’ll be in his office?”

“By eleven-thirty, General.”

“I’ll call him then.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She returned to the congratulatory notes. Then, because it was hard to sit still, she opened her briefcase, took out the photograph of her husband Pat Webster, and put it on her desk. In the photo Pat was leaning back in an old armchair, sleeves rolled up, boots up on a table, playing a banjo. Next to Pat, she placed the photo of her parents, taken on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and the photo of her sister with her husband and children.

There were empty picture hangers on the wall where her predecessor had hung various photos and certificates, and she was able to fill the blank spaces with her own. Jessica had an impressive number of credentials to display, even considering her rank and number of years in the service. One reason for the large number of degrees was the Army’s uncertainty, when she graduated from Engineer Officer Candidate School, as to exactly what to do with a female military engineer. There weren’t very many precedents. Her arrival at her first assignment—in Bangkok, of all places, scarcely then or now a bastion of progressive feminist thought—had been greeted by jeers and catcalls from the enlisted men. But her fellow officers, who appreciated the presence of a round-eyed woman, were supportive enough, though perhaps a little uncertain as to the social niceties. That uncertainty—what was her place, assuming she had one at all?—resulted in the Army’s apparent decision to keep Jessica in school as much as possible. Which resulted in her getting a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia and another master’s degree in contract management and procurement from the Florida Institute of Technology. She had graduated from the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Engineer Basic, Construction, and Advanced Courses, Army Command and General Staff College, the Medical Service Corps Advanced course, and even the Naval War College. She belonged to the National Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Army Engineer Association, and the Society of American Military Engineers. The end result of all this education, the overwhelming weight of her credentials, was that it had become very difficult to refuse her any job that she really wanted.

She really wanted the Mississippi Valley Division. And now she had it.

And she was only forty-one years old.

She paused, a framed certificate still in her hand. She had run out of picture hooks. Apparently she had a few more credentials than her predecessor.

She laughed. This was probably a good sign.

Cellphone plastered to her ear, Jessica nodded goodbye to her driver, Sergeant Zook, and walked past Pat’s red Jeep Cherokee to the new house, the one with the rustic wooden sign marking it as the dwelling of the Commander, MVD. She could hear Pat playing “Hail to the Chief” on his fiddle. She opened the door, and the fiddle fell silent when Pat saw she was on the phone. “If you’re sure,” she said, “that water at the levee toe is from the rain, and not—” she said as she marched across the polished wood floor of their new house, dropped her heavy briefcase onto the couch, then spun and tossed her hat at the wooden rack by the front door.

Missed. Damn.

Pat already had the place smelling like home, which meant wood shavings and glue. She finished her conversation and snapped the phone shut. A mental image of Captain Kirk folding his subspace communicator came to her, and she grinned. Then she bounded across the room and let Pat fold her in his arms.

“I take it that things went well,” he said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Careful of the fiddle.”

Pat Webster was a tall, bearlike Virginian, and Jessica’s second husband. Her first marriage, in her early twenties, had been a catastrophe—a pair of obsessive, overachieving bipolar maniacs was not a recipe for success in a relationship—and by the time she’d met Pat, she’d pretty much given up on anything but transitory romance with colleagues temporarily stationed at the same base.

It was her friend Janice, when they were both stationed at Army Material Command in Alexandria, who talked her into going to a contra and square dance, overcoming her expectation that she would be encountering women in Big Hair and crinolines. Instead Jessica found herself quickly defeated by the fast-moving patterns, the allemandes and honors and courtesy turns and chains, and she ended up at the head of the dance hall, talking to the members of the band in between numbers. And there, with his fiddle and mandolin, in his jeans and boots and checked shirt, was Pat Webster, laconic and smiling. She watched his hands as he played, the long expert hands that made light of the intricate music that he coaxed so effortlessly from his instruments.

She fantasized about those hands all the way home. And, a week or so later, when they finally touched her, she was not disappointed.

She found that Pat had a career, but to her utter relief, it was one that could stand uprooting every couple years as one assignment followed another. He was a maker of fiddles, guitars, dulcimers, and mandolins—in fact, a genuine hand-made Webster guitar sold for up to a couple thousand dollars, depending on the model, and until Jessica got her general’s star he brought more money into their marriage than she. He brought with him the pleasant scent of seasoned wood, of varnish, of glue. He brought her his calm, measured presence, a balance to her own unbridled energy. He brought her the eternal gift of music.

Inspired, she had even learned to dance squares and contras.

“So how are the levees up in Iowa?” Pat asked.

“Holding. It was the private levees that broke.”

It had been all Jessica could do to keep from flying north to check the situation personally. But her deputy at Rock Island assured her that there was no significant danger to Corps structures, and she concluded that she would be better employed in Vicksburg, getting her teams up to speed for when the flood waters headed south.

“Private levees,” Pat mused. “Funny we’ve still got so many of ’em.”

“The Corps budget will only do so much,” Jessica said. Corps levees were built to a standard height and width, faced with durable Bermuda grass, and protected by revetments from the river’s tendency to undermine them. But much of the Mississippi’s flood plain was still guarded by levees privately built by local cities, towns, and corporations, and they built what they could afford—to Corps standards when it was possible, but often not.

In the catastrophic floods of 1993, when ten million acres had gone under water, it had been the private levees that had broken, and the Corps levees that stood. When the city of Grand Forks had been submerged by the Red River in the spring of ’97, it had been because the city’s politicians had been reluctant to raise tax rates in order to provide proper flood protection. Upstream, Fargo, with its more realistic government and higher rate of taxation, stayed dry.

Jessica loosened her collar and jacket, headed for her room to change. “What’s for dinner?” she asked.

“There seem to be a lot of breakfast leftovers,” Pat said, following. Jessica felt her cheeks grow hot. “Sorry,” she said. “I was nervous.”

“I could tell.”

“What else is for dinner?”

“I could make some tuna fish sandwiches. You used up practically everything else in the refrigerator.”

“Tuna is fine.”

Pat was actually a perfectly adequate cook whose capabilities extended well past tuna sandwiches. But he didn’t care about cooking, he didn’t throw his whole being into it, the way Jessica did, to leave the palate delirious and the kitchen a litter of dirty pots and pans.

Pat saved all that for music.

And, strangely enough, for Jessica.

“We could go out, maybe,” Pat said. “And celebrate your ascension.” Jessica shook her head. “Too much homework,” she said, and looked at the heavy briefcase she’d brought home.

“Okay. Tuna fish it is.”

Jessica followed him into the kitchen. “Why do people say tuna, fish?” she asked. He looked at her over his shoulder as he opened the pantry door. “Maybe because a tuna is a fish?” he suggested.

“But people don’t call a salmon a salmon fish, or a grouper a grouper fish, or a bass a bass fish.”

“You’ve got a point there.” He took the can of tuna from the shelf, glanced over the unfamiliar kitchen for an opener. He cocked an eye at her. “Didn’t you say you’ve got some homework?” He hated it when she hovered over him in the kitchen. “You bet,” she said, and headed for her briefcase.

Cover your six o’clock, as the chopper pilots said. Or, in the language of the marketplace, cover your ass.

Jessica Frazetta knew that there were two natural forces that could sneak up on her and wreck the Mississippi Valley, and her career along with it.

The first was flood. The second was earthquake.

Flood and the Corps of Engineers were old acquaintances. The Corps had been fighting the river since well before Colonel of Engineers Robert E. Lee, in the 1850s, had been sent to Missouri to prevent the Mississippi from crabbing sideways into Illinois and stranding St. Louis inland, a mission he had performed with his usual efficiency.

Practically all of the Corps’ efforts in the Mississippi went into controlling the water and keeping river navigation safe. It was to secure these goals that all the levees had been built, the dams, the locks, the revetments, the spillways. For these reasons the Corps had planted lights and buoys, dredged the harbors, charted the depths, pulled snags by the thousands from the bed of the river. But the second, far more dangerous threat was that of earthquake. Jessica knew that an earthquake of sufficient force could undo hundreds of years of the Corps’ efforts in an instant. The levees, the revetments, the dams, the spill-ways… all gone at once.

The Mississippi Valley’s last big earthquakes had occurred from 1811–12, when there were less than three thousand people of European descent living west of the Mississippi.

The world of those three thousand, and the thousands more Indians who lived in the area, was torn asunder by three major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks. The first of the quakes had been estimated as 8.7 on the Richter scale, the second-largest quake in all human history. Fifty thousand square miles were devastated, and millions more suffered damage. Fissures tore open every single acre of farmland. The Mississippi ran backward for a day. Islands vanished, while other islands were formed. Dry land submerged, and the bottoms of lakes and rivers rose dry into the sunlight. The Missouri town of New Madrid, where the quakes had been centered, had been destroyed, and the Mississippi rolled over the remains. The quakes were so powerful that they smashed crockery in Boston, caused panicked people to run into the streets in Charleston, rang church bells in Baltimore, and woke Thomas Jefferson from sleep at Monticello.

The New Madrid fault had remained active through much of the nineteenth century, providing the country an occasional jolt, but it had fallen quiet during the twentieth. And it was during the twentieth century, when memories of the quake had faded, that the Corps built most of its structures in the Mississippi Valley.

In the years since the New Madrid quakes of 1811–12, millions of people moved into the danger zone. Major cities, like St. Louis and Memphis, were built close to the fault, supported by a complex infrastructure of bridges, dams, reservoirs, power stations, highways, and airstrips, few of which had been built with earthquake in mind. Industries flourished: factories, chemical plants, and refineries had been built on the yielding soil of the Mississippi Delta. Billions of dollars in commerce moved up and down the river every year. Millions of acres of farmland, fertile as any in the world, stretched from the rivers, protected by man-made levees.

It had only been in recent decades, when geologists began to study the mid-continental faults, that the true scope of the danger was known. The New Madrid fault, and other faults beneath the Mississippi, were still seismically active, although the vast majority of its quakes were so small as to be undetectable by humans. To judge by historical precedent, a much larger and more destructive earthquake was inevitable.

If the faults should snap again, Jessica knew, millions of lives, and billions of dollars in property, were in jeopardy. The Corps had been striving to reengineer its public works so as to make them resistant to earthquake damage, but the procedure was far from complete.

In her briefcase, Jessica had the Corps’ earthquake plan, released in February 1998, as well as reports concerning the regular inspections of Corps facilities and reports relating to the floods in Iowa. The floodwaters would inevitably channel into the Mississippi from Iowa, and would inevitably test Corps structures farther south as they progressed to the Gulf.

Jessica looked at the stack of papers, at the heavy report.

The earthquake, she thought, was in the indefinite future. The floods were now. She put the earthquake plan back in her case.

She would deal with it when she had the time.

“I’ve got a proposition for you, Vince,” Charlie said, “and—I warn you—I am talking risk here.” Vincent Dearborne steepled his fingertips and looked at him with a little frown. His eyes, however, were not frowning, not frowning at all… Charlie could see a glimmer of interest, and the little lines around the eyes were smiling. Vincent Dearborne, Charlie knew, had been hoping that this moment would come.

“Tennessee Planters and Trust,” Dearborne said in his cultured Southern voice, “is, generally speaking, risk-averse.”

“I know, Vince,” said Charlie, and smiled with his white, dazzling, even, capped teeth. “But you’re not averse to taking a little flyer now and again. When I told you about those straddles two years ago, you backed my play.”

“Yes. And I wondered if doubling the bet was sound. But…” The glimmer in Dearborne’s eyes increased in candlepower. “You made us twenty-four million dollars.”

“Twenty-four million dollars in three days,” Charlie reminded.

“And almost gave me an ulcer.”

Charlie laughed. “You can’t fool me, guvnor. You can’t get an ulcer in three days.” Dearborne grinned and tilted his noble graying head quizzically, the way he always did when Charlie let his East London origins show. It was as if he were amused and puzzled both at the same time. Here was this strange Englishman who talked like a movie character, and who could make tens of millions in a matter of days, and who amounted to… what?

It was as if Dearborne couldn’t figure Charlie Johns out. Charlie came from… some other place. Whereas Dearborne’s place in the world was not only clear, it was on display. His office was a monument to mahogany and soft brown leather, subdued lighting and brass accents. Golf trophies stood on display in the corner—golf was a safe sport. Certificates and awards were ranked elsewhere on the walls. Chamber of Commerce, Lions, United Way—safe organizations. There were pictures of ancestors on the walls: judges, legislators, bankers. Safe ancestors. His pretty wife, displayed in photographs, wasn’t too pretty, and his well-scrubbed children, pink-cheeked in school uniforms, looked—well—risk-averse.

Tennessee Planters & Trust was a safe place to put your money, and Dearborne was a safe director for a bank to employ. That was the message sent by the office decor, by the Memphis skyline visible through the office windows, by the ten-story Planters Trust building of white Tennessee field-stone, even by a bright turquoise pattern in Dearborne’s tie, which was laid to rest next to another, more tranquil shade of blue, like a moment’s bright, shining thought being smothered beneath a reflex of conformity. But Charlie, who prided himself on his discernment, knew that Vincent Dearborne was not quite as sound as his calculated environs made him out to be. A little over three years ago, when Charlie was working in New York for Salomon Brothers and Tennessee Planters Securities flew him out for a secret weekend meeting with the directors, Dearborne had taken Charlie not to the office but to the country club, and made him part of a foursome with two of the other directors.

It had been Dearborne who suggested the wager, “to make it interesting.” Charlie was hopeless at golf. He’d always thought it a sport for wankers, and he’d never really learned to play; but he knew this was a test, so he flailed his clubs with a will until at last the horrible afternoon was over and he could relax in the clubhouse with Boodles and tonic.

And he could whip out his pen and write Dearborne a check for four hundred and thirty-two dollars, and hand it over with a smile.

Dearborne’s eyes had gleamed, then. Just as they were gleaming now.

The conclusion that Charlie had drawn was that Dearborne liked a fling, but was only happy with a sure thing. Before Charlie’s arrival on the scene, Dearborne’s idea of a fling had been to spread some money on the Cotton Exchange.

Charlie played golf with Dearborne on a regular basis now. And regularly wrote him checks afterward. He considered it a form of investment.

An investment that he hoped was about to pay off.

“Since those straddles,” Charlie said, “you know I’ve played it safe, no flyers. Too many conflicting signals, mate. Too much vega in the market, right?”

“Vega.” Dearborne repeated, the gleam in his eyes fading, going a little abstract. “You mean volatility.”

“Almost. Vega is the impact of changes in volatility,” Charlie said. Too much jargon only confused the man. “I’ve made a nice profit for you, but it was nickel-and-diming, a little bit here, a little bit there. I wasn’t taking any flyers—I was, as you say, risk-averse.”

Dearborne nodded.

“I was waiting for a clear signal.” Charlie grinned, twisted the diamond ring on his finger. “This morning, just as the markets opened, Carpe Diem gave me the signal.”

“Ah.” The gleam returned to Dearborne’s eyes. “Your new program,” he said. The convoluted business of trading options required a lot of calculations, and traders depended on sophisticated computer programs to mash the numbers and spew out the complex answers they needed to make their trades. The programs had names like Iron Butterfly and Jellyroll, and they could assemble raw data at lightning speed and configure awesomely complex combinations of options. Carpe Diem was of the next generation of trading programs. A trading whiz Charlie knew from his days at Salomon’s had slipped Charlie a beta test version of the program. His program was ahead of the market. And he planned for his purchasing to be ahead as well.

“What’s Carpe Diem telling us?” Dearborne asked.

“The economy’s going to tilt into recession,” Charlie said.

“People have predicted that for years.”

“Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later,” Charlie said. “The question is when. Carpe Diem says it’s going to happen now. And because this last boom has lasted so long, I think the recession’s going to be a big one.”

He raised a stub-fingered hand and ticked off the points on his fingers. “Unemployment is down and wages are up, which means a season of inflation unless the Fed acts to cool the economy. Consumer price rises were only point-one percent in April, but that comes off a big rise over the holidays. The visible trade deficit went up over the holiday season, like always, but it hasn’t dropped much in the months since.”

“The Dow is up,” Dearborne offered.

Charlie flashed his grin again. “Those blokes are always the last to know,” he said. “Here’s the two factors that Carpe Diem thought were significant.”

He ticked off numbers on his fingers again. “There’s a debt bomb about to go off in Europe. Public debt is out of control in the old East Bloc—well, that’s normal—and it’s normal for Belgium and Italy, too. But in Germany? Public debt is over sixty-five percent of GDP. Britain’s at over fifty percent. And even the Dutch, for God’s sake, have been on a spending spree.” Charlie dropped his hands, leaned forward, gave Dearborne a look from his baby blues. “It can’t last, and when the European economy slows, the effects are going to be worldwide.”

“Secondly,” Charlie said, “Carpe Diem noticed a lot of action on certain commodities—copper and other strategic minerals, because China is sucking up titanic amounts of raw materials as they modernize. And there’s a lot of volatility on foodstuffs, because those floods in Iowa are making people nervous. But what Carpe Diem is really interested in is this weird speculative trend on certain fringy areas of the commodities market. Coffee—why speculate in coffee when there’s stable supply and demand? Also natural gas, food-stuffs, certain petroleum products. Which means the money is moving out of the market’s center, as it were, possibly because people are getting uneasy about it.” Dearborne looked worried. “You’re not suggesting that we speculate in these commodities ourselves, are you?”

“No way, guv,” Charlie said.

He knew Dearborne liked it when he called him “guv.”

“If I studied the way those commodities were moving,” Charlie said, “I reckon I could make you some money, but it wouldn’t be worth the aggravation. Those trades are powered by insecurity and ignorance, which means that you can’t predict them, and if you can’t predict what’s going to happen, that’s not investment, that’s gambling.” Charlie flashed his brilliant capped teeth again. “That’s why we’ve got tools like Carpe Diem—to help reduce the risk.”

Dearborne was reassured. “Does Carpe Diem have any other points to make?”

“The Chinese have the world’s largest supply of foreign currency reserves, but they’re going to have to sell in order to pay for their economic expansion. So will the Taiwanese, because their economies are linked to the Chinese. I expect that the Japanese will begin to sell as well, to finance the amount of debt they’ve acquired as a result of the bailouts they’ve indulged in.”

“Dollar down.” Dearborne nodded, absorbing this lesson.

“Which would normally be good for exports, except that due to the other problems I’ve mentioned, the world won’t be able to afford so very many of our exports in the next few years.” Leather creaked as Dearborne leaned back in his chair. The gleam in his eyes burned with a new intensity. “So what are you planning to do?”

“I’m positioned nicely in T-bonds, which I expect to rise soon and make us a packet. But that’s the short run.”

“Long-term?”

“Well.” Charlie grinned. “There’s that risk I was telling you about.”

“Ahh,” Dearborne said.

“Once the rest of the world catches up to Carpe Diem—and that won’t be long, perhaps even hours—I expect the markets are going to take a tumble. Which is fine as far as we’re concerned—we can make some nice profits right then. But the best course, the way interest rates are running right now, is to sell the market short, and not lose our nerve.”

Dearborne looked thoughtful. If he was sure the market was going to fall, it would be cheaper to let Charlie, right now, sell a fistful of short positions that reflected that belief. Dearborne’s face turned sulky as a new factor entered his thoughts. “Vega,” he said, remembering the jargon for once.

“Vega’s the fly in the ointment, all right,” Charlie said. “When the market starts to slide, volatility’s going to go up. Which will mean an increased chance for profit, but it also means the administrators at the various exchanges are going to get nervous and start calling on us to meet our margins.” Margin calls were the bane of the trader’s life, particularly if he traded on the Mercantile Exchange in Chicago, which had a system called SPAN that continually calculated margins and could call for margins right in the middle of the trading day, meaning that the trader would have to find money for the margin call right then, instead of having overnight to make the arrangements.

“How many short futures are we talking about?”

“Well, guv…” Charlie took a deep, theatrical breath. “For the plan that Carpe Diem and I suspect will maximize our profit, we’ll need a fund of between forty and fifty million.” Involuntarily, and without Charlie’s theatricality, Dearborne echoed Charlie’s intake of breath. “Jesus God,” he said.

Charlie threw up his hands. “Understand that there are ways of making this less risky,” he said. “Every time the market moves, I’m going to be hedging our position. Every minute, practically. And in a volatile market, I’m going to be able to make a lot of short trades that should keep our cash flow positive.”

“Jesus God,” Dearborne said again. He gave a glance at his bowling trophies, as if for reassurance.

“What if the Fed acts?” he said. “What if the Federal Reserve decides to lower interest rates?”

“I don’t think it’ll happen,” Charlie said. “The chairman’s too bloody conservative. But just in case, I’ll hedge by shorting Eurodollar puts. If the Fed cuts interest rates, then Eurodollars will rise and I’ll make a packet when the puts fall in price.”

“Mmm,” Dearborne said as he steepled his fingertips and sought communion with his trophies.

“Vince,” Charlie said as he leaned forward and sought Dearborne’s uneasy eyes with his own eyes of brilliant blue. “I’ve been a good lad these two years—I’ve been risk-averse—haven’t yet steered you wrong.”

“True,” Dearborne admitted. But the acquisitive glimmer in his eyes was dull, uncertain.

“You know what Carpe Diem means in Latin, Vince?” Charlie asked. “Seize the Day. This day must be seized, and soon. Because if we seize it now, I can give you profits that would make those twenty-four millions look like your kids’ milk money.”

Dearborne bit his lip, fiddled with something on his desk. Looked anywhere but at Charlie. Move, you bastard! Charlie thought. You think I spent all those hours playing golf just for the fun of it?

Slowly, a calculating gleam returned to Dearborne’s gaze.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll make some calls.”

Before Charlie even left Dearborne’s floor at the Tennessee Planters & Trust, he used his cellphone to call Deborah, his assistant at Tennessee Planters Securities, and had her begin to place his trades. Then, from the old Otis elevator as it creaked its way to the ground floor, he called Megan Clifton, who ran the “back room”—the settlements office—at TPS.

“Megan Clifton.” Her low, cool Southern voice sent a little tremor up Charlie’s spine.

“It’s on, love,” Charlie said.

The low, cool voice dissolved at once into high-pitched excitement. “Oh, yeah! Whoa, Charlie, you’re a genius’.”

“Better get ready for a long, busy day,” Charlie said. “But for later, I suggest that we call the caterers now and have them deliver dinner for two to my place. There’s some Bollinger in the fridge, and I can warm up the spa.”

“I will make the call as you suggest, sir.” Megan’s cool professional voice was back. The elevator moved uneasily back and forth as it adjusted itself to the ground floor, overshooting a little bit each time. The doors opened and revealed that the elevator was at least a half-inch too high.

“I’ll see you in a few minutes,” Charlie said, and snapped the phone shut as he stepped into the lobby. He didn’t work in the same building as the bank. His own office, and that of TPS, was in a different building, a modern steel-and-glass office building two blocks away. The Glass-Steagal Act prevented banks from dealing in securities, and Tennessee Planters & Trust was nothing if not law-abiding. Tennessee Planters Securities—originally Bendrell Traders—was a separate firm which the bank just happened to control, having picked it up for the cost of its office furniture after Bendrell went smash in the wake of Black Friday in 1987. The bank also just happened to provide TPS with most of its operating capital, including that which TPS used for proprietary trading and for meeting its margins. The separation between the bank and TPS was more than just physical. There was a difference in culture as well, between the cautious, conservative bankers in their mahogany offices, and the traders with their glass-walled cubicles and blinking computer monitors. The bankers were wedded to prudence, to circumspect accumulation of capital, to safety. The traders were after the money, and knew that big profits occasionally required big risks. The bankers dealt with long-term loans, with gilt-edged stocks, with thirty-or twenty-year mortgages. The traders’ deals sometimes were constructed so as to last for mere hours. Successful bankers drove Lincoln Towne Cars and belonged to the country club. Successful traders drove Ferraris and spent every night at the disco.

Successful traders also made a lot more money than successful bankers. Charlie Johns had done his best to bridge the gap between the two cultures. He knew that traders could offend their conservative bosses with their flash and their style—not to mention their profits—and so he took care to present a facade that was more in harmony with Tennessee Planters & Trust than with TPS. He bought his suits from the same tailor that Dearborne used, though his natural style ran more toward Armani. His Mercedes E320 was a calculated degree less ostentatious than Dearborne’s S500. Ferraris and Lamborghinis were too flash, even if he didn’t drive them to work. He joined Dearborne’s country club, and he lost regularly to Dearborne at golf. He had lunch with Dearborne once a week, and consulted Dearborne on trades that he had the authority to make on his own, just to make Dearborne feel his opinion mattered.

And he made Dearborne money. Which was probably better than anything at cementing their relationship.

And, if Carpe Diem and Charlie’s own instincts were anything to go by, he was about to make Tennessee Planters enough money to gold-plate their office building.

By the time Charlie swept into the TPS offices, he had called his three largest clients and convinced them it was time to commit to some major action.

He grinned as he boomed through the big glass doors and gave a jaunty wave to the salesmen and traders sitting behind their desks. Once he was at his desk, he shorted nearly forty million dollars of S&P contracts. As a hedge, he shorted ten million dollars’ worth of Eurodollar puts, just as he’d promised Dearborne he would.

It was a great way to make a living.

FOUR

“Hey,” the kid said. “Heard you got arrested.” He slid into the seat opposite Jason at the cafeteria, plopped down his plastic tray with his plastic-looking sloppy joe.

“Not arrested,” Jason said. “Not exactly.” He was trying to remember the kid’s name. All he could think of, for some reason, was “Muppet,” which did not seem likely. Could it be Buffett? Moffett? He had curly dark hair and a compact, strong body, and wore a striped shirt, boots, and jeans. The cafeteria juke box, which had been playing something by Nirvana, switched to Garth Brooks. One of the little cultural contrasts that came with the neighborhood.

“What did you do to get Eubanks after you?” Muppet asked. His two friends, one of whom was the son of the Epps who ran the feed store, plunked their sloppy joes down on either side of him.

“Took a ride down the water tower on my skates. Down the rail, I mean.”

“Cool,” said Muppet. “I’d like to do that.”

Young Epps grinned at him. “If you did that, Muppet, you’d break your neck.” His name actually was Muppet, Jason thought. How about that?

“You would have died,” Jason confirmed. “I’ve been skating for years, and it was a rough ride.” The others looked at him with a degree of admiration. Jason realized that they thought he had ridden the whole tower, all the way from the top.

He thought about telling them the truth, then immediately dismissed the idea. After all, he would have ridden the entire rail if he had the chance.

“What did Eubanks do to you?” asked Epps.

“Yelled at me some. Took me home so my mother would yell at me, too.”

“That bastard,” said Muppet. “He’s so wack.”

“Wack,” Epps agreed. “He spends his day following teenagers around hoping to catch us at something. If he followed grownups around that way, he’d get his ass kicked off the force.” Jason looked at the dark-haired kid sitting across from him. “Is your name really Muppet?” he asked. Muppet gave an embarrassed grin. “That’s what everyone’s been calling me all my life,” he said. “But my name’s really Moffett. Robin Moffett.”

“Robin?” His other friend, the one who wasn’t Epps, seemed surprised. “Your name is really Robin?”

“Yeah.”

“Robin Hood? Robin Redbreast?”

“Robin Lawrence,” Muppet said.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Jason.

Muppet looked at Jason. “What did your mom do?” Muppet asked. “Did she ground you or anything?”

“No. She took away my skates, and she said I couldn’t use the Internet for the rest of the month.”

“That’s tough. ’Course, there’s no place to skate anyway.”

“I know. And I can sneak some online time when my mom is at work, at least for email, but I can’t stay online too long, because if she calls there’ll be a busy signal, and if the busy signal goes on too long, she’ll know what I’m doing.”

“You and me can come over to the store,” said Epps, “and use the computer there. It would have to be after hours, though.”

Jason looked at him. “You’ve got an Internet connection?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Jason smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

His future, suddenly, did not seem quite so bleak.

And all he had to do to secure a place in the community was to take a little ride in a police car.

“Verily I say unto you,” said Noble Frankland, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He nodded into the microphone as if it were a member of an audience.

“That’s Matthew 24:2. What could be plainer than that?”

He leaned closer to the microphone, raised his voice. “Not be left one stone upon another! That is the voice of our Lord! And what he said came to pass, for in the Year 70 a.d. the Temple was thrown down!”

Frankland scanned the rows of dials and potentiometers before him. His station, steel-walled, bolted down to a concrete foundation he had poured himself in Rails Bluff, had been designed so as to be operated by only one person. He and his wife Sheryl were the owners, the chairmen, the programming directors, the disk jockeys, the talk show hosts, the advertising managers, the engineers, the electricians, and usually the janitors as well. They did it all, together with a little volunteer labor from Frankland’s parishioners.

Money rolled in, from the syndication of his daily Radio Hour of Prophecy program, and from the Tribulation Club members across North America. But it was all spent as soon as it arrived, on maintaining the station and his small church, on the supplies necessary to survive till the arrival of God’s Kingdom, and on the weather-proof, disaster-proof bunkers he’d dug on his ten Arkansas acres in which to house the supplies till the Tribulation Club members needed them.

Frankland leaned closer to the mic again.

“And what else did our Lord tell us that came to pass?” he asked. “Wars and rumors of wars!—verse six. Famines, pestilence, and earthquake!—verse seven. Betrayal!—verse ten. False christs and false prophets!—verse twenty-four. And that’s only the Book of Matthew! You want more? Let’s look at Luke 21:10!”

His stubby, powerful fingers ran down his notes, ticking off the quotations one by one. Citations spilled from his lips in a cascade of verses, interpretations, commands. The Spirit was rising in his heart. It usually took him a while to get warmed up. It was harder when he was talking on the radio, because he didn’t have the feedback from a live congregation before him. Alone in the steel-walled studio, Frankland had to imagine the audience before him, imagine their responses to his calls, the love they sent him, a love hot as a flame, that he used to kindle the Spirit.

“The Word of God isn’t hard to understand!” he said. At his sudden burst of volume the needles jumped on the peak level meters, but this was no time to drop his voice. “It’s in plain language. Just read it, Mr. Liberal God-just-wants-us-all-to-get-along! I’ve got news for you—God doesn’t want us to just get along! God doesn’t want us to be nice! God doesn’t think that obedience to the Antichrist is just another lifestyle choice! God wants us to obey his word!” The needles on the level meters had just about maxed out, and Frankland, concerned that some of his listeners’ speakers, if not their eardrums, might be about to explode, decided it was time to attempt sweet reason. He lowered his voice.

“But let’s just look at the evidence,” he suggested. “Let’s look at Matthew 24:29. ‘Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light…’ And then afterward, in verse 30, the Son of Man appears in the heavens, in clouds of glory, to bring His Kingdom!

“What do you think of that, Mr. Pre-Tribulationist Rapture Wimp!” Frankland realized he was shouting again. “The Tribulation happens first! It’s right there in plain English! And if you don’t believe that, if St. Matthew isn’t good enough for you, let’s look at the Book of Revelation!” The hell with his listeners’ eardrums! What was more important, eardrums or God’s Word?

The Spirit had taken command, as the Spirit so often did. And as the Spirit rolled on, the words flowing from his mouth without his conscious thought, he wondered if his colleague, Dr. Lucius Calhoun of the Pentecostal Church of Rails Bluff, was by any chance listening and resented the characterization of

“rapture wimp.” He hadn’t meant to offend Dr. Calhoun, to whom he sold air time at a bargain rate and with whom he agreed on just about everything but the timing of the Rapture in relationship to the Tribulation, but when the Spirit took hold, Frankland just couldn’t hold back. It was all so obvious.

“The arm of prophecy smiteth the wicked,” he said, “and exalted shall be the prophet among his kind.” In the back of his mind, Frankland wondered if that last phrase was actually in the Bible. The unfortunate truth was that he was not very good at memorization, a fact that put him at a serious disadvantage as a preacher. The stock of biblical quotes he could summon from memory, without the notes he usually kept handy, was not very large.

Perhaps that is why he had not made it to the big time. His Radio Hour of Prophecy did well enough, and he was thankful that he had been allowed to bring people to God in this way, but he had always hoped to graduate to television, to gain the huge audience that worldwide syndication could bring. Yet despite several attempts to make the leap to video, he’d never quite managed it. He looked all right—he was a big sandy-haired man, and his overbite wasn’t too large a problem, even though it did have the tendency to make him look like a chipmunk—but the sad fact was that he and television had somehow never connected.

The closest he’d come had been a three-month stint as a TV preacher in El Dorado, Arkansas, before his move to Rails Bluff. First, the program director had asked him to vary his message a little, to talk about something other than the end of the world. Frankland had tried to comply, but somehow when the Spirit seized him, the Spirit swerved right back to the Apocalypse.

And the other problem was the biblical quotes. “You can’t go on making this stuff up,” the program manager had told him. “People in Arkansas know their Bible.”

It had been useless to explain that it had been the Spirit talking, not Frankland. Who was the program manager to question the words of the Spirit? But Frankland’s Video Half-Hour of Prophecy was canceled anyway.

“The seals produce the trumpets and the trumpets pro-duce the bowls!” he proclaimed. “What could be clearer? What do you have to say to that,” he demanded, “Mr. Roman go-to-confession-once-a-week-and-every thing-will-be-fine Catholic?”

People needed to wake up, that was for sure. The signs were all around. The world was going to come to an end, practically any second, and the people were going to need instruction as to what to do, how to behave.

He didn’t know how long he would be permitted to continue. Once the Tribulation started, the servants of Satan were bound to try to silence him.

“And who is this prince?” he asked. “The prince is the little horn of Daniel! It’s all so clear!” Frankland was ready for the servants of Satan when they came. He had a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun clipped under the desk in the front office. There was a pistol in a drawer here in the studio, and another in his truck.

And, in the concrete bunkers he’d poured for the members of the Tribulation Club on the back of his property, there were a lot more surprises for Satan.

Cases and cases of them.

He brought his hand down on the control panel in front of him, thumping it with his fist as if he were banging a pulpit. Needles leaped on the displays.

“What more do you people need to know?” he demanded.

Charlie sipped at his Cohiba, letting the smoke of the Cuban cigar roll over his tongue. He let the taste soak into his palate for a moment, then tilted his head back and exhaled.

“And the hell of it is,” he said, “we’re going to make a fortune while the economy of the entire world goes straight down the tubes. Firms will go bankrupt. Careers will be wrecked. Millions of people will lose their jobs. We may even see a war or two when economies crash in the Third World.”

“You mean like in Arkansas?” Megan said.

Charlie grinned and sipped his Remy Martin. Under the water of his spa, he slid the bottom of his foot along her smooth bare thigh. She smiled back, then took a taste of her own cigar. They were sitting opposite one another in the spa on Charlie’s second-floor deck, overlooking his yard and pool. Pulsing jets of water massaged their backs, feet, and legs. Wind chimes rang distantly over the throb of the spa’s pumps.

Charlie tilted his head back against the plastic headrest, looked at the few stars visible through high banks of cloud. “There’s a market in everything nowadays,” he said. “Currency, commodities, metals, bonds. There’s a market in markets.” He tilted his head down and looked at her. “With all our short positions, we’ve just placed our bets on the market in catastrophe.”

Megan gave a low laugh. She leaned forward, held out her crystal glass. “Here’s to catastrophe,” she said.

He bent toward her, touched his glass to hers. A crystal chime sang out, hung for several seconds in the air.

Charlie leaned further, pressed his lips to hers. Her lips were moist, tasted of smoke and desire. A throb of pure lust pulsed through his nerves. For a half-second he considered flinging his drink and cigar off the edge of his patio and throwing himself on Megan, but on reflection he decided to wait. Timing, he found, was everything.

He leaned back, let the water jets pulse against his back, sipped again at his drink. Megan rescued a strand of her pinned-up auburn hair that had trailed into the water, then looked back at him with dark eyes.

Charlie adored Megan, and it was because he could look into her and see a reflection of himself. Someone who had come from nowhere—from worse than nowhere—and turned herself into someone else by talent, by energy, and by pure force of will. And the process wasn’t over. Megan was improving her vision of herself all the time.

Charlie loved Megan not for herself, but for her potential.

Megan was born in the Ozarks—Charlie didn’t know just where. Her father was a trapper, for God’s sake, someone who spent most of his life in the woods and mountains looking for animals to skin. Her mother was an alcoholic, abusive when she wasn’t drinking herself unconscious. Megan had clawed her way out of that environment through pure courage and determination, got her college degree, worked her way up in the TPS back room to the point where she was in charge of the whole settlements office. Changed her hick accent to the smooth tones of a Southern beauty queen—now he could only hear the Ozarks in her voice when she got excited. Megan had remade herself.

And so had Charlie. The son of an East London machinist, the product of the local Mixed Junior School, he had ridden a talent for maths to London University, to a first-class degree in mathematics, to jobs at Morgan Stanley in London and Salomon in New York—both American firms where his lowly origins and Cockney accent were not a liability—and now to head of the front room at Tennessee Planters Securities. Along the way he’d had his teeth capped, his jaw-line reshaped, and his straight, mousy brown hair had gone blond and curly.

He hadn’t managed to lose his Cockney accent the way Megan had lost the tones of the Ozarks, but he’d worked out ways of turning the accent to his advantage.

In Megan he had found a kindred soul, someone who understood that sometimes a person just needed to be someone else, could decide who that person was to be, and then become that person. The way Charlie figured it, there was a kind of empty space, a virtual space in the world where a successful person was destined to be. He planned to occupy that space.

So far, it was working very well.

Charlie adjusted his body to the massaging jets that throbbed behind his back. He tasted his cigar again and looked at Megan over the smoke that curled from his mouth. “Life is good, innit?” he said. Megan blew a kiss at him over the rim of her brandy snifter, and gave voice to the two words that were her motto. “No guilt,” she said.

“Why be guilty?” Charlie sipped his cognac. “We’re not going to cause the recession.”

“For every winner in the market,” Megan said reasonably, “there is a loser. For every fortune we make, a fortune is lost somewhere else. People who aren’t as smart, or as quick, or are just unlucky.” Charlie smiled. This was the settlements officer talking. In the end, for Megan everything had to balance. It was her job to catch his mistakes. Trading was fast and manic, and sometimes in the heat of action traders placed the wrong orders or entered the wrong figures. It was not unknown for traders to attempt fraud and deception. It was the task of the settlements office to catch those mistakes on the fly, to make sure that all the accounts were balanced at the end of the day. The job required skill, intelligence, instinct, and tact.

All skills that Megan possessed in abundance. But her instinct to bring columns of figures into balance did not necessarily encompass all financial reality.

“That’s not exactly true, is it?” Charlie said. He leaned back and waved his cigar at the sky. “The market isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said. “Because wealth isn’t limited. The market can be used to make more wealth. And then everyone benefits. A rising tide lifts all boats, as that great statesman John F. Kennedy used to say.”

Megan examined her cigar. “That’s not what’s going to happen in this case, Charlie. We’re fast and smart, and we’re going to take money from the people who are slow and stupid.” Charlie shrugged. “They can afford to lose,” he said, “or they wouldn’t be betting at all.”

“No guilt,” she said.

He rolled the firm gray ash off the end of his Cohiba. He and Megan had formed their—they called it a “partnership”—about three months before, after dancing around their mutual attraction for the better part of a year. They kept their relationship a secret from the others at Tennessee Planters, not because there was a company policy against it, but because people might begin to wonder what an overly intimate relationship between the front and back offices of TPS might mean in terms of what Megan actually reported to their superiors about Charlie’s trades. She had, theoretically, the power to suppress information about his activities. If he was in hot water, she could cover for him. She hadn’t ever done any such thing, of course. But Charlie liked to think that, if he ever really needed it, he could count on her to do just that.

He knew that she trusted him. He was managing her portfolio for her, had made her some money. Was about to make her enough money so that she could retire on her capital now, at the age of twenty-eight.

“I keep thinking of my dad,” he said. “What he’d make of all this.” He made a gesture that took in his house, the spa bubbling on the deck, the swimming pool glowing on the lawn below, the cigar and the cognac and the money in the bank.

“We lived in a little semidetached, you know?” he continued. “Recessions always hit us hard. When I was growing up my dad was laid off half the time. And even when he was working, my mum would meet him at the factory gate at five p.m. on Fridays, so she could get her week’s allowance before he could spend it at the boozer. All the wives did that. Imagine what it was like for the men—walk out of your place of work into this mob of women, all waiting for the money you’ve had in your hand for only a few minutes. He got to see his money for the length of time it took him to walk to the gate, and then it was gone. Year after year.”

“At least your dad had a paycheck,” Megan said. She shifted in her seat so that her foot could slide along his inner thigh. Pleasure sang along his nerves, and he caught his breath. He could see a wicked little smile touching the corners of Megan’s lips.

She wasn’t interested in his family history, in fact thought his affection for his family improbable. She hated her family and saw no reason why anyone else should like his. And so, to avoid the topic altogether, she was playing a game of distraction. But Charlie preferred to demonstrate that he could not be distracted so easily. Other men might be led by their dicks, but Charlie’s moves were more calculated. Despite the fire that quickened his blood, he leaned back and kept his voice deliberately casual.

“My dad’s a union man,” Charlie said. “Always votes Labour. Gets tears in his eyes whenever he hears the ‘Internationale.’” Charlie shook his head. “I’d buy ’em a nice place in the suburbs, but what would my dad do? He’s still at the factory, still doing his job—doesn’t want to commute to work. I’d buy them a car, but they don’t drive.”

Megan’s foot slid up one thigh, crossed his abdomen—Charlie’s belly muscles fluttered at the touch—and then her foot descended the other thigh. Charlie felt heat flowing into his cock. By a pure act of will he kept his voice from breaking.

“So,” he said, “I got my family some nice furniture, and in case I stroke out on the trading floor, I’m leaving them a packet in my will. God knows what they’ll do with the money. Buy a new telly, maybe. Take a trip to Disney World.”

Megan’s foot rested lightly on Charlie’s thigh. “My will leaves everything to my buddy Maureen,” she said. “My family can go fuck themselves.”

“What?” Charlie grinned at her over the rim of his glass. “You’re not leaving anything to me?” Megan’s foot slid up his thigh again. Fire sang along his nerves. Deliberately he caressed her own inner thigh with his instep.

“If this works,” Megan said with a little gasp, “you’re not going to need my money.”

“What do you mean if?” Charlie said. She had reacted to his underwater caress: that meant he had won. He rested his cigar and drink on the edge of the spa, then moved forward, slid weightlessly between Megan’s legs as a wave foamed over his shoulders. He kissed her smoky lips. A smile tilted Megan’s mouth as she arched lazily against him. Water spilled from her breasts. She cocked up one leg and ran her heel up his lower spine.

“Why, Mistah Johns,” she said, in her best Southern-deb voice, “ah am so totally astonished by such gallant attention directed toward li’l old me.”

She tipped her head back and finished her cognac in one swallow. A tiny rivulet of brandy coursed from the corner of her mouth and ran down her left breast. Charlie licked it off, felt the fire on his tongue. He licked up to her neck, tasting sweat and chlorine, and feasted for a moment on her throat. Megan laid her cigar carefully on the edge of the spa, then gave her brandy glass a careless toss over her shoulder, off the deck. Charlie heard the little splash as the glass hit the swimming pool below. He kissed her again, and she drove her lips up into his. Her long fingernails combed his hair. He was already fully erect, and could feel her coarse pubic hair grating against the underside of his cock. He cupped her breasts, held them up out of the water. Foam sluiced down her flesh as he kissed her breasts, tongued the nipples. Her fingernails expertly slid up his back, bringing a shiver of sensation along his spine.

“Mistah Johns.” Still in her Southern belle voice. “Ah do believe that you are growing ovah-excited by the thought of all those Yankee dollahs.”

She took his head in her hands and pressed him to her breast. Her nipple was swollen with pleasure, and he drew it into his mouth, flicked the rubbery bud with his tongue. She gave a tremulous sigh, a bit theatrical—still playing Scarlett O’Hara. “Oh my,” she said in a lazy voice, “it is certainly my impression that you are taking advantage of mah generous and yieldin’ nature.”

“Sorry, love,” he paused to say. “But I can’t do Rhett Butler.”

“You could try Leslie Howard,” she suggested.

Charlie couldn’t remember who Leslie Howard was, a film star or a character in Gone with the Wind or some other bloke entirely, and he really wasn’t in the mood to do imitations anyway. He kissed her again, teasing her breasts under water, stroking them from the armpits to the nipples. He could taste the tang of salt on her lips. She encouraged him with a little sigh.

At least she’d dropped the Scarlett O’Hara routine.

He stroked her ribs, her thighs. Megan nipped his lower lip with her sharp front teeth. He slipped his hand between their two bodies, between her legs. Her lips had a different texture—normally velvet-soft, under water they were more rubbery. She shifted her hips to give him room to stroke her. One of her hands dipped under water, and Charlie felt her long fingernails scratching up the underside of his cock. He arched his back, gasped. She gave a demonic little giggle and enclosed him in her fist. He slid the tip of his middle finger between her lips, felt warmth and readiness. Megan gave a little moan, close to his ear.

“I don’t think you’re exactly immune to the lure of those dollars yourself,” Charlie said. He slid his finger up to her clitoris, heard her sudden gasp, saw her bite her lip. He couldn’t tell if the reaction was pain or pleasure—the problem with sex under water was that the natural lubricant tended to get washed away.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Her dark eyes challenged him from under her brows. “I’m all right for anything you care to try, Mr. Johns,” she said. The Southern-deb voice was gone, and the Ozarks twang had slipped back into her voice.

He positioned her on the molded fiberglass seat—she was near-weightless under water—and slid himself into her. Her softness folded around him, a half-degree warmer than the spa-water. She gave her demonic little giggle again, and her knees clamped hard on his ribs. He adjusted his position with little thrusts.

Megan drove her pelvis into him with a sudden urgent thrust that almost sent him floating away. The water made him so buoyant that he’d bob away like a cork if he wasn’t careful. Charlie clamped his hands on the sides of the spa and met her thrusts. Her ankles crossed behind his back and locked him to her.

She drove herself into him, hips pumping, breath hissing past her teeth, her eyes closed to slits. She could usually trigger her first orgasm right away. Water splashed up, fountained over the edge of the spa. Megan gave a series of low, guttural cries as she came, her strong thighs clamping down hard on his ribs. Charlie scarcely had to move at all.

Megan’s orgasm passed, and she lay back against the spa’s side and let her breath sigh out as she tried to relax. The grip of her thighs eased. Charlie looked down at her and smiled at the way her breasts, more buoyant than the rest of her, bobbed in the surging water. She looked up at him with a ragged grin, then reached for her cigar with shaking fingers. She inhaled luxuriously, held the smoke for a moment, and then formed her mouth into an O and blew out into the space between them. The blue smoke mushroomed off his chest, floated up past the chest hairs that were plastered to Charlie’s skin. He inhaled deeply through his mouth, bringing the tart flavor of the Cohiba across his tingling palate. He thrust gently, making certain she was comfortable, then increased his movement. Megan gave a little cry of surprise at the post-orgasmic intensity of her pleasure. She set the cigar on the edge of the spa again. Charlie lengthened his thrust. The intense look came back to Megan’s face; her breath began to hiss again. Charlie grabbed ahold of her hips and lunged into her. She met him with a grin and a gleeful half-shout, a kind of sexual battle cry. He drove furiously into her, his fingers slipping beneath her to cup her buttocks, lifting her off the formed fiberglass seat. She clasped her arms around his neck. Charlie lifted her just above the lowest of the several water jets set into the back of her seat. Both gasped as a jet of water pulsed over their genitals. Her breath hissed in his ear. Frantically he licked her neck and shoulder. Her hips began the sequence of furious lunges that signaled the approach of orgasm, and Charlie increased the fury of his thrusts. The spa poured a jet of bubbling pleasure along the underside of his cock. A river of sweat ran down his face. Water leaped out of the tub, poured onto the deck around them. His orgasm triggered first, and hers a half-second later.

Afterward he ducked his head under water to wash away the sweat and clear his head. He rose, shaking water from his bleached locks. Megan was perched half out of the water, letting the night air cool the glistening water drops on her shoulders and breasts. Strands of her pinned-up hair had straggled into the water, and wet hanks of hair curled about her shoulders like dark serpents.

“We’ll do it slow next,” Charlie said.

“If I’m not too sore,” she said.

He grinned at her. “I’ll kiss and make better.”

“Ha ha,” she mocked. She looked around for her cigar, then bent to peer over the edge of the spa. “Shit,” she said. “I dropped my smoke.”

“I’ll get it.”

He vaulted out of the spa, water pouring off his body, and found her Cohiba where it had rolled next to a potted ficus. The night air was wonderfully cool on his overheated body. He sipped at the cigar, found it had gone out. He reached for his lighter, puffed it into life, and handed it to her. He clamped his hands on the deck rail and looked at the glowing pool below. Well-being sang through his blood. “I feel like Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle,” he said.

“If you do that yell,” Megan said, “I’m leaving.”

“Maybe I’ll just go find an alligator and fight him hand-to-hand.” On sudden impulse he jumped up on the rail, swayed back and forth on his bare feet. Megan’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Get down from there!” she said.

“We’re going to make money!” Charlie shouted into the night. He pounded his chest with one hand while the other arm, extended, helped him balance. “Tarzan make big bucks!” he shouted in Weissmuller-inspired pidgin English.

“You’re crazy!” Megan said. The Ozarks rang in her voice. “Your neighbors are going to—”

“Tarzan is Lord of Jungle!” Charlie yelled. “Tarzan swing big dick in world of finance!”

“You’re out of your mind, Charlie!” Megan yelled back.

He bent at the knees. He could feel a wide grin spreading across his face at the thought of what he was about to do.

“You’ll kill yourself!” Megan shouted, guessing what was on his mind.

“Tarzan live forever!” Charlie shouted, and leaned forward, toes digging into the wooden rail for one last push as his body sailed out into the night.

“Charlieeee…!” Megan called.

The wind flowed through Charlie’s hair as he flew, straight as an arrow, downward to the pool. The cool waters received him as their lord.

FIVE

“Damn. Look at that. River’s sure high.” Viondi paused at the top of the crumbling concrete ramp. Nick Ruford passed him and kept walking down the ramp. “There’s floods up north, you know.”

“Hadn’t heard,” Viondi said.

“Haven’t been watching the news, huh?”

“Been workin’ double shifts remodeling those old buildings down on Chouteau. Ain’t had time to watch the news.”

Nick paused at the water’s edge. The swift river rippled purposefully across the boat ramp, as if it resented the presence of the concrete. There was a splash as the wake of a towboat raised a wave that splattered Nick’s shoes. He stepped back.

Viondi Crowley walked down the worn ramp in his sandals, paused to put down his creel, then stepped into the water, washing the dust from his big, square toes.

“River’s a cold motherfucker today,” he said.

“Careful. Or you’ll fall on your ass.”

The towboat’s wake slopped water over Viondi’s ankles. He backed out of the river, shook the Mississippi off his feet.

“Hand me the soap,” he said.

The Mississippi ran blue here—thirty miles above where, at St. Louis, the Missouri dumped half the mud of the Midwest into the Father of Waters. Long wooded islands stretched down the river, though at the moment most of them were half submerged, willow branches trailing listless in the flood. Two towboats were in sight, both pushing long tows against the current. The sound of their powerful turbines whined distantly off the water.

Nick looked out at the sparkling waters, felt the sun on his face. A mild wind stirred the hairs on his neck. He took a breath, tried to relax. Tried to make himself relax. And then wondered why it was so hard. It’s not like he had a job to worry about. Or a home. Or a family.

Hell, relaxing should be easy. So why wasn’t it?

He looked down as Viondi held the bar of soap in one big hand and carved it into chunks with his pocket knife. He retained two of the soap chunks, put the rest in their original wrapper, then put the wrapper in his pocket.

He reached out a hand, and Nick mutely handed him the fishing rods. Viondi baited them both with chunks of soap, then handed one to Nick.

“Better cast off the ramp,” he said. “With the river this high, there’s bound to be snags everywhere else.” Viondi stepped away to give himself some casting room, then brought the rod back over his shoulder and let it fly out. The reel sang as the baited line flew out over the river. There was a splash as it struck the water.

Relax, Nick told himself. You should relax. Fishing is the most relaxing thing in the world. He cast into the water, his movement more awkward than Viondi’s. The hook and its chunk of soap landed about twenty feet from where Nick intended. He had come to fishing late in life—his father, as he was growing up, had always thought the son of a general had more important things to do. Nick’s sports had been wrestling and track, and he’d been expected to stay on the honor roll for academics as well. There’d been Scouting—if a general’s son couldn’t make Eagle Scout, there was obviously something wrong with them both. And afterward there had been more school, and family, and his job with McDonnell.

Where did fishing fit into all that?

He hadn’t gone fishing in his life until he met Viondi.

“Hey, Nick,” Viondi said, as he reeled in. “What do you call a woman who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose?”

Nick looked at Viondi’s grin. “What?” he said.

“‘Darling.’”

A reluctant laugh pushed itself up from Nick’s diaphragm. “Where you hear these?” he asked. Viondi retrieved his lure, cast again. “There’s this rich white lady, see, goes to the doctor. And the doctor sits her down and says, ‘You’re in good health. And in fact I want to compliment you on the fact that your pussy is the cleanest I’ve ever seen.’

“And the lady says, ‘It better be, I got this colored man comes in twice a week.’” Nick’s laugh bubbled up like a spring.

“Made you laugh twice in a row!” Viondi said. “Gold star for me.” Nick wished he knew some good jokes he could use to answer Viondi’s. But Viondi was the only person who ever told Nick jokes.

“Where do you get these from?” Nick asked weakly.

“Work. Niggas gotta keep themselves amused working eighteen hours a day.” Viondi’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the water. “Strike,” he advised.

Nick had reeled his lure close to the shore; he looked down to see a dark shadow in the clear water, an engulfing mouth that opened startlingly wide before closing on the slice of soap and darting away. Nick jerked the rod to set the hook, felt the fish resist, heard the whine of the reel as the fish took the line out. Viondi cranked his reel to get his own line out of the way.

“Big ol’ catfish,” Viondi said, after they landed the fish. He laid the gasping fish on the fresh-cut grass he’d put in his creel, then smiled up at Nick. “Soap gets ’em every time.” Viondi was a plumber. He ran his own plumbing company with about a dozen employees, and Nick had made his acquaintance when he’d hired Viondi to replumb his old house back in Pine Lawn. He and Viondi had hit it off. Manon hadn’t liked Viondi as much as Nick had. She thought Viondi was crude and irresponsible. “How can he be irresponsible,” Nick had pointed out, “when he’s running a successful company?”

“He’s irresponsible in his personal life,” Manon said.

Nick had to admit that this was true. Viondi was either working or playing, either pulling double shifts with his crew, or at a party that could last for days. Nick wasn’t quite certain how often Viondi had been married, but he’d heard reference to at least three wives, and he’d had children by at least three women, not necessarily the same women as his wives.

And Viondi looked like such a roughneck. He was big, with wide shoulders and big biceps and a short-cropped beard. He looked as if he could tear apart a human being with his large bare hands. Just Viondi’s looks made Manon nervous.

For weeks Nick would leave messages on Viondi’s answering machine without a reply, and then he’d know Viondi was working. But then he’d get a call, and Viondi would want Nick to pile with a few other friends into Viondi’s Buick and drive off for a weekend’s debauch in Memphis, or a road trip to Chicago, or to spend some time at the Greenville Blues Festival.

Or sometimes the call was just to go fishing on a Wednesday morning. A Wednesday like today. Whatever the call, it had been easier for Nick to say yes once Manon had gone home to Toussaint. A pair of freshwater gulls wheeled overhead in hopes that someone would clean a fish and give them the remains. Viondi rebaited Nick’s hook with another piece of soap. “You heard from Arlette?” Nick’s heart sank. Just when he’d started feeling good.

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s going to France in a couple weeks.” Nick frowned at the river. “I’m not going to get to see her till, maybe, Christmas.”

“Shit. That’s tough. Your old lady ain’t cutting you no slack at all.” Nick found himself wanting to defend Manon. “Well,” he said, “it’s an opportunity, you know. Going to France.”

“Arlette needs a daddy more than she needs a trip to France,” Viondi said. “I’ve kept all my kids in my life, no matter what else happened.” He finished baiting the hook and let it fall. Nick cast, heard the splash, saw the pale chunk of soap sink into the rippling water. Viondi cast, dropped his hook precisely. One of the gulls dipped toward the splash, then decided it didn’t want to eat soap. Viondi began reeling in.

“Why don’t you go down to Arkansas,” he asked, “see your girl?” Nick’s heart gave a little jump at the thought. “My old car wouldn’t make it,” he said automatically. It needed new engine and transmission seals that he couldn’t afford. When he drove it, even the driver’s compartment filled with blue smoke.

“Take the bus.” Viondi gave him a severe look. “It’s not like you’ve got anything critical to do in St. Louis.”

Nick thought about it for a long, hopeful moment, calculating how much it would cost, how long he could afford to be away. As Viondi said, it wasn’t as if he had anything important here, a job or anything. There wasn’t a hotel in Toussaint, he’d have to stay at the boarding house run by Manon’s aunt. Man, Nick thought, Manon would be pissed.

He thought about Arlette’s eyes lighting at the sight of the diamond necklace.

“Tell you what,” Viondi said. “I could use a little R and R down in N’awlins. I’ll drop you off in Toussaint on the way.”

Nick looked at him. “What about those buildings on Chouteau?”

“Nearly done. I’ll let Darrell finish the job.” Darrell was Viondi’s eldest son. “Do him good to have a little responsibility for a change.” Viondi smiled. “I’ve got a weekend’s worth of work first, though, that can’t do without me. How about I pick you up on Monday?”

Hope rose in Nick, but he found that he was wary of hope these days. He didn’t want this to disappear.

“You sure about this?” he asked. “I mean, this is pretty sudden.” Viondi shrugged. “It’s like I’m always telling you, man, you want a flexible schedule, you get a job like mine. Work hard, play hard, die with your boots on.” He looked at Nick. “It’s not too late for you, you know. I’m bidding up a big contract, could use a new apprentice.”

“Well,” Nick said “it may come to that.”

Viondi grinned. “Hey,” he said. “You know why God invented golf?” Nick shook his head. “No idea,” he said.

“So that white folks could dress up like black people.”

A few more hours of this, Nick thought, and he might even start to relax.

As he drove around the bend and the plant came in sight around the pine thicket, Larry Hallock lifted his eyes automatically to the huge cooling tower and found something wrong. His eyes checked in their movement and returned to the tower, the elegant concrete hyperboloid curves whitened by the morning sun.

Something was missing. The plume of steam that normally floated above the tower. Larry was annoyed with himself. He knew that. He knew that the reactor had been shut down for refueling, something that happened every eighteen months or so. He knew that there would be no plume of steam when the reactor wasn’t in operation.

But he’d got used to the steam plume being there, perched above the tower. Eighteen months was just long enough for him to forget how the plant looked when the reactor was shut down. He passed by the old Indian mound that archaeologists, somewhat to the inconvenience of the facility’s designers, had insisted remain on the property. The front parking lot looked full. One of the concessions the power company had made to the locals when they’d acquired the site was that one-third of the plant workers had to come from the immediate area. As there are relatively few nuclear engineers and qualified power plant managers in rural Mississippi, the Poinsett Landing plant was blessed with a large and splendidly equipped janitorial, maintenance, and machine-shop force.

The parking lot was unusually full as workers busied themselves with maintenance and preventative maintenance while the reactor was cold, so Larry turned the Taurus down the fork in the road that led behind the plant, toward the river hidden behind the long green wall of the levee. The long morning shadow of the cooling tower reached across the grass and fell on him as he drove, and in the air-conditioned silence of the car, he felt a chill.

Larry’s feet rang on metal as he climbed the ladder that led up the maintenance truss that ran up the curved roof of the primary containment building. He tilted his head back in the bright yellow hood of the clean suit he wore and kept on climbing. The structure smelled of emptiness and wet concrete. Masses of concrete and steel loomed around him. Below, in addition to the water-filled chamber and the crane, the building was filled with a chaos of tanks, pipes, valves, conduit, ductwork, electric motors, girders, accumulators, and bundles of cable. All of it on a massive scale, dwarfing the suited figures of the crane operators.

Jameel, the foreman who was supervising operating the refueling machine, looked up as Larry passed overhead, then gave a wave. Larry waved back.

“How ’bout the Cubbies?” Larry called down. Jameel was from Chicago and maintained a dogged loyalty to the National League’s perennial losers.

“Two in a row!” Jameel shouted. He gave the thumb’s-up sign.

“Guess they didn’t need Gutierrez after all!”

Jameel made a face. He had complained long and hard about the Cubs’ preseason trade. The refueling was relatively simple, but the scale of it was always impressive. Larry enjoyed his visits to the containment structure, and since the reactor was shut down, and everyone else going through routine maintenance checklists, he had nothing more urgent at the moment than to suit up, enter the containment building, and play tourist.

The bright yellow clean suit he wore, complete with boots and gloves and a hood over his head, had nothing to do with protecting himself from radiation—the water flooding the space above the reactor would do that. The suit was to keep him from contaminating the water with one of his accidental byproducts, such as, for example, a hair. The demineralized water that was used to cool the reactor and its fuel was carefully maintained in order to make certain that it gave no chemical or mechanical problems. The refueling machine began to hum as chains rattled in. Larry put his hands on the rail, looked down. The machine was large and moved back and forth on tracks placed over the water-filled refueling cavity. Its operators sat atop it, peering into the watery depths below.

Glimmering in the glow of floodlights, the squat silver-metal form of a fuel assembly began its descent into the reactor. Its glittering image was broken by the refraction of the little wavelets in the pool. The chains ceased to rattle, and the sound of the engine died. Electric motors gave brief whines. Jameel signaled to another of his crew. There was a subdued metallic clang, and then chains began to rattle again as the hook that had lowered the fuel assembly into the reactor withdrew.

The refueling process was nearing its end. Over eight hundred fuel assemblies needed to be moved—most were just moved within the reactor, but a third had to be replaced completely, the old assemblies moved through an underwater channel to the Auxiliary Building for storage, while new assemblies were carried the other way.

With an urgent hum of electric motors, the refueling machine began to move, sliding on its tracks toward the fuel channel, where it would pick up another fresh fuel assembly for movement into the reactor. Larry smiled down at the operation and thought of horses.

Even with his fifty-five years and his degree in nuclear engineering, Larry Hallock still considered himself a cowpuncher. He had been raised on a ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico, a long, rambling adobe building, built over generations, with a tin roof and a homemade water tower. Every summer afternoon, as the thermals rose from the valley floor, cool air would flow down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and bring with it the scent of the high meadows, the star flowers, white mountain daisies, and purple asters, the flowers that flourished in the brief growing season at ten thousand feet. For Larry, this was the perfume of paradise. Sometimes, even now, he woke from a dream with the scent in his nostrils. When he was fourteen, his father had called him, his brother, and his sister into the little office from which he ran the ranch business, the mud-walled room with its old rolltop desk, well-thumbed ledger books, and Navajo rugs. His blue eyes gazed at them all from his leathery face.

“Do you love this business?” he asked. “Do you want to ranch for the rest of your lives?” All three siblings nodded.

“Well, then,” their father said, “you better all go to college and become professionals, because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to afford to keep this place alive.”

They had taken their father’s advice to heart. Larry’s younger brother Robert was a doctor in Santa Fe. Larry had become a nuclear engineer. Both considered themselves cowboys at heart, and spent as much time as possible in New Mexico doing ranch work. And their older sister Mimi, who still lived on the ranch, commuted in her Chevy pickup truck to her law practice in Las Vegas. She had raised her children to carry on after her, which was more than Larry had managed—his daughter worked in biostatistics, whatever those were, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and his son studied Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. Both places were a long way from New Mexico, and when Larry thought about it he felt a breath of sadness waft through his heart.

He was remembering a grulla mare named Low Die that he had ridden when he was maybe twelve. She would set down wonderfully on her hocks, but for some reason she would not fall off to the right as well as she fell off to the left. When she spun to the left it was a thing of beauty, but when he wanted her to cut right, for some reason her coordination fell apart, and there were strange, unpredictable hesitations in her movement. It was almost as if she were afraid to turn right.

Experience suggested that such a fault might be the result of a spinal injury or deformity. But after a thorough examination it was concluded that Low Die’s spine was in perfectly fine shape. So Larry had worked that strange horse patiently for weeks. He would work her first on moves that she could do well, moves in which she had confidence. He would praise her lavishly for every successful maneuver. Then he would run her for a while, so that she’d get tired and not think so much, just respond to the touch of his feet and hands.

And then he’d start turning Low Die in wide circles to the right. And the circles would get smaller and smaller until, eventually, she was falling off to the right just as he wanted. That was how you solved a problem. You broke it down into pieces, and you solved the pieces one at a time. With patience, you could get anywhere, even into the dimwitted brain of a horse. Low Die. A beautiful cutting horse. He’d ridden her for years.

“You see that homer in the Red Sox game?” Jameel called up from his post on the refueling machine.

“Oh yeah,” Larry said. “A thing of beauty.”

In Larry Hallock’s estimation, the problems involved in managing nuclear power were not dissimilar to those involved in training a horse. The universe operated by certain principles, and these principles could be applied anywhere, by anyone of sufficient skill and intelligence. The statement of a problem contained within itself the elements of its own solution. You needed to break the problem into its parts, to work on each in its turn. You needed patience and a sense of perspective. Humor didn’t hurt, either. Sometimes you found yourself turning circles, as Larry had when he was training Low Die, but you needed to realize that even when you were turning in circles, you were still getting somewhere. Poinsett Landing was a complex system, and its complexities were increased by its massive scale. The statistics themselves were vast enough to strain the imagination. The power station required a dozen years to build, 1,800 miles of electrical wire, 100 miles of pipe, 125 miles of conduit, 16,000 tons of steel, 29,000 tons of rebar, and nearly 150,000 cubic yards of concrete. The reactor vessel, the steel pressure cooker in which nuclear fission took place, stood eighty feet high, its sides were over eight inches thick, and it weighed two million pounds. It sat in a steel-and-concrete containment structure twice as high as the reactor vessel, three and a half feet thick and sheathed with stainless steel, built so strongly that it could withstand the 300-mile-per-hour winds of a tornado, or even the impact of a Boeing 747 being deliberately crashed, by suicidal terrorists, into the building from above. But when you got right down to it, a nuclear power station, with all its vastness, was a very simple system compared to a biological organism such as a horse. Its size was a measure of its relative inefficiency—it was enormous because people hadn’t worked out how to generate power with the compact efficiency of a biological organism. Animals, with their complex organization and chemistry, their mobility and intelligence, were marvels of concentrated efficiency. They were brilliant engineering. By comparison, Poinsett Landing Power Station, complex as it was in certain ways, was simplicity itself. Which was good, as far as Larry Hallock was concerned. An animal, be it a human being or a horse, was intricate enough so that when something went wrong with it—a broken leg, cancer, mental illness—it was difficult to fix. The problems at Poinsett Landing were, by comparison, simple. Take the problem of Poinsett Landing’s site, for example.

The massive containment building, with its huge steel nuclear reactor, its three-foot-thick concrete walls sheathed with steel, had presented a particular problem to the plant’s designers. A large, heavy building requires a large, stable foundation. The best foundation of all is solid bedrock. But bedrock is at a premium in the Mississippi Delta. The land consists of layers on endless layers of mud laid down by repeated floodings of the great river. The mud can extend thousands of feet below the level of the land. There is no bedrock on which to safely build large structures and anchor them against the dangers of their own weight.

But the Delta land was cheap, much cheaper than elsewhere. With the plant requiring two thousand acres of land, the price of the land was a prime consideration in the plant’s cost. The plant’s designers were asked to solve the problem of building the huge, heavy structure on land that would not support it. The engineers simply built their own bedrock beneath the containment structure, a huge mat of concrete laced with a webwork of steel. This pad was twelve feet thick and sat in the rich Delta land like a paving stone, and it supported the vast two-million-pound weight of the reactor vessel, the steel-and-concrete containment structure, and the control facility, which leaned against the featureless containment building like a child clinging to his mother’s hip.

It was a tried and true technique, Larry knew, often used in areas like Miami Beach, where large buildings had to be constructed on shifting sand. It had the advantage of simplicity. The huge pad would be there forever: after it had been set in the Delta soil, no one would ever have to think about it again.

“Waaal,” Larry Hallock said, “let’s get this sucker warmed up.” He stood behind his metal desk, perched on its platform above the rest of the control room. The lights and indicators, which were on panels above the operators’ heads, were at eye level for Larry. He scanned them, noted the orderly rows of green and red lights, nothing amiss.

The room looked like the headquarters of a James Bond villain. Metal surfaces, control panels, thousands of buttons, displays with blinking lights. All painted in avocado green and harvest gold, the signature colors of the 1970s, the decade in which the room was designed and built. Larry wondered if a more recent control room would be painted different colors. Would a nineties control room be Hunter Green?

A box from Dunkin’ Donuts on one of the computer monitors near the door spoiled the illusion of a supervillain’s retreat. Larry helped himself to a chocolate doughnut.

“We’re set,” Wilbur said, having, from his lower perspective, just scanned the displays himself.

“Let’s give ’er the spur,” Larry said.

You didn’t want to start up a nuclear reactor with a bang. It would take almost a full day to get the reactor on line, to first increase temperature within the reactor, then start pushing steam through the turbine to generate enough power to put on the grid.

It was like handling a big horse, one that could stomp you flat just by accident, just because you weren’t paying attention. You just wanted to give it a little kick with your heels, get it moving without startling anyone, least of all yourself.

It was tricky enough so that Larry wanted to be in the control room for the procedure, just in case Wilbur, who was the control room operator and would be giving the orders, needed some backup. Larry was the shift supervisor, in charge of everything going on at the plant during his shift. Wilbur was in charge of the reactor under Larry’s supervision.

Larry and Wilbur watched the displays as boron carbide control rods were partially withdrawn from the reactor, as neutrons began to multiply and the chain reaction began. The scent of roses floated through the control room: Larry had bought a massive vase of yellow roses for his wife, who had a birthday today. He moved the roses out of his line of sight, sat in his wheeled metal chair, and thought about putting his boots up on his desk, but decided not to.

Larry put a hand on the scarred metal surface of his desk and felt a little tremor through his fingertips. Pumps, distant but powerful, steam moving through massive pipe. Valves tripped open as pressure built. Words floated to Larry as he watched the displays. Something about Ole Miss and the Rose Bowl. No day was complete without talk of football. Not in Mississippi.

One of the operators interrupted the talk of the gridiron in order to make a report. “Holding at ten percent.”

Ten percent was one of the check points, where all concerned would be checking their instruments, making certain that everything was operating normally.

Larry scanned the displays over the operators’ heads. Everything looked fine.

“You going to do anything special for your wife’s birthday, Mr. Hallock?” Wilbur asked.

“Tonight we’ve got reservations at the Garden Court in Vicksburg.”

“Getting some of that Creole food, huh? It’s too hot for me.”

Larry grinned. “You best not try any New Mexico chile, then.”

“I don’t even put pepper on my grits in the morning.”

Larry looked at the displays, at the lights shifting, red and green.

“Bland is boring,” he said. “Me, I like a little spice in my life.”

“Everything checks, Larry,” Wilbur said. “Still holding at ten percent.”

“Waaal,” Larry said, “let’s goose her a little.”

Boron carbide rods slid smoothly out of the reactor. Neutrons turned water to steam. Steam shot under unimaginable pressure through massive thirty-six-inch pipes.

Larry put his boots on the desk and thought about horses.

Perfume floated into the Oval Office from the Rose Garden. The economics briefing book, with its tasteful white plastic cover and presidential seal, had migrated from the President’s footstool to the top of his desk in the West Wing. The London meeting of the G8 countries was only a week away. The President was now immersing himself in figures concerning gross domestic product, financial markets, foreign direct investment, prices and wages, output, demand, jobs, commodities, exchanges, and reserves.

Fortunately the President liked this kind of detail work. Facts and statistics were easy compared to trying to manage Congress, foreign leaders, or for that matter the arrogant turf warriors of his own party. He had a number of proposals he wanted to make at the G8 conference. Proposals having to do with the removal of trade barriers, pollution control, expansion of the information infrastructure, practical assistance to Third World countries. Proposals that only the leader of the world’s primary superpower could make.

If only, he thought, goddam Wall Street didn’t stab him in the back while he was off in London trying to get things done.

The President’s phone buzzed, and he reached for it while trying to absorb a graph on current-account balances. Oil-producing states, he saw, were benefiting from a slight rise in the cost of fossil fuels.

“Judge Chivington for you, sir,” said his secretary.

“Thank you. Put him on, please.”

“Mr. President! Rosalie told me you called!” the judge bellowed. He was not the sort to moderate his voice merely for the telephone.

The President switched to the speaker phone and put the handset in its cradle. “I’m cramming for the G8 conference,” he said.

“That will relieve the voters, sir,” the judge said. “People worrying about employment and meetin’ the mortgage are going to be encouraged as all hell when they turn on their televisions and see the President talking to the French economic minister about the price of brie.”

The President smiled, leaned back in his chair, and was about to put one foot up on the corner of his desk when he remembered that this massive and colossally ugly item was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, God alone knew why, and had been a gift of Queen Victoria, the reasons for which seemed pretty damned obscure, too, but that this meant the desk was therefore a valuable antique that did not deserve to have his heel marks on it. He reluctantly put his shoe back on the floor. I am a prisoner of history, he thought. Damn Jackie Kennedy anyway. He spun his chair about to face the tall windows and the Rose Garden.

“My views on the price of brie,” he said, “are going to be taken more seriously if they come from the representative of the strongest economy in the world.”

“Ah,” the judge said. “So you reckon this is an inconvenient time for Wall Street to have the jitters.”

“That is correct.”

“And your economic advisors tell you that they can’t be absolutely positive about it, but it looks as if the market has entered an uncertain period.”

“Correct…”

“And that while they can’t be definite about it, because the indicators are as yet unclear, it may be possible that the bull market is due for a correction.”

“Something like that.”

“And that the last thing you want, hoss, is for Dow Jones to drop four or five hundred points when you are talking to the French economic minister about the price of brie, because that would blow your credibility to hell and gone.”

“I think that is about the gist.” The President nodded. “Judge, you have a remarkable ability for summing up.”

“And therefore, sir, you want me to talk to Sam.”

“If you could. He is your friend.”

“Lots of people are my friends, Mr. President,” the judge said.

The President smiled his brilliant telegenic smile—even though there was no one to see it, the smile was still an essential part of his repertoire—and put the tiniest trace of syrup into his voice. “If the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board could be said to have a friend,” he said, “that friend is you.” There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the judge spoke. “Have you talked to him yourself, Mr. President?”

“I have.”

“And what has he told you?”

“He said that the bull market might be due for a correction, and that he was monitoring the situation and would act, if necessary, at the appropriate time. But that a mere downturn in stock prices was not a case, strictly speaking, for intervention.”

“I take it, sir, that you pointed out the importance of the economic summit?”

“I did my best. He suggested, first, that this unsettled period in the markets might end before the conference begins, and might in fact end in a big upswing. Also, he said that it would be better for the conference if plans were made on a basis of actual conditions and not, as he put it, false optimism.”

“Damn,” the judge said. “Sam’s really being a hardass, isn’t he?” The problem was, the President knew, that there was little for a president to shine at anymore. The Cold War was over and foreign policy had come down to mediating agreements between various competing ethnic groups that the electorate hadn’t heard of and didn’t care about. The arrogant blown-dry busybodies in Congress had ignored, watered down, or eviscerated every domestic policy initiative undertaken by the Executive Branch. For over twenty years, in every administration, every budget sent by the President to Congress had been declared dead on arrival. They couldn’t decide on their own what to do, jerked this way and that by lobbyists and opinion polls, but they were certain they didn’t want the President doing anything, either.

So like it or not, the President’s job now came down to two things: he had to be seen to make money for people, and he had to be seen to be caring. He had to go to meetings like the G8 summit and return with promises of jobs and increased prosperity. And he had to be able to listen to people who were in the midst of hard times, and he had to look concerned. The people wanted a president who Cared, and so the President spent a lot of time, in day care centers or drug rehabilitation clinics or veterans’ hospitals, doing his job of Caring. There were no more issues, there were no more real conflicts in politics, it had all become soap opera. The President had to pretend to everyone that the soap opera mattered. And, as his press secretary Stan Burdett always remarked, it was no good Caring if he weren’t seen to be Caring, and no good making money for people if he weren’t making money for everyone, and furthermore seen to be doing it.

The President just wished he could appoint a Cabinet Secretary for Caring and have done with it.

“I’m not asking for much,” the President said. “What’s wrong with boosting investor confidence?” The judge thought silently for a long moment. “Mr. President,” he said, “I’ll talk to Sam about it.”

“He’s always been a loyal Party man,” the President said. Until, he did not need to add, Sam had been made the nation’s chief banker, at which point he had given up politics for a Higher Calling, rolling the bones and gazing at chicken entrails in the name of the High God of Interest Rates.

“True,” the judge said. “Very true.” His voice boomed out. “Sir, I’ll do as you ask.”

“Thank you, Judge.”

“You’re very welcome, Mr. President.”

“How about some golf next week?”

“You’re very kind, sir. I would like that very much.”

The President smiled. “I’ll have my flunky call your flunky.”

The President snapped off the speaker phone, picked up the briefing book, and leaned back in his chair. He had been raised on the history of presidential greatness. Franklin Roosevelt fighting the Depression and Hitler, Lincoln freeing the slaves and seeing the country through its greatest crisis, Jack Kennedy staring down the Soviets over Cuba, Lyndon Johnson creating programs to eradicate poverty and establish civil rights.

And now the President couldn’t even ask the chairman of the Federal for a favor, but had to get a friend to ask it for him.

A prisoner of history, he thought again.

He considered putting his feet up on the desk, but refrained.

Once the slide began, the market fell faster than even Charlie had anticipated. Charlie and TPS, even with all their money committed to Charlie’s positions, weren’t big enough to shift market prices very far, but once big traders like Salomon and Morgan Stanley started moving into short positions, the balance changed. Once the smart money moved, the stupid money trotted after—too late, as usual—and the really smart money tried to make profit out of both.

Charlie began to wonder how many beta-test versions of Carpe Diem were out there. He stayed at his desk for the entire trading day, fueled by pots of coffee and takeout food brought in by his secretary. He traded constantly, making hedges, shoring up his position. He was afraid to take a pee break for fear that he’d miss something and lose money.

After each trading day was over he went to the back room to help Megan with the long task of reconciliation. The TPS back room wasn’t really set up for trading at this volume, and Charlie’s trades were so many, and so frantic, that toting up the figures sometimes took them late into the night. And Dearborne was on Charlie’s neck every minute. Charlie hadn’t thought that Dearborne was going to be this involved, but apparently the banker had figured out that it was his future at stake as well as Charlie’s, and every night he waited in his office for the reconciliation figures to be transmitted to him. If they were late, he called Megan’s office to ask when they could be expected.

Go home, Charlie urged him mentally as he heard the jangle of the phone. Go to the country club. Go anywhere!

But Dearborne hung on. “You’re going to give me that ulcer yet,” he told Charlie. Charlie figured that if anyone was going to get an ulcer, it would be Charlie, and it would be Dearborne who gave it to him.

The market fell far enough so that Charlie was able to liquidate his position in treasury bonds, which gave him a great lump of profit that made him itchy. He could add it to the margin account, because he knew big margin calls would be inevitable as soon as the regulators noticed how exposed his positions were growing. He could use the money to further hedge his positions, which would lessen the risk of the big margin calls. Or he could buy more short positions, which, because it would make a lot more money in the long run, is what he really wanted to do.

But the smart traders don’t take those kind of risks on their own, Charlie thought. Not without covering their asses.

So he called Dearborne. “I just made you pots of money, guv,” he said.

“How big are the pots?” Dearborne asked.

Charlie told him.

“Nice pots,” Dearborne said, impressed.

It was a clumsy metaphor, Charlie thought, but he could run with it. “I can get you newer and nicer pots,” he said, “but there’s a risk.”

“Oh God,” Dearborne whimpered. “My ulcer’s really kicking up.”

“You don’t have an ulcer yet,” Charlie pointed out, and then explained his point of view.

“But if we buy all those unhedged positions,” Dearborne said, “what do we use to cover the margin calls?”

“That’s your department, guv,” Charlie said.

Dearborne groaned.

“In the words,” Charlie said, “of that great statesman, Ronald Wilson Reagan, stay the course.”

“You’re going to kill me,” Dearborne said.

“Trust me,” Charlie said. “I know what I’m doing.”

Charlie got his way. But as soon as he started putting the money on the market, the regulators noticed his vulnerability and began calling in margins, and he had to call Dearborne for money. Which led to even more anxiety on Dearborne’s part, and more phone calls.

“The margin calls are signs of success,” Charlie kept telling him. “It means the market is moving our way.”

But it wasn’t moving Charlie’s way all the time: it jittered up and down on an almost hourly basis. Charlie took advantage of the upswings to sell as many of his hedges at a profit as he could, then buy more short options. Which led to more margin calls, more aggravation. More phone calls from Dearborne. On Thursday night Charlie drove home after reconciliation, planning on nothing more exciting than eating some Chinese takeout and having a long soak in the spa, only to find an urgent message from Dearborne on his answering machine.

“Turn on your TV!” Dearborne shouted from the tinny speaker. “The chairman of the Fed is on!” The chairman wasn’t there when Charlie looked, so he switched to CNN and ate orange peel beef from the cardboard container while he waited for the financial report. Right at the top of the report was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, with a strange gnomic smile pasted to his face, announcing that the Fed was cutting interest rates a full point. Announcers were treating it as if the chairman had just turned water into wine.

Fuck, Charlie thought. Fuck I am so screwed…

And then, as if on cue, the phone rang. Charlie didn’t answer. He just waited for Dearborne’s voice to come out of the answering machine.

It didn’t say anything that Charlie hadn’t already imagined.

The President choked on laughter at the sight of the chairman of the Federal Reserve making his announcement. The unnatural grin, on Sam’s reserved and owlish face, looked more like the product of a jolt of electricity than a result of fiscal confidence.

“I love it!” he whooped. “Damn, I am some kind of slick son of a bitch!” The First Lady gave him an indulgent look from over her reading glasses. She sat in a lounge chair in their drawing room, a glass of sherry by one hand, briefing books in her lap. Her husband was not the only person doing homework for the economic summit.

“Sam’s peculiar behavior is not unanticipated, I gather?” she said.

“Judge Chivington gave him a little phone call. But I didn’t think it would work so soon, or so fast. And I sure as hell didn’t think it would work by a whole interest point.”

The First Lady looked down at her briefing book and with a marking pen drew a thick pink line along a critical factoid. “You think we can sustain this rally?” she said.

“Barring some unforseen disaster.” He grinned at the television analyst who was urging fiduciary caution upon his audience. “I won’t have egg on my face at the economic summit, anyway.”

“Let’s just hope,” the First Lady said, returning her gaze to her briefing book, “there isn’t a market adjustment while we’re in London.”

“We’ll have to hope,” said the President, “that we’ve put it off.” All day Friday, Charlie felt as if he’d fallen during the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Except that it was the bulls of Wall Street that were stomping him into the pavement, one sledgehammer hoof after another. Every kick to the kidney, every hoof to the spleen, and he was bleeding dollars. Buoyed by the Fed chairman’s apparent optimism, the market was on a big upswing, regaining practically all the ground it had lost over the last week.

Dearborne didn’t help, not with his panicky phone calls. “It’s false optimism,” Charlie said. “Stay the course.”

“Over thirty percent of Tennessee Planters’ capital is committed to backing your positions,” Dearborne said. “We are a risk-averse institution. You told me you’d be hedging every single minute.”

“I have hedged. I just cashed in ten million dollars’ worth of Eurodollar futures. I made you money!”

“You haven’t hedged enough. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Stay the course,” Charlie said. “It’s not as bad as you think.” It’s going to be worse, he thought. Even though prices fell at the end of the day, as people started taking their profits, the S&P had gone up five whole percentage points.

After the markets closed, Charlie helped Megan with the process of reconciliation. Before they were completely finished, Megan sent her other employees home, then took Charlie into her office and closed the door. She looked at her monitor, and Charlie could see the green columns of figures reflected in her eyes.

“If you liquidate now,” she said, “your S&P futures will have lost sixty-two point five million dollars.” Charlie’s heart gave a lurch. “Sixty-two and a half,” she repeated. “Now you’ve purchased these options for forty million, and your Eurodollar hedges gives you another ten, but what’s going to happen to you first thing Monday morning is a twelve-and-a-half-million-dollar margin call. I’m amazed you haven’t got it already—probably the computers haven’t caught up to the day’s trading.” The strain of maintaining her low, cultured tones turned her voice husky. “If you don’t liquidate, my dear, your losses are unlimited.” Charlie licked his lips. He could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead. “You’ve got to help me hide it,” he said.

She stared at him. “Hide twelve and a half million? Are you out of your mind?” Charlie spoke out loud as calculations rattled frantically in his skull. “Not that much. Just eight or nine. We can’t hide all of it, they’ll be expecting some loss. So we give them a loss, okay? Just help me make it an acceptable loss—three or four million, something like that. And put the rest of it—where?” His mind spun through a mental list of his clients.

Megan stared at him. “Charlie, that’s fifteen ways illegal.”

“What drives markets?” Charlie asked. “FIG. Fear, Ignorance, Greed. The directors at Tennessee Planters are ignorant of the securities marketplace. They really don’t understand what I’m doing. I have to stroke Dearborne every second to get him into line, and I can’t stroke all of the directors all of the time. Once they see our current position, fear will take control of their minds. They’re going to try to take charge of TPS, and ignorance and fear will have them doing the wrong thing. We don’t dare panic them. If they panic, they could order me to liquidate, and those millions of losing positions will turn into millions of real losses.”

Charlie could tell from the look on Megan’s face that she understood all too well what might happen.

“What have we got in the error account,” Charlie said, “a couple hundred thousand dollars? Just put the losses there instead of the real account. Who’s going to check the error account?”

“The figures in the error account get reported just like everything else,” Megan said. “All Dearborne or anyone else has to do is just call it up on the screen.”

Good, Charlie thought. She was responding to the problem. She was starting to think of ways to do what he needed.

“We can’t put it in my account. My profile is too high.” He looked at Megan. “Your account?” Megan’s answer was a flat stare.

“Right,” Charlie said. “So we put the loss in one of my client accounts. Sanderson—no, he’ll smell something wrong. Caldwell.” He grinned. “Caldwell. Caldwell’s on vacation. He won’t even notice. And he has sufficient collateral to cover any margin calls.”

“He’s not going to notice millions of losses? This won’t attract his attention?”

“Issue a correction once we’re in the black. I’ll call Caldwell and tell him it was a computer error.”

“Charlie,” Megan said, “I dassant do this for you.” The Ozarks was beginning to seep into her voice.

“These sorts of mistakes happen every day. You know they do.”

“Not for this much money. And it’s my job to catch just this sort of error.”

“Just till Monday,” Charlie said. “Dearborne plays golf every Monday at one o’clock.” Megan’s eyes flashed. “How’s Monday going to make a difference?” she demanded.

“The rally was over, I could tell,” Charlie said. “The momentum was gone. People are going to have the whole weekend to reevaluate their positions. Prices are going to fall on Monday.” He hoped.

He leaned forward over Megan’s desk, fixed her with his blue eyes. “Just till tee time, that’s all I ask. Then you can issue a correction. Dearborne won’t even look at it, he’ll just see Monday’s totals after the markets close.”

Megan bit her lip. “This is how Nick Leeson lost Baring’s,” she said.

“No!” Charlie shouted. Anger seemed to flash his blood to steam. He pounded a fist on the desk. “Nick Leeson lost Baring’s because he was a fucking incompetent traderl” He thumped his own chest. “I am a fucking great traderl I am the lord of the fucking trading jungle!” He realized Megan was leaning back, away from his anger. What he saw in her eyes wasn’t fear, it was distaste. She hated weakness, he reminded himself. Hated fear, hated panic.

Charlie lowered his voice, tried to catch his breath. He had to make it all logical, all reasonable. He reminded himself that he was asking her to go clean against her training and instincts. Not to mention the law. It was her job to balance the books. It was something she took pride in. Now he was telling her not to balance them, to shove a colossal loss under the rug. He had to keep talking, to keep Megan working on the problem, see it from his point of view.

“I just need to get over this little bad patch, that’s all,” he said. “Just help me with this.” He felt sweat running down his face. “After this is done, we can relax. Call the caterers, get some duck, some veal. Call a masseuse over to the house, make sure we’re good and relaxed. Open a bottle of Bolly. We can have a quiet weekend together.” He looked at her. “It’s your money, too, sweetheart.” She looked at the screen. Gnawed a nail. Then bent over her keyboard, her lacquered nails rattling on the keys.

“Caldwell better be on vacation,” she said.

“You’re brilliant!” Charlie cheered.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m just crazy.” She looked at him darkly. “But not as crazy as you.”

SIX

The Reverend Noble Frankland looked into his wife’s sitting room. “Time to go, sweetie pie,” he said. Sheryl looked up from her work. “Just a second, teddy bear,” she said. Sheryl used tweezers to pick up a tiny piece of paper, no larger than the head of a pin, dip it carefully in glue, and then place it carefully in the eye of an angel.

She was doing her art. Sheryl had been working at this project for longer than the twelve years of her marriage to Frankland.

Her chosen medium was postage stamps. Sheryl bought them by the thousands, the more colorful the better, and cut them up into tiny pieces each the size of a snowflake. These she glued onto bolts of black-dyed linen in designs representing scenes from the Book of Revelation. The pictures were amazingly intricate, like those miniature paintings drawn with three-hair brushes, but the scale of the work was enormous. The entire work was over fifty feet long, and Frankland had never been permitted to see all of it, though occasionally he’d caught glimpses of it over Sheryl’s shoulder as she worked. Just the bits he’d seen took his breath away. Horsemen and angels, the saved and the damned, the Whore of Babylon and the City of God, all blazing in the brightest of colors, all shown in the most exacting detail. When Sheryl depicted a demon, she showed it to the pockmarks on its skin and the gleam of wickedness in its eyes. You could practically smell the garlic on its breath.

No commercial artist could ever produce work like this. The labyrinthine detail combined with the huge scale would have defeated any attempt to profit from such a work. Only a person inspired to devote her life to the work could possibly assemble such a thing.

Frankland stood by and waited for Sheryl to finish. She had always wanted to be a pastor’s wife, and she hadn’t shrank from any of her duties, but when they married she had demanded one promise from him. “I want you to let me have an hour a day to work on my Apocalypse,” she’d said. “And the rest of the time is for you and the Lord.”

He hadn’t minded. Frankland had projects of his own. They’d spent many hours in pleasant silence, Sheryl working on her art, Frankland working on his plans—perhaps equally detailed—for the End Times, the plans that he kept in fire-proof safes in the guest bedroom closet. Sheryl finished the angel’s eye—it glowed a beautiful aquamarine blue, with a little wink of postage-stamp light in a corner of the pupil—then blew on the glue to dry it and rolled up the linen scroll. “I’m ready, sugar bear,” she said.

The picket signs were thrown in the back of the pickup truck, and Sheryl climbed into the driver’s seat. Sheryl put the truck in gear and wrestled the wheel around to point it toward Rails Bluff. The pickup was a full-size Ford, and Sheryl had to work hard to make the turn, but Frankland did not want power steering on his vehicles. Or air-conditioning, power brakes, power windows, or power anything.

It wasn’t that he objected to these conveniences as such. It was just that he figured that during the Tribulation, spare parts for power steering mechanisms and other conveniences might be hard to come by, and he didn’t want his ministry to be immobilized by the failure of something he didn’t actually need. He wiped sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. Maybe, he thought, he should have relaxed his principles in regard to air-conditioning.

At least the sun was beginning to sink toward the west. The heat would soon begin to fade. The truck jounced out of the driveway and onto the asphalt. Frankland rolled his window all the way down, and inclined his head toward the air that blasted into the cab as the truck picked up speed. He waved at Joe Johnson, one of his parishioners, who was pacing along the edge of one of his catfish ponds. Johnson looked up from beneath the brim of his Osgold feed cap and gave a wave. The pickup drove on. Cotton fields broadened on either side of the road.

“Robitaille,” Sheryl said flatly. She slowed, swinging the big truck toward the shoulder. A large, elderly Lincoln zoomed past, heading in the opposite direction, its driver a dark silhouette behind its darkened windshield. Frankland looked over his shoulder at the Lincoln as it roared away. He could feel distaste tug at his features.

“Driving like a maniac, as usual,” he said.

“Driving like a drunk,” said Sheryl.

The Roman Enemy, Frankland thought, and turned to face the foe.

The Rails Bluff area had so few Catholics that there was no full-time priest in the community. The little clapboard Catholic church shared its priest with a number of other small churches in the area, and Father Robitaille drove from one to the other on a regular circuit. In Rails Bluff he heard confession and said mass on Monday nights, then roared off in his rattletrap Lincoln to be in another town by Tuesday morning.

Robitaille did not show the Church of Rome to very good advantage. He was from Louisiana originally, but alcoholism had exiled him to rural Arkansas. And he drove like a crazy man even when sober, so sensible people slowed down and gave him plenty of room when they saw him coming.

“I don’t know how he’s avoided killing himself,” Sheryl said.

“The Devil protects his own,” said Frankland.

A cotton gin shambled up on the right, corrugated metal rusting behind chain link. 750 friendly people welcome you, a road sign said.

The population estimate was an optimistic overestimate. Both in terms of number, and perhaps even in friendliness.

The Arkansas Delta, below the bluff, featured some of the richest agricultural soil in the world combined with the nation’s poorest people. The mechanization of the cotton industry had taken the field workers off the land without providing them any other occupation. The owners had money—plenty of it—but everyone else was dirt-poor.

Rails Bluff, however, envied even the folks in the Delta, and sat on its ridge above the Delta like a jealous stepsister gazing down at a favored natural child. The county line ran just below the town on its bluff, and all the tax revenue from the rich bottom land went elsewhere. It was as if God, while showering riches on everyone in the Delta, had waved a hand at everyone above the bluff and said, “Thou shalt want.” In the Delta, many people were poor, and a few were rich. In Rails Bluff, nobody was rich. Now that a Wal-Mart superstore had opened in the next county, things in Rails Bluff had grown worse. The hardware store had just gone under, and the clothing store was hanging on by its fingernails. If the world did not end soon, Frankfand thought, Rails Bluff might well anticipate the Apocalypse and vanish all on its own.

The truck drove past an old drive-in theater, grass growing thick between the speaker stanchions, and then passed into town. Sheryl pulled into the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, and Frankland saw that Reverend Garb was already waiting, standing with one of his deacons, a man named Harvey, and a smiling, excited crowd of young people, members of his youth association.

Garb was a vigorous man in gold-rimmed spectacles, pastor of Jesus Word True Gospel, the largest local black church. The kids—all boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen—were all neatly dressed in dark slacks and crisp white shirts. Garb and Harvey added ties to the uniform. All wore white armbands.

Frankland hopped out of the pickup and shook Garb’s hand. “Glad you could make it, Brother Garb.” He looked at Garb’s youth brigade. “I hope my parishioners give us such a good turnout.”

“I’m sure they will, Brother Frankland. Some are here already.”

Frankland looked at the rows of cars and trucks parked at the Piggly Wiggly, saw familiar faces emerging. He greeted his parishioners as they approached, heartened by their numbers. As he was talking to one of his deacons, a battered old 1957 Chevy pickup, rust red and primer gray, rolled off Main Street into the parking lot, a big man at the wheel. There was a gun rack in the truck’s rear window with an old lever-action Winchester resting in it. Frankland walked toward the pickup truck to greet its driver. Pasted on the back window was a sticker that read trust in god and the second amendment.

“Hey, Hilkiah,” said Frankland.

“Hey, pastor,” Hilkiah said cheerfully.

Hilkiah Evans stepped out of the truck. He was a tall man with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and a pendulous gut. His prominent nose had been broken over most of his face, and his arms were covered with tattoos. The old ones, the skulls and daggers and the

Zig-Zag man that dated from his time in prison, were getting blurry with age as the ink began to run—a contrast to the later tattoos, the face of Jesus and the words “Jesus is Lord,” which were sharp and clear. A naked woman, prominent on his left bicep, had been transformed into an angel through the addition of a pair of wings and a halo.

Hilkiah was one of Frankland’s success stories. After his second stretch for armed robbery, Arthur Evans had been introduced to Frankland by a member of his church, Eliza Tomkins, who was also his parole officer. Though Arthur had at first resisted Frankland’s efforts to get his mind straight, it was clear that Eliza had detected a void in the man, a void that needed to be filled with belief and with the Light. And, by and by, Arthur had listened, and as a mark of his conversion had changed his name to Hilkiah. Now he was one of Frankland’s stalwarts, a deacon and a tireless organizer. He had joined the Apocalypse Club and purchased a two years’ supply of food, although he’d had to do it on credit. Though he always had to scrape to make ends meet and was always working at least two jobs in the community, Hilkiah nevertheless donated much of his time to work at the radio station, to helping with church projects, with the youth and outreach programs.

And of course with the Christian Gun Club. He had given a great many young parishioners their first lessons in the use of a firearm.

His involvement with the Gun Club was, technically, illegal and a violation of his parole. But since his parole officer was also a member of Frankland’s congregation, she had decided to ignore the technicalities.

Besides, it was ridiculous to tell someone in a place like Rails Bluff that he couldn’t own a gun, even if he was a convicted armed robber. Sometimes the law was just silly.

“Hope I’m not late,” Hilkiah said.

“Not at all. I’ve barely got here myself.”

Hilkiah reached into the bed of his truck and lifted up a large Coleman cooler. “I brought some Gatorade. Thought people might get thirsty in this heat.”

“Bless you, Brother Hilkiah,” Frankland said. He should have thought of that himself. Hilkiah set up the cooler on the tailgate of his truck along with some plastic cups. Reverend Garb came over to shake hands with Hilkiah, and then he turned to Frankland.

“Shall we get started?” he asked. “Or are we waiting for someone?” Frankland glanced along the road. “I was expecting Dr. Calhoun,” he said. “Maybe we should wait a few more minutes.”

Garb glanced toward Bear State Videoramics. “There’s Magnusson standing in the door,” he said. “He doesn’t look so happy to see us.”

“He that seeketh mischief,” Hilkiah said, “it shall come unto him.”

“The way of transgressors is hard,” said Garb, skipping a little further in the Book of Proverbs. There was a silence while the others waited for Frankland to produce a quote, but Frankland’s mind spun its gears while it groped through its limited stock of citations, and it was Hilkiah who finally filled the silence with “A wicked man is loathsome, and committed to shame.”

“’Scuse me, teidy bear,” said Sheryl. “You forgot something.” Sheryl approached and tied a white band around his arm. “Thanks, honey love,” said Frankland.

“I’m going to go back to the studio and check up on Roger,” Sheryl said. “I’ll be back at ten o’clock to pick you up, okay?”

“Okay,” Frankland said. They kissed, and she walked to the truck. Roger was the boy volunteer they had minding the radio station—not a big job, because all he had to do was load the tapes of prerecorded programs—but Roger was fourteen, and Sheryl didn’t want to leave him alone with complicated equipment for too long a stretch of time.

“The Lord gave you a good woman, there,” Garb said with a smile.

“Don’t I know it,” said Frankland.

The rear wheels of the Ford spat gravel as it wheeled out of the parking lot, horn tooting. Another auto horn answered, and Frankland saw Dr. Lucius Calhoun boom into the parking lot in his Oldsmobile, waving from the window with his left arm as he spun the wheel with his right. He was followed by a regular convoy of vehicles, and as they drove into the parking lot they all began to sound their horns, a joyous noise unto the Lord.

“Sorry to be late,” Calhoun said as he popped out of his car. He was a young man, short and vigorous, barely thirty though already bald on top, with a ginger mustache and a broad grin. He shook Frankland’s hand and Garb’s.

“We were planning on coming in the bus,” he said. “We had bus-sized banners and everything. But that ol’ fuel pump started kicking up again, so we had to convoy down.”

Dr. Calhoun seemed to spend as much time waging war with his church bus as he did fighting the Devil. Frankland had always enjoyed the stories of Calhoun’s travails.

On the other hand, the Pentecostal Church could at least afford a bus. At Frankland’s outfit, all the money went into the radio station and the bunkers of survival supplies.

“Shall we get started?” Frankland said.

Each pastor organized his own flock, handing out signs that said PORNOGRAPHY ATTACKS THE FAMILY or RAILS BLUFF FAMILY VALUES CAMPAIGN or FIRST AMENDMENT DOES NOT PROTECT FILTH.

Some of the children had signs that said protect me from smut.

Bear State Videoramics, to its disgrace, had been renting pornographic videos out of its back room. And, to the disgrace of the community, this had apparently been going on for some time. Action was clearly required. The world would end soon, and Frankland did not wish Rails Bluff to acquire more than its necessary share of the divine wrath.

Frankland had an idea about how to deal with these sorts of situations. He could, of course, gather signatures on a petition, and lobby and persuade the county council to pass an ordinance against pornography, but then the ordinance would immediately become the subject of legal contention—the Civil Liberties Union, or other secular satanist busybodies, might intervene, and lawyers would cost the county money, and the thing could drag on for years without resolution, and in the meantime Eric Magnusson would still be peddling porn.

So quicker action was called for. A stern warning from the guardians of the community. A picket line, a public protest, and a call for a boycott.

Hit him where it hurts, Frankland thought. Right in the pocketbook. Magnusson couldn’t be making that much money as it was—nobody in Rails Bluff was making money. Magnusson couldn’t afford to lose much business.

And the best part was, even the Civil Liberties Union agreed that picket lines and civil protest were just fine. Just citizens exercising their rights to state their opinion.

“Don’t reckon you’re going to give up this foolishness anytime soon, huh?” said Magnusson. Frankland looked up from tying a white band on the arm of one of his Sunday School class. The owner of Bear State Videoramics stood above him, red-gold hair gleaming in the setting sun, a scowl on his long Swedish face.

“I reckon not,” Frankland said.

“What’s the problem?” Magnusson said. “I’ve got a right to earn a living.”

“You’re not allowed to earn a living by poisoning the community,” Frankland said. “Somebody might pay you to put cyanide in the water, but that doesn’t mean you should take the money.” Magnusson scowled. “I don’t sell to no kids,” he said, “so I don’t know why you got kids here. They’ll find out more about porn from you than from me.”

“They’ll know to avoid it,” Garb said. He had walked over from where he had been organizing his youth association members.

“I won’t stay in business without the back room,” Magnusson insisted. “You want another business to close in this town? What about my family?”

“The righteous,” said Garb, “eat to the satisfaction of their soul; but the belly of the wicked shall want.”

“Vileness shall meet with requital, and loud shall be the lamentations thereof,” Frankland said, his mind spitting out the quote before his tongue could put a stop to it. He had to admit he had no idea whether the verse was actually in the Bible or not, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Garb’s eyes flicker as he tried to identify the quote.

Magnusson only looked grim. He glanced over the assembling parishioners and nodded to himself. “I see some of my best customers here,” he said. “People who rent from the back room a lot. You want their names?” He looked at Frankland. “What’s that quote, from the Bible? About the beam in the eye messing up your view, or something?”

Garb seemed troubled by this revelation, but Frankland knew the answer. “They would not have sinned,” he said, “if you had not provided the means.”

“Oh yeah. It’s all my fault. Blame the lusts of the world on me.” He waved his arms. “If they don’t get the stuff from me, they’ll get it on mail order.”

He stalked back to his store. Frankland watched him go in satisfaction.

“It’s working,” he said, and smiled.

Calhoun approached, a broad grin on his face. “Shall we start with a prayer?” he said. The demonstration went well. A number of people, heading into the parking lot with the obvious intention of renting a video from Bear State Videoramics, saw the demonstrators, their friends and neighbors, circling in front of the store with their signs, sometimes chanting slogans and sometimes singing hymns. The customers would usually hesitate, then shy away.

There were a few exceptions. A couple young men, obviously drunk, made an elaborate show of renting some pornographic videos, which they waved at Frankland as they got back in their Jeep and sped away. A few other adults came into the store to return videos, and a couple stayed to make other rentals, conspicuously from the family section.

But for a Friday night, Frankland figured, Magnusson’s business was lousy. The protest was really hitting him in the pocketbook.

“It’s working,” he told Dr. Calhoun as they fell into step.

“For one night, anyway,” Calhoun said. Calhoun grinned up at him and wiped sweat from his bald head.

“By the way, Reverend,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your radio address the other day. What was that term you used? ‘Rapture wimp’ was it?”

Frankland felt heat rise to his face. “I do apologize, Dr. Calhoun,” he said. “The Spirit was in me pretty strong at the time—but I should have chosen more appropriate language.”

Calhoun gave a chuckle. “Well, I’d like to think I’m not a wimp. I just happen to believe that there isn’t necessarily an interval between the Rapture and the Second Coming.”

“I believe I explained my reasoning in that radio speech,” Frankland said.

“But what about the Bema Judgment?” Calhoun said.

And Calhoun and Frankland then had a pleasant time, for the next hour or so, arguing back and forth about the Tribulation, the Bema Judgment as opposed to the Krino Judgment, the Twenty-Four Elders, Christ’s Bride in Heaven, the Judgment of the Gentiles, the role of the 144,000 Jews, and other significant matters pertaining to the end of the world.

They were interrupted by the publisher of the local weekly paper, who interviewed the leaders of the protest as well as Magnusson. Frankland had a feeling the coverage would be favorable, as the publisher was a member of Dr. Calhoun’s congregation.

The only real sour note came later, when the pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, Pete Swenson, turned up to rent a video. He crossed the parking lot slowly, a thoughtful frown on his beefy Swedish face, hands in the pockets of his chinos. He nodded at Frankland and Garb, walked into Bear State Videoramics, and could be seen having a long conversation with Magnusson. Hilkiah approached, clenching his tattooed fists.

“G—” he began, then corrected himself. “Dad-blame that squarehead, anyway.”

“I can’t figure him out,” said Calhoun.

A good third of the inhabitants of the community were the descendants of a colony of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants that had been planted here in the 1880s. A great many of the members of the commercial class, such as it was, bore Swedish names. The lofty red brick Church of the Good Shepherd, sitting next to the immaculate green lawn of the immigrant cemetery, was the largest of the area’s churches, and the oldest.

And the Swedes’ attitude was different. It just was, and Frankland didn’t understand it. Why Swenson wouldn’t stand with the community against pornography, why he didn’t participate in the Love Offering Picnic, why he didn’t urge his flock to join the Christian Gun Club with their children—why wouldn’t a minister do these obvious things, which were so clearly a part of his duty?

Swenson left the video store and nodded at Frankland again as he shambled toward his car. There was a tape of Spartacus in his hand.

“Well,” Frankland said finally, as Swenson drove away. “Those Lutherans, they’re pretty close to being Catholics, you know.”

Calhoun and Hilkiah looked at him and nodded.

That probably explained it.

The stock market was going mad, the President thought, and all because Sam made a weird face on television. Some days he just loved his job.

“We need a full-court press on this issue,” he said. “Point out that the market is bearing out what the Administration has said all along.”

“Yes, sir,” said Stan Burdett. His spectacles glittered. He knew just how to handle something like this.

“Maybe the First Lady can say something in her speech in Atlanta tonight.”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Grayson about it.”

There was the sound of a door opening. “Mr. President.” The President’s secretary entered the Oval Office—without knocking, the first time ever. “Something’s just happened.” There was a stricken look on her face.

The President saw the look and felt his heart turn over. For a moment he pictured the First Lady in a plane crash, his children in the sights of assassins…

“What happened?” he said, and tried to control the tremor that had risen in his voice.

“I called Judge Chivington’s office to make your golf appointment for next week.” His secretary’s lip trembled. “The judge is dead, sir. He passed away in his office about ten minutes ago. The paramedics are still there, but they say they can’t revive him.”

The President began to breathe again. Relief warred with sorrow in his mind, and then with shame at his being glad it was the judge and not his family.

“I thought the judge would bury us all,” he said, and then his voice tripped over the sudden ache in his throat.

Judge Chivington gone. The judge had been such a constant in the President’s life, from the very beginning of his career to the present, that he had truly never pictured his life without the man. He looked at his secretary, then at Stan. “Could you leave me alone for a while, please?” he managed.

“Yes, sir,” Stan said.

The others left in silence. The President turned his chair to the tall windows behind him, to the roses ranked in the garden beyond.

It was like losing a father, he thought.

Judge Chivington had been one of the greats. Legislator, jurist, advisor to the powerful. One of the few things that the President could absolutely rely on throughout his life.

The President would see that the judge was properly recognized as he began his trip to the beyond. A funeral in the National Cathedral, a procession of Washington’s great orators from the pulpit, a choir that spat holy fire.

The judge’s wife had died about five years ago. The President would have to call the judge’s daughter, who was a high-powered lawyer on the West Coast.

Do this right, he thought. If you ever do anything right in your life, do this. He turned and reached for the phone.

SEVEN

Omar gave himself Monday off and drove to Vicksburg to pick up Micah Knox, the speaker from the Crusaders National of the Tabernacle of Christ, who was supposed to meet him at the bus station. There was only one white man in the station when Omar arrived, a skinny kid slumped in a plastic waiting room chair with his feet propped on an army surplus duffel bag, and he seemed so unlikely to be a Crusader that Omar’s gaze passed over him twice before the kid stood up, hitched the duffel onto his shoulder, and walked straight up to him.

“Sheriff Paxton.”

His voice was nasal and unpleasantly Yankee. He was thin and very small, coming maybe up to Omar’s clavicle, and thin, with red hair cut short enough to show the odd contours of his skull. He wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, black jeans, and worn work boots. He looked maybe all of seventeen years old.

“Micah Knox?” Omar shook the kid’s hand. With the duffel and the short haircut, he looked like a teenage soldier on leave.

“Thanks for coming to meet me,” Knox said. His eyes were eerie, with bayou-green pupils entirely surrounded by eye-white.

“Can I help you with that?” indicating the duffel.

“No, I got it. Thanks.”

They walked out of the waiting room into the blazing heat. Omar opened the trunk of his car and let Knox put his duffel inside. The duffel seemed surprisingly heavy. Sweat was already popping out on Knox’s forehead.

“Damn, it’s hot down here,” he said.

“You’re not exactly dressed for the South,” Omar said. Knox looked self-consciously at his long-sleeved flannel shirt.

“I got Aryan tattoos,” Knox said. “I don’t want the niggers to see them. Nothing but niggers on that bus.” Omar unlocked his car doors and he and Knox got inside.

Omar started the car, and for Knox’s benefit turned on the air conditioner full blast. Two young black men, leaning against the shaded wall of the station, looked at them both with expressionless faces. Probably they recognized Omar from television. Knox glared sullenly back at them.

“I hate the way they stare,” he said.

“You had a chance to eat? You want to stop somewhere?”

Knox shifted uneasily in his seat. “I don’t eat much.”

It occurred to Omar that maybe Knox didn’t have any money. “I’m buying,” he said.

“I’m not hungry,” Knox said. “But you go ahead and eat if you want.” Omar drove in silence over the crumbling Vicksburg streets until he got onto I-20 heading west. The freeway vaulted off the Vicksburg bluff and was suddenly over water. Omar looked down at a huge gambling casino dressed up as a nineteenth-century riverboat, with huge flowering stacks and gingerbread balconies, then saw Knox sitting with his hands clamped on the passenger seat, his eyes closed and his face gone pale.

“Something the matter?” Omar asked.

“I hate heights,” Knox said in a strained voice. “Can’t stand bridges.” Omar was amused. When he’d got to the end of the bridge, he told Knox it was safe and Knox opened his eyes and began to breathe again.

“So you’re on a speaking tour or something?” Omar said. “The Grand Wizard didn’t make that clear.”

“Speaking. Recruiting.” He gave Omar a look with his strange eyes. “Fund-raising.”

“Can’t have raised too many funds if you’re traveling by bus.”

Knox shrugged. “I raised money here and there, but I didn’t keep it. I sent it to other Crusader groups.”

“That’s good.”

Knox shifted uneasily in his seat. “You got a bank in Shelltown, or whatever it’s called?”

“Shelburne City. And we’ve got two.”

“I might need to get some more money.” He scratched his head. “Either of the banks owned by Jews?”

“Nope. You can do business in either of ’em.”

“Mm.” Knox pulled his feet up into the seat and crossed his arms on his knees, resting his chin on his forearms. His fingers tapped out strange little rhythms on his flannel-covered biceps.

“I got a good feeling about Shelburne City,” he said. “I think we’re gonna give people something to think about.”

Omar and Knox didn’t talk much on the way to Spottswood Parish. Knox clamped his eyes shut when they crossed the Bayou Bridge, then sat up and grinned. “We’re in Liberated America now!” he said.

“As liberated as it gets,” Omar said.

“This is the only county in America not run by ZOG. You chased ZOG out of Spottswood County.”

“Parish,” Omar corrected automatically. ZOG was Zionist Occupation Government, a term that some of the people used.

They passed a sign with a blue spiral design and the words evacuation route. Knox narrowed his eyes as the sign passed.

“What is that? Is that some kind of nuclear war thing?”

“It’s in case of a big hurricane,” Omar said. “This state is so flat that a big enough storm could put half of us under the Gulf of Mexico.”

Knox looked around. “It’s flat all right.”

“It looks flatter’n it is,” Omar said. “You can’t really tell from looking, but most of the parish is actually higher than the country around. In the big flood of ’27, thousands of people saved their lives by evacuating here.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Knox said. He peered at a strange figure that strolled up the road toward Hardee. He was an elderly black man dressed in worn overalls, with a ragged wide-brimmed hat on his head. He carried a wicker bag over one shoulder, and a stick over the other shoulder with a half-dozen dead birds hanging from it.

“What the hell is that?” Knox demanded.

Omar grinned. “That’s ol’ Cudgel,” Omar said. “He’s from down south in coonass country somewhere, came up here fifteen or eighteen years ago. Lives in a shack up in Wilson’s Woods, has a skiff on the bayou. Lives off what he can catch or trap, fish or birds or animals.”

Knox turned around in his seat, looking at the strange figure loping along the road in his homemade sandals. “Looks like he just came down from the trees,” he said. “He looks like the original Mud Person.”

“Mud people” was a term that some of the groups used for inferior races. The theory was that they weren’t created by God like white folks, they were spawned out of the mud.

“Cudgel’s all right,” Omar said. “Cudgel’s never been any trouble.” Knox gave Omar an intent look. “Ain’t none of ’em all right. I’m from Detroit and I know. They chased us out of Madison Heights, they chased us out of Royal Oak. They’re animals, every one of ’em.” He flung himself back into his seat with a thump. “They should be put to sleep,” he said. “I get upset just thinking about it.”

“Well,” Omar said, “you’re in liberated country now. You can take it easy.”

“Hurricanes,” Knox muttered. “Swamp-niggers. Floods. Jesus H. Shit.” Omar figured that the rest of the day was going to be very long. He was looking forward to getting his guest to the bus station in Monroe next morning. The kid was just too twitchy, too moody. He doubted that Knox had anything new to say about the situation. He wondered why the Grand Wizard had arranged to send him here.

Knox was pleased by the election signs and flags that were still visible in Hardee, and by the way some of Omar’s neighbors waved at him as he drove by. “You got some real support here!” he said, slapping his thighs. “That’s great! It’s great to see this stuff!”

Omar slowed as he approached his house. “I want to check if there’s reporters around,” he said. “I don’t want them following us to the meeting.”

“Jesus, no,” Knox muttered. He slumped low in his seat, just letting his eyes peer above the level of the door.

“I think most of them went home,” Omar said. “They got a short attention span, you know, Madonna farts in Hollywood and they’ve got to go cover it.”

The road was empty of any living thing except for a couple of cur dogs panting in the shade of some forsythia. Omar parked in his carport. Knox seemed spooked by the idea that reporters might be lurking around, and he continued to slump in the passenger seat until he got out, and then kept his head down as he left the car and collected his duffel from the trunk.

Wilona wasn’t home, and Omar remembered that this was the date for her afternoon tea with Ms. LaGrande. Omar showed Knox through Wilona’s sewing room to the bedroom that Omar’s son David had occupied until he left for LSU. “Thanks, Sheriff,” he said. “This’ll do fine.”

“Would you like a beer?” Omar asked. “Co-Cola? Lemonade?”

“Coke would be good,” Knox said. He stowed his duffel under David’s narrow bed. Omar got Knox a Coke and himself a beer. He sat on the sofa in the living room, and Knox sat crosslegged on the floor in front of him. He looked down the length of the building, through Wilona’s sewing room to his own bedroom.

“Why do they build ’em like this?” he asked. “Long and narrow, all the rooms in a row?”

“Ventilation,” Omar said. “A shotgun home was built so that any breeze would blow through all the rooms.”

“But now you’ve got air-conditioning.”

“Yep.” Omar sipped his Silver Bullet. Knox fidgeted with his Coke, making a continuous ring of ice against the glass.

“I’m curious,” Omar said. “The Grand Wizard didn’t really have a chance to tell me where your outfit is based.”

Knox turned his staring green eyes on Omar. “My action group formed in Detroit,” Knox said. “Most of us are in the West, I guess. Montana, Oregon, Washington State. But there’s no particular place we meet—we all travel a lot, and we only get together on special occasions.”

“A traveling Klan?” Omar smiled thinly to cover his unease.

He was beginning to feel a degree of anxiety about his guest. “You all salesmen or something?” he asked. Knox shook his head. “Not like you mean. I mean we all recruit, yeah, but we travel because we’re all warriors in the cause. See, I don’t know many other Crusaders—I’ve only met a handful. I only know the ones in my action group—that’s my cell. That way if one of us is an informer, he can only betray so many.”

“Uh-huh,” Omar said. He sipped his beer while alarms clattered through his mind. He didn’t like what he was hearing.

“You’re a police officer, right?” Knox said. “So you know how it is that serial killers get away with what they do.”

Omar thought about it. “You mean that there’s no connection—” he began.

“Right. They kill perfect strangers. There’s nothing to link the killers and their victims.” 154 Walter J. Williams

“Uh-huh.” Omar said again. He narrowed his eyes, tried to think his way out of this. Cocksucker set me up, he thought.

“Just apply that principle to the revolution,” Knox said. “That’s all the Crusaders National are doing. You don’t do anything in your own area, or to anyone who knows you.” He looked up. “Say, did you ever read Hunter!” Knox said.

“Heard about it,” Omar said, still thinking. He carefully put his beer down on the side table.

“Hunter’s a great book. Tells exactly how to do it,” Knox said. “Exactly how to overthrow ZOG and put Aryans back in charge again. It’s just about this one guy… and all he does is travel around, and he kills nigger leaders and kike politicians and queers and black men who fuck white women. And he’s so inspirational, see, that soon other people follow his example.” Set me up, Omar thought. That fucking bondsman bastard.

Knox’s face glowed with enthusiasm. “ZOG doesn’t know how to fight them. Because they’re not organized, they’re just people doing what’s right. If they catch one, he can’t help them, ’cause he doesn’t know the others. Now the Crusaders National are a little more organized than that, but not much. We use codes to communicate, and the Internet. And we meet only to plan our actions and carry them out, see… you know, find a bank in some little town—”

Omar moved. He lunged off the couch and slammed Knox in the breastbone with the palm of his hand. Knox’s eyes widened in shock as he went over on his back. Coke splashed over the floor.

“Down!” Omar shouted. “Down on your face!”

Ice skiddered across the wooden floor. Knox was on his back with his legs still half-locked in the crosslegged position. Fabric tore as Omar grabbed his shirt and rolled him over onto his face.

“Arms straight out!” Omar said. He could feel sweat popping out on his face. He straddled Knox and slammed him in between the shoulder blades to keep him on the floor.

“What—?” Knox began.

“Just shut up!” Omar said. “Put your arms straight out!”

Knox obeyed. “I didn’t do nothing, man,” he said. Omar began patting him down. He found a knife in a sheath inside Knox’s jeans on the right side, so that it would be invisible till he drew it, and a little snubnosed .38 special in an ankle holster. Omar stood up, looked at the five bullets in the cylinder. Knox was carrying it loaded. Omar cocked the pistol and pointed it at the back of Knox’s head.

“Take your pants off,” he said.

Knox twisted his head to stare at Omar in alarm. “Hey!” he said. “You think I’m queer or something?” Fear made his voice crack. “I’m not a queer! I hate queers!”

“I want to find out if you’re wearing a wire,” Omar said. “Do it or I blow your fucking head off.” Knox put his hands on his belt, then hesitated.

Sweat slid off Omar’s nose, pattered on the floor. “This is my parish,” he reminded, “and you can disappear into the bayou real easy.”

Knox squirmed on the floor as he drew his jeans as far down as his boots would permit. Beneath the jeans were worn boxer shorts. Omar knelt and carefully felt Knox’s crotch. Knox straightened and gave a little gasp at the touch, but did not protest. Omar could detect no electronics.

“Right,” he said, stepping back and raising the pistol again. “Now I want you to crawl toward the bedroom.”

“I’m not an informer,” Knox gasped. “I’m not a race-traitor. I don’t know who told you different, but—” Omar swiped with his sleeve at the sweat that poured down his face. “Shut up and do as I say,” he said. Still aiming the pistol, he walked behind Knox as Knox crawled into David’s room. The boy’s jeans were still down around his knees. Omar had Knox lie facedown in the corner while he dumped out Knox’s duffel on the bed. He found some clothing, a zipped case of toiletries, a laptop computer in its original foam packing held together by duct tape, some books and magazines, including well-worn copies of Hunter, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and The Turner Diaries, ammunition, a 9mm Beretta, and a pump shotgun with a folding stock and pistol grip—disassembled, but it could have been put in working order in seconds.

“I can explain, you know?” Knox said.

Omar sat on the bed and contemplated the weapons laid out before him. The Grand Wizard, he thought, had set him up. He’d got jealous of Omar’s prominence in the organization, was afraid that Omar might set up his own Klan. It had been the Grand Wizard who had sent this kid to Spottswood Parish to talk about bank robbery and sedition. Maybe even rob the bank and claim Omar as an accomplice. Well, Omar thought. The Grand Wizard’s plan just got derailed.

Omar looked up at Knox. The redheaded man had turned partly onto his side and was watching Omar with those strange eyes.

“Let me tell you how it’s going to be,” Omar said. “So far as I know, these weapons belong to you and have not been used in the commission of any crime.”

“That’s true,” Knox said. “They’re clean. I bought ’em at a gun show. You can—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Omar said. Knox closed his mouth with an audible snap.

“Just listen,” Omar said. “Now—you’re a colleague, and you’re here in Spottswood Parish to talk to my people, and you can do that. But—” He pointed the pistol. “I’ve worked hard to get where I am, and I am not going to let you fuck up my work by preaching anything illegal. There are going to be people at the meeting tonight who are peace officers, and who are sworn to uphold the law. You are not going to compromise us in any way. You are not going to advocate killing people, or robbing banks, or committing crimes.”

“I won’t,” Knox said quickly. “You can trust me. I didn’t understand your situation, that’s all.”

“Because,” Omar said, continuing as if he hadn’t heard, “if you do that, if you advocate illegalities, you are just going to disappear. And don’t think I can’t make that happen, because everybody you’re going to meet tonight are people I grew up with, and I know them all very well, and I can trust every single one of them to do what’s necessary.” He wiped sweat from his face. “You understand what I’m saying, podna?”

“Yes.” Knox nodded. “I understand.”

“I’m going to tape-record the meeting tonight.” Omar said, “so there’s a record of what you say. Just in case someone later alleges that you came here preaching sedition or something.” Just in case the Grand Wizard sics the fucking FBI on me, he thought. Knox nodded again. “Fine,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

They both froze at the sound of the front door opening, at the sound of heels on the wood flooring.

“Oh, my God in this world!” Wilona’s voice. “What happened here?”

“Just a little accident,” Omar called. He was surprised to find that his voice was steady. “I’ll help you clean it up in just a second.”

Omar stood and opened the gun and dropped the bullets out of the cylinder. He tossed the pistol back on the bed. He unzipped the bag of toiletries, dumped its contents on the bed—shaving cream, bag of disposable razors, and a huge economy-sized bottle of aspirin—and then Omar gathered up all of Knox’s ammunition and zipped it into the toiletries case. Knox watched in silence from the floor. Omar paused in the door, looked down at Knox for a long second, then closed the door behind him as he left the room. He walked through Wilona’s sewing room into the living room and found Wilona cleaning up the spilled Coke with a roll of paper towels. She wore heels, her new frock, and Aunt Clover’s pearls.

“Don’t do that, darlin’,” Omar said. He tossed the bag of ammunition on the sofa and bent to help her clean up. “You’ll make a mess of your nice clothes.”

Wilona straightened. “What is going on?” she said. “It looks like you just threw your drink halfway across the room. And you’re all sweaty like you’ve been working.”

“Mr. Knox had a little fall,” Omar said. “I wanted to make sure he was all right before I cleaned up.”

“My goodness.” Wilona looked alarmed. “I forgot he was coming. Is he all right?”

“He’s fine.” Omar swabbed at the floor and noticed idly that termites were digging a tunnel across one of the floor-boards. Time to call the exterminator. “He’s changing clothes right now.” He looked up. “How was your afternoon?”

“Oh, it was lovely!” He picked up the gloves she had left on the little table by the door. “Ms. LaGrande was so gracious—she met me right on the front portico. The portico is a special design, she told me—it has a special name and everything. Did you ever hear what it’s called?” Omar ripped another towel off the roll. “A front porch?” he asked. Wilona laughed. “It’s called ‘distyle-in-antis.’” She pronounced the unfamiliar words carefully. “That’s with the two round columns between the two square columns. Ms. LaGrande’s great-grandfather modeled it after the Tower of the Winds in Athens, Greece.”

Omar straightened, looked down at the floor.

“That’s going to have to be mopped,” Wilona said. “Otherwise it’ll get sticky.”

“I’ll get the mop,” he said.

They both turned at the sound of a door opening. Knox appeared at the door to his room. He was wearing a fresh flannel shirt and the same black jeans. He walked uneasily through the sewing room to the living room door.

“Micah Knox,” Omar said, “this is my wife Wilona.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Knox said slowly.

“Mr. Knox, are you all right?” Wilona walked toward him to shake his hand. “I heard you had a fall.” Knox leaned on the door frame and gave an apologetic grin as he took Wilona’s hand. “I’m just fine, ma’am. Sorry about your floor.”

“I’ll mop that up,” Wilona said. “That’s not a problem. I’m just glad you’re feeling all right.” Knox looked over Wilona’s shoulder at Omar. Omar looked back into Knox’s staring green eyes.

“I think everything’s fine now,” Knox said. “We had a little accident, but everything’s going to be okay.” On Monday, the market dropped off a precipice and didn’t find bottom. A large Dutch bank failed. The Chinese chose this moment to dump billions of dollars of currency reserves, and in every market from Singapore to London the bears contemplated the chaos and sharpened their claws. At twelve-thirty, Charlie called Dearborne’s office and found he’d left for the country club. He looked at Megan through the glass wall of her office and gave her a nod. She typed in the correction, and millions of dollars of losing positions pulsed into the TPS computers on a silent electronic wave. Not that it mattered. What had been catastrophic positions on Friday were turning into mountains of solid gold on Monday. By three o’clock, when the exchange closed, the S&Ps had dropped sixteen percent, Charlie was in the black, and he was standing on his desk, beating his chest and giving a Tarzan yell. Selling short the S&Ps had made him a profit of $137,500,000, give or take a few hundred thousand. Added to this was the forty million he’d started with, and the ten million he’d made on the Eurodollar puts. This was a 370 per-cent profit in less than a week.

And on any large gain made for TPS, Charlie’s contract called for him to collect a bonus of seventeen percent. Seventeen percent of $147,500,000…

“I’m lord of the fucking jungle!” he shouted. “We’re all going to die rich!” His people, the traders and salesmen, looked up from their screens, hesitated a moment, then began to applaud. As cheers began to ring out, Charlie looked up to Megan’s office, and he could see her eyes gazing levelly at him over the top of her monitor. He couldn’t tell whether the eyes were smiling or not. By four o’clock, when the Merc closed in Chicago, Tarzan yells seemed inadequate to the situation. Instead he put on his phone headset and punched Megan’s number.

“Sod the proles,” he said when she answered. “Let your staff do the reconciliation. Come home with me tonight.”

“No guilt,” she whispered. The words sent a surge of desire up his spine.

“I’ll call the caterer,” he said.

“Welcome to the observation deck of the Gateway Arch of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial,” said Marcy Douglas. “On exiting, please step to your left and make your way up the stairs. If you are waiting for a tram, please wait for everyone to exit before taking your place.” The latest group of tourists climbed from the south tram to the observation platform. Marcy noticed, among the usual ambling tourists, the parents and children and people with cameras, an elderly lady on the arm of a younger woman, a young Japanese couple in baseball caps, and a cluster of middle-aged people talking to one another in French.

The usual. Marcy evaded an impulse to look at her watch. She was on duty till ten o’clock and had many hours to go.

“Please stay on the yellow stairs,” she told the tourists.

Marcy was twenty-two years old and had worked for the Park Service for two years, since she’d given up on college. She was tall and thin and black, and kept her hair cut short and businesslike under her Smokey Bear hat. She was from rural Florida and loved the out-of-doors, and had hoped to work in one of the big national forests. Failing that perhaps in Jean Lafitte National Park—better known as the French Quarter of New Orleans—but those with seniority were lined up for those jobs, so she found herself working 630 feet above the St. Louis waterfront, shepherding tourists through the largest stainless steel sculpture in the world, the silver catenary curve of the Gateway Arch. The giant wedding ring that St. Louis had built to the scale of God’s finger.

The elderly woman put her hand on Marcy’s arm. “That was the most unpleasant elevator ride I’ve had in my life,” she said.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Marcy said. “I know they’re crowded.” The huge arch couldn’t use regular elevators: it had special trams, trains of little cars, built to ride up the inside of the curve. Each car seated five, if the five were close friends, weren’t too large, and if none of them smelled bad.

“And the swaying,” the lady said. “I felt like I was going to get sick to my stomach.” Marcy patted her hand. “You take as long as you need to catch your breath before going down.”

“Is there another way down?”

“You can take the stairs, ma’am, but there are over a thousand of them.” Marcy tried to look sympathetic. “I think the tram ride would be better for you.”

“Come along, Mother.” The old lady’s companion tugged gently at her arm. “The young lady has work to do.”

Marcy shuffled the line of waiting tourists into the trams and sent them to ground level. She could be in nature, she thought. She could be in Yosemite.

Or she could be in the French Quarter, sipping a planter’s punch in the Old Absinthe House.

“Why are the windows so small?” a little girl asked.

“A lot of people ask that question,” Marcy said. She didn’t know the answer. Marcy stood with a couple of tourists for a photograph. She didn’t know why so many people wanted to take her picture, but many of them did.

The French people went from one window to the next in a group, comparing the view with a map they’d brought with them. She heard “Busch Stadium” and “Cathedrale de St. Louis.” A lot of French people came to St. Louis, figuring that since the French had once owned the place, they’d find French culture here. Marcy figured they were usually disappointed. The French men, she noticed, were casually dressed, but the women looked as if they were on a modeling assignment.

“My goodness!” The old lady clutched at her heart. “Is it swaying up here?” Marcy smiled. She spent a lot of her shift smiling. It adds to your face value, her mother used to tell her.

“We sway a little bit when the wind picks up, yes,” she said. “But don’t worry—the Gateway Arch is built to withstand a tornado.”

“Pardon, please,” said one of the Japanese. “How do you get to the Botanikkogoden?” It took two tries before Marcy realized that she was asking for guidance to the Botanical Gardens. She gave directions. Her colleague, Evan, had just brought another load of tourists up on the north tram and was urging people to stay on the yellow stairs.

One of the tourists was tilting his camera, trying to get a picture of the Casino Queen, the big gambling boat just pulling into its mooring across the river in East St. Louis. Revenues from the Casino Queen, Marcy knew, had rescued East St. Louis from being the poorest city in the United States, a position it had held for decades.

“How do you pronounce the name of the architect?” an anxious woman asked.

“I’m not very good at Finnish,” Marcy said, and then did her best to pronounce Eero Saarinen’s name.

“Why didn’t they get an American architect?” the woman demanded.

EIGHT

It was the first sunny day in weeks. Jason sped along the top of the levee, listening to his tires grind on the gravel road that capped its top. The ATV’s exhaust rattled off the tangle of trees between the levee and the river. The river was very high now, only ten feet below the top of the levee, and the cottonwood and cypress stood in the gray water, leafy branches trailing in the current. The mass of water, the evident weight of it, all moving so relentlessly under Missouri’s skies… it made him uneasy. What if it got higher? What if it went over the top of the levee and flooded out his house? Somewhere to the north, up in Iowa, there was supposed to be flooding. What if the floodwaters came south?

But no one else here seemed concerned. “The river gets high twice a year,” Muppet had told him. He figured Muppet should know, and Muppet wasn’t packing survival supplies into a boat, so he supposed it was all right.

Jason was driving Muppet’s Yamaha ATV, speeding along the top of the levee with the throttle max 3d out. Muppet sat behind, his butt above the rear wheels, bouncing along with his feet splayed out to each side, the heels of his sneakers just above the roadbed.

The little vehicles—essentially motorcycles with four wheels—were the passion of Muppet’s crowd, and indeed half the kids at school. No drivers’ licenses were required to run the vehicles as long as they stayed off the road. The ripping sound of the ATVs’ engines was heard over the entire district on weekends. On the far side of the levee, on the river’s muddy sandbanks, on islands made accessible by low water, and on trails beaten into the hardwood tangle, the brightly colored vehicles sped along like ants on the trail of honey.

But now, with the river high, a few rural roads and the crest of the levee were the only places to drive. Jason was determined, though, to make the most of it. At least on the top of the levee he could go fast. It wasn’t as good as skating, Jason thought. Nothing was. But it was better than staring at the walls and waiting for his parents to change their minds and bring him back to California. He wondered how he was going to get his father to buy him an ATV. It was too late for his birthday—his dad had already bought the present, or so he said. And Christmas was far away. Maybe, he thought, if he did really well on his finals…

The Indian mound loomed up on the right, and below it, the row of five houses with Jason’s in the middle. Jason decelerated, clutched, shifted into a lower gear, then steered off the top of the levee and onto the steep grassy grade. Muppet’s feet flew high as the ATV pitched over the brink and accelerated, engine buzzing like an angry beehive. Jason heard Muppet give a whoop.

Jason gave the machine more throttle.

The ATV hit the flat with a bump, bouncing high and throwing Muppet forward into Jason. Jason laughed. He upshifted and felt the wheels spin on gravel, and then the cart took off, throwing Muppet back on the seat and bringing a fierce grin to Jason’s face. The ATV lurched as he corrected his course, and then he accelerated down the lane. His house came up faster than he expected and he overshot the drive-way, coming to a stop on the front lawn.

“You’re getting the feel of it, all right,” Muppet said.

“Thanks for letting me drive.” Jason put the vehicle into neutral, then dismounted. “Want to come in?” Muppet shook his head. “No thanks. My mom is having her piano lesson now, and I’ve got to get dinner ready for my baby sister.”

“Okay.” Backing toward the porch. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“See you then.”

“Thanks!”

Muppet revved the engine and took off, making a U-turn on the front lawn and heading back to the levee. As the buzzing engine receded, Jason could hear the Huntley dog, Batman, barking like fury from his confined yard.

Jason took off his helmet—his mother had relented to the extent of giving his armor back, if not his skates—and then he turned and bounced up the porch steps before noticing the large UPS package that sat before the screen door. His nerves gave a little joyous leap. His birthday present from Dad!

He picked it up, and it had quite a respectable weight. At least it wasn’t clothing. He unlocked the door and took the package upstairs to his study. His birthday wasn’t until Friday, but he saw no reason not to open it now, so he took out his pocket knife and slit open the strapping tape that held the box together. When he’d finally placed the contents of the box on top of his desk, he looked at it in puzzlement.

Astroscan, it said. Reflector telescope. And there was a book with it, explaining how to find and view astronomical objects.

The telescope made sense as a gift, Jason supposed, though he couldn’t remember expressing any interest in astronomy to his father, or his father to him. Here in rural Missouri, with only the minimal glow of Cabells Mound on the north horizon, the night starscapes were spectacular. On those nights when the sky wasn’t covered with cloud, anyway. There hadn’t been many clear nights this rainy spring.

He suspected that his father hadn’t thought of the gift, though. It seemed more like something that Una might pick.

The thing was, the Astroscan didn’t look like a telescope. Telescopes were supposed to be long tubes, Jason knew, with a piece of glass at one end and someplace to put your eye at the other. This thing looked, if anything, like a giant red plastic cherry.

There was a round, red hard plastic body, maybe ten inches across. It was round on the bottom, and wouldn’t stand by itself, but there was a stand provided in which it could sit and rotate freely. And then there was a thick stem, six or seven inches long, that stuck out from the body. Removing the plastic cap on the end of this revealed a piece of glass that Jason assumed was a lens. There was another lens, an eye-piece, in a foam-padded box, but it seemed to go in the stem, not on the end away from the front lens.

It seemed very strange.

Jason wondered for a while if this was some kind of kiddie scope, if his father had got him something intended for a six-year-old.

The Huntleys’ dog Batman was still barking, barking as if it were deranged. Jason looked out the window to see if the dog was barking at an intruder, but Batman was sitting in the backyard next to the little Huntley girl’s inflatable wading pool, with its muzzle pointed to the sky, barking into the air. Maybe, Jason thought, it had a bad case of indigestion or something. He returned his attention to the telescope.

He shoved his computer monitor out of the way, put the scope on his desk, put the eyepiece into the aperture, then pointed the Astroscan out the window and put his eye to it. He could see nothing but a blur. He spun the focusing knob.

And the world leaped into focus. There, amazingly close, was the line of trees at the far end of the cotton field. And beyond that, the water tower of Cabells Mound with its winding stair, its metal skin painted its strange unnatural green. Birds flew past, sun glowing on their feathers.

But it was upside-down. The water tower and the trees were planted in the sky and pointed down to the earth. Weird.

Jason rolled the telescope over in its cradle, then walked around the desk and looked through the eyepiece from the other side. The picture was still upside-down.

He guessed he would have to get used to it.

At least it wasn’t a kiddie scope. He could see miles with this thing. He wished Batman would stop barking.

He scanned the horizon, but the view to the north was too flat to see very much, just the tower and the line of trees. He cleared the other end of the desk, shifted the scope, and looked east toward the river, twisting the focus knob until the flooded cottonwoods leaped out in bright detail. The inverted image revealed a big hawk sitting atop one of the trees, its back turned to him. Its dull red tail was clearly visible, as was the mottled pattern of feathers on its back.

And then something big moved behind the hawk, and Jason turned the focusing knob until he saw a tow boat churning upstream, the hot exhaust that poured from its stacks blurring Jason’s view of the river’s far bank. The tow consisted of fifteen barges lashed together by steel wire, and Jason could see the ribbed capstans that held the wire taut, the rust that streaked the sides of the barges, the white bow wave that marked the tow’s speed. He could see the radar spinning on top of the tow boat, and see the red flannel shirt and heavy boots of one of the crewmen as he busied himself on the afterdeck. He tried to follow the tow boat with the scope as it moved upstream, but it was difficult because he kept forgetting the image was inverted—he’d push the scope in the wrong direction, and the image would leap out of sight as if the host of a slide show had clicked from one slide to the next. Jason then spent too much time finding the tow boat again—crazy views of sky and field flashed through the eyepiece—and then, once Jason found the tow boat, he had to refocus the scope. The boat was now stern-on, and above the huge double swell of its wake he could read its name in black letters on the white stern counter: Ruth Caldwell.

“Cool,” Jason said.

He needed to go someplace higher and get a better view. For a moment he considered trying to get up on the roof, and then he remembered that there was a vantage place just behind his yard. The old Indian mound that towered over the property in back. Between the height of the mound and the reach of the scope, Jason could probably see Memphis.

There was a shoulder strap that had come with the scope, which would make it easy to carry—now Jason saw the value of the Astroscan’s compact design. He clipped the strap to the scope, put the big plastic lens cap over the objective lens, and put the eyepiece back in its padded box, then put the box in his pocket. He swung the shoulder strap experimentally over his shoulder and found that he could hold the Astroscan reasonably secure under one arm.

Then he bounced down the back stairs, paused by the fridge for an apple and some supernaturally charged water, went out the door. The huge mound loomed above him. A gust of wind rustled the oaks and elms that crowned its massive height.

The Huntley dog had given up barking and was whining now, whining as if it were in pain. Jason looked over the fence, but he couldn’t see anything wrong, and he couldn’t think of anything that he could do, so he passed by the propane tank, crossed the soggy backyard, and began walking briskly toward the mound.

There was a kind of steep earthen ramp that led to the top, with a path that zigzagged through the brush and trees. Jason began to climb. Within moments he was breathing hard, and his thighs were aching with the strain. The Indian mound was bigger and steeper than it looked.

On another side of the mound, by the highway, was a little plaque that the town of Cabells Mound had put up. It explained that it was this mound that had given the town of Cabells Mound its name, and that the mound had been built approximately 800–900 a.d. by the Mississippian Culture, and was once surrounded by a large town. About the year 900 the site had been abandoned for reasons unknown. Jason’s mother, on the other hand, held to the opinion that the mound had been built thirty thousand years ago by refugees from Atlantis, a theory that Jason had once dared to doubt out loud. “Who are you going to believe?” Catherine retorted. “A bunch of know-nothing archaeologists, or people who are in touch with the Atlantean survivors today?”

Jason’s mother had a knack for bringing conversations to a screeching halt with statements like that. Fortunately Muppet and his friends didn’t seem to mind hanging around with the son of the New Age Lady. They thought her beliefs were sort of interesting—when Jason had them over and showed them the house, they asked what the crystal in the water jug was for, who the Egyptian person in the photo was, and for details concerning the expected demise of California. When they met Catherine, a few hours later, they looked at her with a curious expectancy, as if she might begin chanting or channeling Elvis at any moment.

Jason figured he’d made some real friends here. Friends would stick by you no matter how crazy your mom happened to be.

Jason paused halfway up the mound, panting for breath. He turned and gazed out at the world below, the flat country that stretched forever to the north and west, eastward the gray-brown river spotted with silver flecks of reflected sun-light, the Ruth Caldzvell disappearing around a distant island. The strange white splotches on the brown, level fields were more distinct from this height than from the second floor of his home. Mr. Regan, he saw, was in his carport, bent over his boat. Birds chattered at Jason from the trees, but louder still was the howling of dogs. It sounded as if every dog for miles around had gone berserk.

His mom’s car, he saw, was just turning off the highway on its way to their house. He turned again and climbed steadily to the top of the mound. An old pumpkin oak stood on the mound’s verge. It had been struck by lightning, Jason observed. Part of the trunk was scorched black, limbs were splintered and bare of leaves, and much of the crown had burned away, but the oak had somehow survived the sky’s onslaught. New shoots were sprouting out of the burned part, looking frail in the sunlight, but waving their leaves proudly.

There were some bundles of dried flowers laid before the tree, Jason observed, among the tangled roots, and the remains of incense cones. His mother had made offerings here, though he could not say whether they had been to the tree’s burgeoning life or to the spirits of dead Atlanteans. The mound was thoroughly forested, and the view was largely blocked by the crowns of trees that grew on the steep slopes. Jason made his way to a little cleared space, where he found trampled grass and a used condom. Courting couples, he guessed, came up here to watch the sunset. He felt a sudden flush of distaste for the latex object, and he kicked it away, then reached into his pocket for the eyepiece to the scope.

There was nothing to rest the Astroscan on, so Jason just let it hang from the shoulder strap while he put his eye to the rubber eyepiece. He turned the scope on his own home, and through the back window he could clearly see his mother in the light of the kitchen, drinking a glass of energized water while frowning and contemplating something beyond the edge of the windowframe—Jason realized after a few seconds that she was looking into the open refrigerator, presumably trying to make up her mind what to have for dinner.

And then Jason realized that the image was, for a change, rightside-up. He wondered about that, until he realized that he was standing with the telescope under one arm and he was bending over it, head hanging down, to put his eye to the eyepiece. The image seemed rightside-up because his head was upside-down.

The ripping engine noise of an ATV sounded in the distance. Jason took his eye from the scope, and saw Muppet’s little green vehicle racing down the levee with Muppet bent over the handlebars. Behind, throwing up dust, was a Cabells Mound police car, lights flashing. Though Muppet had cranked the ATV’s throttle as far as it would go, the car, following behind, seemed only to be loitering.

“Asshole Eubanks,” Jason said. “You’re not even in your jurisdiction, damn it!” He bent his head and tried to focus the scope on the top of the levee. With more luck than skill he managed to catch Muppet in the scope’s image. He saw the green helmet turn, look over his shoulder at the car following so easily behind, and then glance down the slope of the levee, toward the cot-ton field below.

Yeah, Jason thought. He could almost read his friend’s mind. Go for it. He saw Muppet’s gloved hand twist the throttle, heard the change in engine pitch that came with the shift in gears. And then the ATV rolled off the top of the levee, accelerating for the field below, where the car might not follow.

“Go!” Jason shouted. “Run for it!”

The ATV raced down the levee’s flank. The police car slowed, hesitated. Above the chainsaw rip of the ATV’s engine Jason heard an eerie, collective howl, as if all the dogs in the world were crying in pain. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

And then the world rose and hit him on the chin.

NINE

They were late in getting started because Viondi needed to pick up something to deliver to one of his relatives in Mississippi. What the object turned out to be was a large silver samovar, over two feet tall, tossed casually in a cardboard box in Viondi’s trunk, next to another card-board box that held Viondi’s clothes and toilet articles. Nick put his soft-sided suitcase and his satchel in the trunk next to the boxes.

“A samovar?” Nick said. “What’s your family doing with a samovar?”

“Is that what it’s called?” Viondi shrugged. “No idea how we got it, brother. You can ask Aunt Loretta when you meet her. We use it to make tea and shit.”

“And what happened to your suitcase? Why’s your stuff in a box?”

“I loaned my suitcase to Dion.” Dion was one of Viondi’s sons. “But he was living with his girlfriend, and when she moved out, she packed her stuff into the suitcase and never gave it back. And she and Dion don’t talk to each other no more, so odds are I won’t ever see it again.” Nick looked at Viondi. “It’s a complicated family you’ve got, Viondi.” Viondi grinned at him through his bushy beard. “All families are complicated.” He slammed the trunk with his big hands, mashing the cardboard box of clothes. “You want to drive?” Nick shrugged. “Might as well.”

“She won’t bother.” The loud voice of a well-dressed white businessman cut across from the sidewalk, talking to another businessman. “The nigger who’s right? No way.”

Nick hunched for a moment, anger kindling in his soul at the slur that just flew in from nowhere, and then he realized that what the man had actually said was, “She won’t bother to figure who’s right.” And he tried to relax, but the carefree moment was gone.

He looked at Viondi, and could tell from his expression that he had processed the random words the same way Nick had, and had then made the same correction.

Shit, Nick thought. You were always ready for it. Always braced for bigotry until sometimes you heard it where it didn’t exist. No wonder so many black people die of hypertension.

“Give me the keys,” Nick said.

The keys to the Buick spun glittering through the air. Nick caught them on his palm, opened the door, slid into the leather seat.

The car still smelled new.

Viondi jumped into the shotgun seat and picked up a satchel of tapes. “What you want to listen to?” Nick narrowed his eyes as he gazed over the wheel at the busy street in front of him. “The blues,” he said.

Viondi looked at him. “You got some more bad news?” he asked.

“Heard from Lockheed on Friday,” he said. “I didn’t get the job.”

“Sorry, man. That’s bad.”

Nick started the car.

“You got any more places to apply?”

Nick shook his head. “Not for the kind of work that I do.”

“There’s all sorts of engineers, though, right? I mean, you can get a job in another field?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But I’m about fifteen years out of date for anything but what I’ve been doing.” Viondi thought for a moment. “You get back from seeing your girl,” he said, “we’ll talk. I’ll get you some work.”

“I don’t know anything about plumbing.”

Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. “Nick, you an engineer! You don’t think you can learn plumbing? Only two things you got to know about plumbing. The first is that shit runs downhill, and the second is that payday’s on Friday.”

A reluctant laugh rolled up out of Nick. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

“A man sends his daughter to France, that man needs a job.”

Nick sighed. “I know,” he said.

“Professor Longhair’s what you need,” Viondi said. He slotted in a tape. “Let’s hear a little of that N’Yawlins music, get that Louisiana sound in your soul.”

So they listened to Professor Longhair on their way out of St. Louis, and as they headed south on 1-55 they followed it with Little Charlie and the Nightcats, Koko Taylor, and Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows. They avoided the Swampeast by crossing into Illinois at Cape Girardeau, the silver bridge vaulting them over a brown, swollen Mississippi that was packed high between the levees and walls. Even from high above, on the bridge, the slick, glittering river looked fast, deep, and dangerous. The old town of Cairo was decaying gently behind its tall concrete river walls. Viondi took over the driving because he wanted to stop at a barbecue place he remembered, and he drove around the shabby downtown area for twenty minutes, but the restaurant had closed or he couldn’t find it, so they got some burgers and crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. They followed Highway 51 through Fulton into Tennessee, and then south through Dyersburg and Covington. And as they approached the homeland of the blues, Viondi’s music drifted back in time, a connection to the heat and toil and sadness of the Delta, all the horrible old history, shackles and cotton fields, mob violence and the lash. Lonnie Johnson. Son Seals. Victoria Spivey. Robert Johnson.

“My granddad came north up this road,” Viondi said. “Highway 61 out of the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, then 51 north on his way to Chicago.”

“That’s the way a lot of people went,” Nick said. “My mother’s people came north that way.”

“North to the Promised Land. Get away from the Bilbos and the coneheads. And what they got was South Chicago.” Viondi shook his head. “I remember driving down with my family during the summers to see all the relatives we left behind. All the old folks, still in Friars Point. The backseat all packed with kids and packages and the smell of food.”

They carried their food, Nick knew, because black people could never be sure if restaurants would serve them. And even after segregation ended, the habit of carrying food along continued. Nick’s stomach rumbled. He found himself wishing there was a full hamper on the backseat.

“You still got people there?” Nick asked.

“A few. All working for Catfish Pride.”

“And one of them owns a samovar.”

“Aunt Loretta isn’t a relative, she’s a used-to-be in-law. She’s kin to Darrell’s momma.” Viondi smiled.

“She’ll put us up tonight. You’ll see.” He lifted his sunglasses, looked at Nick out of the corner of one eye.

“You getting hungry?”

“Yeah. That burger didn’t last. Maybe we can get something in Memphis.”

“I know a place that’s closer.”

Nick sighed. “Sure we can find it?”

Viondi dropped his sunglasses back on his nose and laughed. “Let’s check it out. You don’t want to eat now, we’ll get some takeout.”

The restaurant was open, an old ramshackle seafood place that loomed above the Hatchie north of Garland, gray weathered clapboards and mossy shakes on the roof. Nick and Viondi ate fish, cole slaw, greens, a bottle of Bud apiece, then stepped out onto the dense heat of the late afternoon and looked down at the thick, slow river, swollen by the backwash of the Mississippi. Nick felt an unaccustomed contentment easing his strung-wire muscles, and he touched the little box in his shirt pocket, the diamond necklace he had bought for Arlette.

Tomorrow he’d give it to her. He imagined her eyes shining.

Shadows were starting to lengthen. Nick got behind the wheel and crunched away down the gravel drive.

“I can get us to Memphis from here,” Viondi said. “We don’t have to backtrack. Just turn right.” He slotted a Lonnie Mack tape as Nick made the turn. “My token white guy,” he said. They drove down a winding two-lane blacktop. There were few buildings, and no people. Pines clustered thick on all sides.

Lonnie Mack’s voice grated from the car’s speakers.

Viondi adjusted the seat to recline more, leaned back with his hands pillowed on his stomach. The bottle of beer had made him drowsy. “So,” he said, “what do you call a whore with a runny nose?” Nick looked at him suspiciously. “What?”

“Full.”

Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. Nick shook his head. “That’s the third most disgusting joke you’ve told today,” he said. Lonnie Mack’s guitar stung the air.

The car took a leap, left the road for a second, and Nick’s eyes shot to the road, his hands clenching on the wheel. Had they just blown a tire? Hit something?

Nick looked into the rearview mirror to see if there was a dead animal in their wake, but there was nothing.

The Olds made a sudden lurch to the left, then to the right. Blown tire, then. Nick’s foot left the accelerator.

“What happened?” Viondi said, sitting bolt upright.

Nick looked up in surprise as he saw that the pines on either side of the road were leaping, branches waving madly as if in a high wind. Then one of the trees ahead on the right exploded—there was a puff of bark and splinters partway up, as if it had been hit with an artillery shell, and the top half of the tree tipped, began to fall toward the road.

“Look out!” Viondi shouted, one big hand reaching for the wheel. Nick flung the Olds to the left and stomped the accelerator. He felt himself punched back in his seat as the car took off. Splinters spattered off the windshield. Viondi gave a yell and leaned toward Nick as he tried to get away from the tree that was about to crash through his window. Nick’s heart pounded in his ears.

Boughs banged on the trunk as the tree crashed to the ground just behind the car. “She’s a natural disaster!” sang Lonnie Mack.

“What’s going on?” Viondi shouted.

Nick tried to get the car into the middle of the road. Trees shot by on either side, and suddenly they were in a clear space, green soybeans in rows on either side of the road. Nick took his foot off the accelerator. Nothing could fall on them here.

And then the earth cracked across, right in front of them, a crevasse ten feet across. Nick yelled and slammed on the brake.

The last words he heard were natural disaster, and then the Olds pitched into the crack. The choir mourned softly in the great space of the National Cathedral. Judge Chivington lay in state in his great mahogany coffin, and around him was a golden pool of light cast by floodlights overhead. Television cameras hunched inconspicuously in the cathedral’s darker recesses. The President sat in the front pew, with the First Lady on one side and the judge’s daughter, her husband and children, on the other. The stock market, he was given to understand, was going to hell in a handcart. The Fed chairman’s bizarre smile of the previous week had been analyzed and, probably, laid down to indigestion. The G8 summit was going to fall flat, all the President’s initiatives going the way of all the President’s initiatives, and his mark on history would be that of a caretaker, a Grover Cleveland or a Gerald Ford, someone fated to occupy the President’s Office in between the crises that made or tested greatness. Damn it, Chivington, he mentally addressed the coffin, why did you have to leave? Why now?

A shudder ran through the pew beneath him, and the President looked up, wondering if a big truck had just passed. He felt an unease in his inner ear.

The voice of the choir dimmed—the President saw chorister eyes glancing around—and then the choral director gestured emphatically, getting his crew back in hand, and the massed harmonies strengthened. The President felt a strange vibration in the palm of his hand where it was gripping the pew. From overhead there was a chime. It hung in the air for a long moment, producing a discord in the choral sound below. Another chime rang out, a deep metallic bellow.

The President felt the First Lady’s gloved hand close on his arm, and he heard her whisper in his ear.

“What’s going on?”

He shook his head. Another peal sounded. The choir’s voice faltered again.

The President looked up in surprise. The cathedral bells were ringing, softly at first, then with greater and greater insistence.

“Can they turn those off?” the First Lady hissed.

The President shook his head again. This wasn’t a regular bell peal, the sounds were too random. Something else was happening.

Another shudder ran through the building. Near the catafalque, a stand of media lights tottered and then fell with a crash. The choristers were singing as loud as they could to cover the growing chaos. In wonder the President gazed upward as the bells sounded, ringing as if they were mourning the end of a world.

Marcy, in response to the tourist’s question, was about to explain that the Westward Expansion Memorial was an international competition open to everybody, but at that moment she heard a strange roaring sound, like all the cattle in the stockyards had broken loose and were climbing the monument’s stairs. She gave a look to Evan, her colleague, to see if there was something wrong with the north tram. No, the sound wasn’t coming from there.

The entire Gateway Arch jumped about ten feet to one side.

Marcy went down, tangling her legs with those of the tourist. There was a sound like a freight train inexplicably roaring through the tram stop. A painful series of throbs went up Marcy’s spine, as if someone was kicking her repeatedly on the tailbone. Each kick lifted her a couple inches from the floor, then dropped her again.

“Everyone keep calm!” she shouted through sudden terror.

About a third of the tourists had fallen. The rest were shrieking, swaying, staring—all except the two Japanese, who had thrown themselves to the ground at the first impact, and were lying curled into little fetal balls, hands over their heads. Some of the people that had fallen were trying to rise. Marcy made flattening motions with her palm. “Everyone get on the floor!”

Her ears ached with the volume of the roaring. One of the windows shattered, fragments spilling outward into space, and a group of tourists screamed.

“Get down!” Marcy yelled.

Nobody could hear her, but the tourists were looking around for instruction, and enough of them saw her gestures so that they began to drop to the ground. Marcy put her hands atop her hat to show they should protect their heads, and they understood and began to cover up.

Marcy wanted to reassure them. “You’re safe! You’re safe!” she shouted, and then, because she could think of no other words, she added, “This place is built like a brick shit-house!” She hoped.

The whole Gateway Arch kept kicking her in the butt, hard.

Marcy had all the statistics memorized, all the tons of concrete and steel that had gone into the Arch’s construction. Eero Saarinen’s modest intention had been to create a monument that would last 8000 years, and he had built it proof against the winds of a tornado, against the shattering force of an earthquake.

She hoped his calculations had been on the money.

“A brick shithouse!” she repeated.

Another window blew out, letting in the hot, moist Missouri air, and Marcy began to pray. Jason lay stunned on the grass with the telescope partly under him. There was a horrific noise and vibration as if a thousand semi trucks were thundering past at once, all blowing their horns. He could feel the vibrations on his insides, as if his internal organs were shaking themselves apart. Earthquake, he thought. He was a California boy and he knew.

And he knew it was a bad one.

Cracking noises split the air like gunshots as tree limbs snapped. There was a tremendous crashing overhead as a huge elm branch snapped off high up, bouncing off other branches as it fell, and Jason hunched into his shoulders as it smashed to the ground just a few feet away, its jagged butt-end driving into the turf like a spear, the leafy end still tangled in the tree above.

Jason tried to stand and was thrown down before he could even rise to one knee. He gulped in the air and found that it tasted of sulfur—he had been so astounded by the force of the quake that he had forgotten to breathe—and then he belly-crawled the few feet, through a rain of fallen branches, to the brink of the mound. Below, the earth was heaving up in long rollers like the Pacific rolling onto the shore at Malibu. Here and there deep cracks gouged their way across the fields as if a savage giant were slashing at the soil with a knife. The earth moaned aloud as the giant struck again and again. But it was at the row of five houses that Jason stared. He couldn’t see his mother, but was relieved to see that the house was still intact. The windows were broken out and the old brick chimney had sprawled across the roof like a fallen prizefighter, but the building was still standing. Which was more than could be said for the other neighbors. Their houses were brick, and any Californian knew that masonry was death in an earthquake. Two of the houses, including the Huntleys’, were already piles of broken brick lying beneath shattered roofs. And as he watched the Regans’ house swayed and fell, collapsing into its basement, tearing away the metal roof of the carport from its supports and dragging it into the pit with a screech of metal. Jason couldn’t see Mr. Regan, though the old man had been in the carport just moments ago.

There was an explosion a scant hundred feet from his mother’s house, the sound buried beneath the roaring and moaning of the earth, and then water and white sand were blasted into the air, followed by a plume of water higher than the roof of the house. Jason wondered dazedly if the geyser came from a broken water main—but no, this was the country, there were no water mains here. There was a horrific noise as a slippery elm, fifteen feet away on the right and sixty feet tall, pitched over the edge of the mound and flung itself downward like a javelin.

And then Jason cried out in fear as his own house gave a lurch and fell, dropping with an audible crack onto one corner. A rain of chimney bricks spilled from the roof. The old frame house had been built on little brick piers, and the heave of the earth had walked the house right off its foundation. Another geyser burst out of the cotton field, and then another. And then another geyser burst up from the Huntley house—but this wasn’t water, it was a bubble of fire, blasting up from beneath the broken roof. The Huntley’s propane tank, couplings shattered, had ignited. Jason’s heart leaped into his throat. He tried to shout a warning, but it was lost in the groaning of the earth.

The last of the five houses shattered as the earth gave another wrench. Cracks tore across the surface of the ground. Sulfur tainted the air. Jason’s stomach turned over as he felt a new element enter the earth’s motion—he felt as if two strong men were kicking him at once, and in different directions. It was this that brought the Adams house down. The old farmhouse swayed back and forth, as if to blows, and then there was a rending and cracking of timber, and the roof spilled into the backyard, taking most of the house with it. Terror roared through Jason like a flame. He screamed and again tried to stand. The earth flung him down, pitched him down the slope. For a whirlwind moment he felt himself falling free. He screamed again and came to an abrupt stop, brought up short as he fell into the limbs of a scrub oak. Branches slashed at his face. He clawed his way through the branches, slid another ten feet down the slope, was caught by more brush.

And suddenly the earth fell silent. Jason’s inner ear spun in a giddy circle and he bit back nausea. He shouted, was surprised to find he could hear himself. “Mom!” he yelled. “Are you okay?” There was no answer. He looked wildly for the path he’d ascended by, but it was buried in broken timber, so instead he ran straight off the edge of the mound. He clung madly to branches to steady himself as he tried to scramble directly down the sides, but the mound was too steep, and there were too many uprooted trees, fallen limbs, and tangled brush for him to make any kind of swift progress. He heard someone shout below—a male voice calling for help. He shouted in answer as he dove through the trees. And then he came to a clear area, where he could get a good view of what was going below, and stopped to orient himself.

His heart almost failed him, and his knees threatened to give way. He had to clutch at a tree limb to keep from falling.

The broken houses were plain to see. The Huntley place had turned into a torch as a jet of propane consumed the entire property. The dog Batman wailed from amid a cloud of black smoke that roiled into the sky. Another fire was rapidly building in the ruins of another house, the one at the west end of the row. The tumbled, broken mass of his own home had partly fallen toward the Huntley ruin, and was dangerously close to the flames. It was clear that Jason had to get his mother clear of the wreckage before fire consumed the whole street.

In the field beyond the house, a dozen geysers spat water and white sand into the sky. Some had built up cones of sand around their bases. But it wasn’t the geysers, or even his wrecked home, that held Jason’s gaze.

It was the levee to the east.

The long green wall had been breached in at least two places. The water that poured through was not coming gently—it didn’t run through, it wasn’t as if a jug of water had been spilled in the kitchen and was gently emptying itself on the floor. The water jetted through, with the entire great weight of the river behind it. It was as if a thousand high-pressure hoses had been turned on behind each breach. Mist boiled upward from the two breaches as the brown water poured onto the laser-level fields below. In the midst of all this, between the two breaches, was Eubanks’s cop car, which sat motionless atop the levee as if trying to make up its mind what to do. And below, a tiny figure amid the giant water plumes, Muppet was struggling to right his overturned ATV.

“Run!” Jason screamed. “Run for it!” He didn’t know who he was shouting at—Muppet, his mother, Mr. Regan, maybe even Batman the dog.

Everyone. Everyone run.

Terror launched him down the mound. Branches lashed his face as he fell as much as ran down the mound’s steep face. As he ran he caught brief glimpses of the catastrophe from between the trees… Muppet getting on his ATV and beginning his race with the advancing water… a huge chunk of the levee, tons of stone and concrete, breaking away in the torrent, carried into the field by the powerful flood… Eubanks hesitantly backing his car away from the widening breach…

And then Jason ran head-on into a tree limb and knocked himself sprawling, the air knocked out of his lungs. “Run,” he urged weakly, though he knew no one could hear him. Over the Niagara roar of the breached levee he could still hear the faint hornet buzz of Muppet’s ATV. He sat up, breath rasping in his throat, and felt his heart sink as the sound of the ATV faltered. His head spun. He batted aside leaves, peered between the wrecked trees, and saw that the little vehicle had run as far as it could, that it was stopped at the edge of a crevasse that lay across its path and was too wide to drive across. Muppet’s green helmet turned to gauge the approaching water, and then he dismounted the vehicle and took a few steps back so as to run at the breach and leap across. His sneakers splashed in water that was already ankle-deep.

“Run,” Jason urged. There was a huge pain in his chest, as if something inside had ripped away. There was a grating roar as another piece of the levee tore away, and then Muppet ran and launched himself across the fissure. He reached the other side, falling to hands and knees, then picked himself up and began to run. “Run,” Jason advised. He clutched at branches and tried to stand. His head spun. He was whooping for breath. The breach in the levee widened again, the river shifting ten tons of stone as if it were foam packing. The flood burst through, a wall of water twenty feet high, six-foot wavecrests foaming at its top.

Muppet looked over his shoulder at the oncoming wall, and his stride increased. And then the foaming wall overtook him—Jason caught a brief glimpse of tumbling puppet limbs, a green helmet flashing in the brown water—and then his friend was gone.

Jason reeled down the face of the mound, but he knew it was too late to save Muppet—to save anyone. The flood waters raced on, a mass almost solid in the weight of its onslaught… the wave front gave a glancing blow to the shattered house on the end of the row, and the roof came apart under the impact, the pieces floating onward, piling into the flaming wreck of the Huntley house. Batman the dog gave a last wail, and was silent. The Huntley house came apart as well, turning into a wall of burning wreckage that surged up against Jason’s house.

“No,” Jason said. His Nikes splashed into water and he kept going, wading out into the rising flood. He watched his house dissolve, mingle with the flaming wreckage carried in by the flood. There was a bang as something exploded, and the fires spread. Jason paused as a surge of water lapped to his waist and almost took him off his feet. Tears spilled down his face, blurred his vision. Water tugged at his knees, and more waters were clearly coming.

Jason turned and began to claw his way back up the mound, grabbing handfuls of turf and hauling himself by the branches. The flood surged up to his waist, lifted him upward, toward a fallen elm that lay athwart his path. Jason reached for it, pulled, got a foot over the bole of the tree, and rolled over the tree onto dry ground.

He wiped tears from his eyes, sat up, and turned to see a clump of burning wreckage, all that remained of the five houses on his road, being carried on the flood toward the highway. Very little of the wreckage was even recognizable as belonging to the house that Jason had lived in.

His mind whirled. It had only been a few brief minutes since he had been standing atop the mound, watching his mother in the kitchen through the telescope. Now the kitchen was gone, and the house, even the field in which the house had stood.

There was a weird singing in his heart, a wail of loss and grief and shock. He couldn’t think what to do. He didn’t know whether to allow himself the hope that his mother might be alive. Alive and where? In the burning ruins?

The elm tree below his feet shifted in the current. Jason looked at the breaches in the levee, saw them wider than ever before. The Mississippi didn’t seem to be an inch lower than it had been: there were six-foot waves in both the breaches, and flying white scud. Eubanks’s cop car was perched on an island that was getting smaller by the second.

Jason needed to move to higher ground. Wearily he turned and began to climb.

A shadow fell on him and he looked up. Though only moments ago the day had been perfectly sunny, now a low dark cloud nearly covered the sky.

Jason viewed this phenomenon with the same dull acceptance with which he accepted the need to climb. He was beyond thinking about things. He could only react.

He began to claw his way up the mound, bracing his feet against trees or broken stumps, digging in the turf for hand-holds or pulling himself up with branches. Twice, powerful aftershocks knocked him flat, belly to the damp earth, sent him clutching for anchors to keep from falling off the mound’s steep flank. Finally he dragged himself to the top-most level, the little clear area from which, a few moments ago, he’d viewed his world. The telescope sat there waiting for him, unbroken. Apparently its hard red plastic case was adequate for an earthquake. The lens cap lay where he left it.

Without thought he put the cap on the objective lens, then turned and gazed at the scene below him. The burning wreckage that once was his home had dispersed a bit, though it was still heading west with the flood. To the north, a dark, lowering cloud of smoke, its bottom marked by scarlet flame, hung above Cabells Mound. It seemed as if the whole town was burning. He could not see the water tower and assumed it had fallen. With no water pressure, he knew there was no way that Cabells Mound could fight the fires.

Not until the river water smothered them, anyway.

To the east, the two gaps in the levee were growing toward each other. As chunks of the levee tore away, Eubanks kept shuttling his police car back and forth, trying to remain in the exact center of his diminishing island. His car’s rack lights continued their mute flashing: Emergency! Emergency!

Within a few minutes, however, the island was not much bigger than the car, and Eubanks had nowhere to go.

Jason could see his dark silhouette moving inside the car. At first he wondered what Eubanks was trying to do, and then he realized that he was closing all the car’s windows, making it as watertight as possible. He was planning on floating away, then, as far as he could. Jason supposed it was as sensible a plan as any.

But Eubanks’s plan never had a chance. The levee did not tear away beneath his car, it was torn—a mass of laden metal rammed through the breach, trailing a nest of cables, a barge that had broken free from its tow. Perhaps it was one of the barges that Jason had just watched the Ruth Caldwell push upstream. It smashed the levee beneath the front half of Eubanks’s car, and as the barge swept past, the car pitched down nose-first into the gap, then toppled over onto its roof. Jason could hear the thud from where he sat, along with the sound of shattering glass. The car spun madly in the current for a few seconds, water pouring into the broken windows, and then the river swallowed it with the same fantastic speed with which it had swallowed everything else.

Jason watched with the same dull, mute acceptance with which he had viewed the rising waters, the burning of Cabells Mound. It was as if he’d already used up all his stock of emotion and there was nothing left.

A gust of cool wind blew across the mound, and Jason shivered in his wet clothes. He looked up into the dark, threatening sky.

And then, out of nowhere, the first lightning bolt rained down.

“Is this the day?” Frankland demanded. “Is this the day? Is this the Day of the Lord?” The station was vibrating to pieces around him as he shouted into the microphone. Things tumbled off shelves: a stack of tapes slid off their metal trolley and spilled on the floor with a clang. Frankland’s chair was moving in wild circles across the tile floor, anchored only by his hand on the mike. He ducked into his collar as a fluorescent light exploded overhead.

“And I looked when He broke the sixth seal,” Frankland shouted, “and there was a great earthquake—are you ready for judgment?—and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair—are you ready for Jesus?—and the whole moon became like blood—are you ready for God’s Tribulation?” Frankland, trying to hold on, was wringing the micro-phone as though it were the neck of the Devil himself. “Are you ready?” he howled as something in the outer office crashed to the floor. And then the lights went out. Frankland waited, in the rumbling darkness, for the emergency generator to kick on, but nothing happened.

Darn that diesel anyway. Frankland tried to stand, but he put a foot on something that had tumbled from a shelf and fell clumsily to his knees. Crawling, he made his way to the door, tugged it open, and then crawled through the office—all the shelves had fallen, all the furniture had moved—to the exterior door. Suddenly the shaking ceased, and the rumbling receded, like a train passing on to somewhere else. Frankland hauled himself upright by the doorknob. Vertigo swam through him. He needed to use his shoulder to drive the metal door from its bent frame.

As he burst open the door, sunlight and the smell of sulfur hit him in the face. Brimstone! he thought delightedly. The dirt parking space in front of the studio was torn clean across by a rent four feet across. He made his way around the building, one hand on the wall to keep him steady. The church, he saw, was still standing, though its windows were gone. He felt a grim satisfaction: he had built his station, and his church, to survive this and more.

His hands were trembling, and it took him a while to get the padlock on the generator room open. Once there, it only took a moment to start the piggyback electric motor on the diesel. The diesel coughed into life. The light in the shed winked on. Frankland staggered out of the shed and waved his arms at the heavens. “The voice of the Lord is back on the air!” he shouted. And the heavens answered. Frankland’s hair sizzled as it stood on end. There was a flash, a boom, the smell of ozone. Frankland tottered and fell to his knees, his mind swimming.

A lightning bolt, he thought, from a clear blue sky. What more sign did a man of God need?

He stayed on his knees, clasped his hands, began to pray.

“Thank you, Lord, for letting me see this day,” he said. “Thank you for this destruction out of which Your kingdom will be born. Thank you for giving me my mission.”

Heaven’s lightning rained down around him. He raised his hands in praise.

It was a new world, he thought, and he knew exactly what to do.

The Reverend Noble Frankland had come into his own.

TEN

Father Guillaume Robitaille rolled over the Arkansas blacktop at 85 miles per hour, his radar detector alert to the presence of the state police. Traveling throughout his parish, if such it could be called, put at least 800 miles on his old Lincoln every week, and his policy was to spend as little time in the car as possible, which meant getting from one place to another as fast as the machinery permitted. The words to the old song “Hot Rod Lincoln” tracked through his mind as he squinted through the windshield. Commander Cody, he remembered, and His Lost Planet Airmen. It had been a hit when he was young.

Tonight he would say mass for his tiny congregation in Rails Bluff, all six of them—maybe seven, if Studs Morris had succeeded in raising his bond money.

He raised his 64-ounce Big Gulp and sucked on the plastic straw. The motivation with which he had spiked his Sprite warmed his insides.

Though whisky was his preferred drink, he used vodka when he was on the road. It wouldn’t fill the confessional with telltale fumes.

A cotton wagon blocked the lane ahead, drawn by a rusty old tractor and moving at ten miles an hour. The Lincoln swooped around it as if it were standing still. Father Robitaille drove one-handed, his Big Gulp in the other. He overcorrected, had to straighten out, felt the Lincoln fishtail. Only one way to fix that. Hit the accelerator.

The big car responded. Robitaille smiled.

At first Robitaille thought he’d blown a tire—maybe more than one. The car leaped as if each wheel was trying to go in a different direction, some of them no longer horizontal.

Robitaille lifted his foot from the accelerator, put his Big Gulp between his thighs, grabbed the wheel with both hands. Now he could see it wasn’t just the car—power poles and fence posts were dancing, and branches waved in the air. The cotton fields on either side of the road heaved up in waves. Robitaille fought to keep the car on the road. At times it seemed it was jumping out sideways from beneath him.

He looked in the rearview mirror, and his heart leaped into his throat as he saw it coming at him from behind.

Behind him, the ground was collapsing. A line was crossing the land, and behind the line it looked as if the ground was dropping ten or fifteen feet, like a stage set with the props knocked out. The line reached the cotton wagon and its tractor. They both fell—Robitaille saw the arms of the driver rise, an expression of dismay on his face, as the tractor dropped out beneath him, its nose kicking up as it threatened to roll over on him. Behind the moving line, where the land had fallen, was nothing but wreckage. The line was rolling up on the Lincoln’s rear bumper.

A cocktail of adrenaline and vodka surged through Robitaille’s veins. There was only one response. Accelerate!

Robitaille punched the accelerator and felt the big car leap in answer. Duct-taped upholstery absorbed his weight as he was pressed back into the seat. He clutched the wheel with white-knuckled hands, tried to keep the car on the pavement as his speed increased.

He wasn’t getting the smooth acceleration he was used to—the car was jumping so much that the drive wheels weren’t in contact with the pavement half the time, they were just spinning in air. But the speed built nonetheless. Robitaille’s glances at the mirror assured him that though the line was still overtaking him, it was doing so more slowly.

Faster. He mashed the accelerator to the floor. Sooner or later, he hoped, the geology might change, the land wouldn’t be so susceptible to quake.

The Lincoln vibrated like a mad thing under his touch. The engine roared. Robitaille felt it trying to leave the road, become airborne.

He rocketed around a parked pickup, saw the open-mouthed woman behind the wheel staring at oncoming ruin. Faster. The car landed heavily—or perhaps the ground had leaped up to meet it—and the suspension crashed. He felt the oil pan scrape on asphalt. The drive wheels screeched as they dug in and flung the car forward. He saw his muffler and tail pipe assembly bounce free in the road behind him before being swallowed by the encroaching abyss.

Faster. He saw the road arching up ahead of him, the bridge over the Rails River. Exultation sang through his mind. Surely the wave that was collapsing the country behind him wouldn’t cross the river?

Behind he saw the line of ruin recede. He was gaining on it.

The bridge was just ahead. The unmuffled engine thundered like an artillery barrage. Robitaille began to laugh. The Lincoln bottomed again at the bridge approach, then flung itself up the arching roadbed. The laugh froze in Robitaille’s throat.

The far half of the Rails River Bridge was gone, just a fallen rubble of steel and asphalt. The Lincoln’s wheels spun in air as it launched itself into space. The engine roared. Robitaille felt the car’s nose tip downward, saw the water below.

Wished he had time for another drink.

“Hey, darlin’,” Larry said to the phone. As he spoke his greeting, he raised his voice slightly to let everyone in the control room know that it was his wife Helen who had interrupted the day’s desultory football analysis.

“Are you busy?” Helen asked.

“We are analyzing the Cowboys’ jackhammer offensive,” Larry said.

“I’ll take that as a no, then.”

After a lot of work during refueling, and stacks of related paperwork afterward, Larry and the Poinsett Landing Station were in a fairly relaxed period. The plume of steam floated above the cooling tower, a finger of white that pointed toward Louisiana. The facility was running at eighty percent capacity, and the operators had little to do but watch the controls. Sometimes Larry wondered how long Poinsett Landing would continue to run if he, and everyone else in the control room, simply left, locked the door behind them, and never came back.

Months, probably. Possibly even years, until the enriched U-235 in the fuel assemblies finally spent itself, until the fuel finally lacked the ability to heat the demineralized water in the reactor vessel to anything greater than the temperature of hot tea, and the huge steam generator, rotating on its 160-foot shaft, finally cooled and cycled to a stop.

Larry stole the last glazed doughnut from the box parked atop the computer monitor, then settled into his chair with the phone at his ear. Below, the football discussion continued uninterrupted.

“I thought I’d call about Mimi’s birthday,” Helen said.

“It’s not for another month,” Larry said. He bit his dough-nut, felt sugar melt on his tongue.

“Yes, but I saw something this morning that was just perfect for her. Do you know that old antique store up by the courthouse?”

“Uhh—guess not.”

“Well, I saw this amazing lamp. It’s a bronze horse, a kind of Frederick Remington thing…” Larry sat up in his chair as something jolted up his spine. “Just a minute,” he said. It felt as if someone had just kicked the bottom of his chair seat. His eyes darted to his metal-topped desk, where pens and pencils were suddenly jiggling. He lowered the hand holding the doughnut to his desktop.

“Hey,” he called out, trying to get the attention of the operators below. Larry’s eyes were already scanning the displays. Pump malfunction? he wondered. Something with the turbine?

He heard a kind of percussion in his ear, like a shelf had fallen on the other end of the phone. “What was that?” Helen called in his ear, alarm in her voice. And then, a second or two later, Larry felt it himself, a lurch as if something large had fallen sideways against the control building.

“What was that?” Wilbur echoed.

The lurch came again, then again, a thudding, wham-wham-wham-wham, a steady pounding triphammer. Everything on Larry’s desk was shivering over to the right. He stood, phone in one hand, doughnut in the other. His eyes frantically scanned the control room displays. A folder of documents spilled from his desk, splashed unnoticed to the floor.

“Power spike on station transformers!” one operator shouted.

“Turbine feedwater pump’s offline!” shouted someone else. Books pitched off shelves. And then Larry heard it coming, a chuffing noise like an express train hurtling forward on its tracks, choom choom choom choom choom CHOOM, coming closer at terrifying speed. Larry had a moment to wonder if it was a tornado; he’d heard that tornados could sound like trains… Then the express train hit the building. Larry felt a shocking blow to his right shoulder as he pitched sideways into the wall. The computer monitor flung itself into his lap, making him cry out. Fluorescent light shattered overhead, glass raining down on the room.

“Fuuuuuck!” Wilbur yelled.

Larry rolled the monitor off his lap and attempted to stand, one hand groping at his desk, trying to lever himself upright. His boots went out from under him and he shouted as he fell and received another slam to his shoulder.

“Turbine trip! Turbine trip!” The voice was so distorted by fear and shock that Larry did not recognize it. Larry could barely hear the voice over the express-train sound of the catastrophe. He felt the teeth rattling in his head. Glass shattered throughout the control room. Panels spilled from the ceiling, revealing ducts and bundles of cable. There was an actinic arc of electricity, a chaotic series of shouts from the operators. Larry rolled over on his stomach and tried to crawl toward the door. The floor kept trying to kick him in the belly.

Think, he urged himself. But he couldn’t think at all, couldn’t put one thought in front of another. The express train seemed to have run off with his mind.

The remaining lights faded to a dull amber. Dismayed cries filled the air. Electricity arced somewhere in the room.

Emergency lighting, Larry thought. Wait for the emergency lighting. The lights brightened for a moment, and Larry felt relief flood into him. Then all light faded. There were shouts in the darkness, crashes as things fell. The whole building seemed to take a massive lurch to one side. Larry felt himself pitch forward. His hands scrabbled for support. He could smell burnt plastic. And then there was a roaring as the electric arcs triggered the control room’s gas extinguishing system, as pressurized cylinders of Halon 1301 began to flood the room with gas in order to suppress electric fires.

“Out!” Larry shouted. “Everyone out!”

Halon gas wasn’t poisonous, not exactly. You could breathe it and it wouldn’t kill you. But it drove the oxygen out of the room, and that would put you six feet under.

There was so much noise that he couldn’t tell if anyone heard him.

Earthquake, he thought. No other explanation.

Vertigo eddied through his brain. The floor didn’t seem to be strictly horizontal anymore. Larry groped his way to the door, felt the metal frame under his hand, tried to haul himself upright. A bolt of pain shot through his injured right shoulder.

CHOOM CHOOM Choom choom choom choom…

The express train sound faded. Larry found himself standing in the door to the control room. Over the hiss of the Halon cylinders he could hear a babble of confused voices both within and without the control room. A shrill call for help echoed down the corridor. He moved instinctively toward the sound, groping his way down the corridor. Broken glass crunched under his boots. The only light he could see was an exit sign that glowed a ghostly red in the middle distance.

Someone slammed into him from behind, and pain shot through his shoulder. “Careful!” he snapped.

“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur’s voice shouted in his ear. “Did we have reactor trip?”

“Must have,” Larry said. “Power loss this bad. Whole grid must be down.” He rubbed his shoulder, tried to make himself think. In event of electric power failure to the reactor, control rods would slide into the reactor to stop nuclear fission. It wasn’t something he had to order, it was something that happened automatically.

“Help!” a man screamed.

So the reactor, Larry forced himself to think over the noise, was shut down. The problem now was getting rid of the waste heat already in the core. Which should be happening automatically; there were systems that would do that.

There were also supposed to be backup electrical systems for the control room. And those had failed.

“Did the reactor trip?” Wilbur was shouting at the people shuffling out of the control room. “Did the reactor trip?”

“I don’t know,” came the answer from the dark. “I didn’t get a light or a warning. But things went to hell so fast.”

“Help!” someone shrieked. “Jesus Christ I’m trapped!” Larry kept trying to put his thoughts together. One thing after another, he reminded himself. Just keep turning that horse in circles. If the reactor’s primary cooling system suffered a LOCA—Loss-Of-Cooling Accident—gas-pressurized accumulator tanks within the containment building would dump a boric acid solution into the reactor core. This would serve very well for cooling, at least for a time, but in the event of a continued loss of pressure, auxiliary diesel generators belonging to the Emergency Core Cooling System, the ECCS, would automatically switch on and dump cooling water from accumulator tanks into the reactor, then keep the water circulating until the interior of the reactor cooled. If the diesels failed, the accumulator tanks would dump anyway, but the water would have no way to circulate.

“Help!” the man shrieked. Larry reached out into the darkness toward the huddle of men and grabbed Wilbur’s shoulder. He was alarmed to find the shoulder was covered with something warm and wet that felt like blood.

“Listen,” he said. “We’ve probably suffered a LOCA. We’ve got to make sure the ECCS is doing its job. We’ve got to get people down the stairs and out to the diesels.” Suddenly the building shuddered as if to a blow. Glass shattered somewhere nearby. Larry lurched and reached protectively for his shoulder, but did not fall. Panic whirled through his thoughts. I could die here, he thought.

“Heeeelp!” the man screamed.

The building ceased to move. Even the trapped man was silent in the next few hushed seconds as everyone waited for the whole building to tumble down.

The silence held. So did the building.

“Listen,” Larry said. “Who’ve we got here? Wilbur, can you check generator three down by the machine plant?”

“Right,” Wilbur said.

“Bill—you there?”

“Ayuh.”

“I’m trapped!” called the voice again.

“Bill,” Larry said, “I need you to check number two, by Reactor Services.”

“Right.” |

“I’ll check number one myself.” The man kept screaming down the corridor, but Larry’s mind had started working again, was putting one thought atop the next. “Marky? You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you go to the secondary shutdown room?”

The secondary shutdown room, at the very base of the containment structure, contained all the duplicate controls necessary to bring the reactor to a safe shutdown. Maybe the emergency power was working there.

“I don’t reckon I can get there,” Marky said. “I think I busted my leg. Somebody’s going to have to carry me out.”

“I’ll go instead,” said someone else.

“Good. You do that.”

“Somebody help meeee…”

“Okay,” Larry said. “The rest of you help Marky and that other poor soul. Check every office and make sure there aren’t people trapped up here. And take them down by the stairs—don’t use the elevators even if you can find one that seems to be working.”

Larry groped his way toward the illuminated exit sign. He found the steel push bar on the stair, put his weight on the door, and failed to budge it. The doorframe was bent, he realized. He put his unwounded shoulder against it, shoved. Nothing.

“Door’s jammed,” he said. “Can somebody help me here?”

Three of them, with effort, finally bashed the door open. The stairwell was dimly lit from the few battery-powered emergency lights that hadn’t been completely shattered. A strange bellowing sound echoed up the stair, like lions roaring in the African bush. Larry paused for a moment, sniffing for scent of fire and detecting none. Then he reached for the metal stair rail and began to descend. The stair was tilted at crazy angles, as if it were trying to pitch him off. His inner ear swam with vertigo as he groped his way down the stair, one slow step after another. He worried that the metal stair might have been structurally damaged, that his weight might prove too much and that it might fall away with him on it.

The roaring sound got louder as he descended. He began to feel a vibration through the metal rail. The roaring was terrifyingly close. Larry couldn’t imagine what might be causing it. Perhaps, he thought, a fire was raging somewhere nearby.

He reached the bottom of the stair, put his palm against the metal door to see if fire had turned it hot. The door was cool, but it vibrated in sympathy to the roaring sound. For a moment Larry hesitated, wondering if opening the door was at all wise. Then, when he tried to push the door open, he found again that the door was jammed.

It took them longer this time to get the door open. The concerted efforts of four grown men were necessary to bash the door open. When it finally moved, it flung open about two feet, then stuck fast on broken concrete. A cold mist drifted in through the opening, and along with it the stench of sulfur. Larry stepped out onto the east side of the control building and looked in astonishment at a series of fountains, a line of them forty feet away, that jetted water a good hundred feet into the air. Mist plumed high in the air, and water rained down on a level field thick with debris.

Water from the reactor? he thought, thunderstruck. But no. Reactor water would be boiling hot, not cool. Besides, there wasn’t enough buried pipe in this area to account for the volume. Somehow, Larry decided, the geysers had to be natural. And therefore they were not his problem. He would think about them later.

Larry wiped mist from his spectacles and shuffled to one side to let the others emerge from the structure. They gazed in consternation at the devastation around them.

The control building they’d just left was a wreck. It was tilted on its foundation and loomed over Larry’s head like a concrete cliff. Larry felt a strong urge to slip away before it fell on him. The control structure leaned against the containment building like a drunken prizefighter hanging on the ropes. Larry’s head whirled as he realized that even the containment structure, with its tons of concrete and steel, was leaning at an unnatural angle. Water fountained from beneath its foundation, from beneath the twelve-foot-thick pad of concrete and steel on which the structure rested. Occasionally the geysers would spit out a rain of sand or a rock, twenty-or thirty-pound stones lofting through the air to thud onto the debris field. Larry was relieved that the fountains seemed generally to be tilted away from the building.

No time to be a tourist, Larry thought. He blinked in the mist.

“Are we ready?” he said. The others turned to him. Wilbur swiped with his sleeve at the blood that was running down his face from a scalp wound.

“You all right, there?” Larry asked.

Wilbur looked at his bloody sleeve in dull surprise. “Guess so,” he said.

“Let’s do it.”

“Right,” Bill said. He headed north toward the containment building, to get to the diesel by Reactor Services on the other side of the reactor.

Larry turned and loped the other way, down the length of the control building, keeping between the wall and the geysers that were roaring up from beneath the building’s foundation. He tried not to trip on the stones and chunks of broken concrete that slid under his bootsoles. He could hear Wilbur stumbling after. Larry turned the corner, now heading west, then slowed and came to a halt as he saw the turbine house.

Through fountaining water Larry could see that the long building that housed the 160-foot Allis-Chalmers tandem-compound turbine no longer existed. The entire central section of the building seemed simply to have been blown to confetti. The rest had collapsed, chunks of aluminum roof or concrete wall tumbled down on the hulking forms of wrecked transformers, pumps, and condensers. Twisted rebar had been sculpted into weird shapes.

Larry could see no human beings in or near the colossal wreck.

Wilbur’s footsteps, behind Larry, slowed to a halt. “Good God,” said Wilbur’s voice. “What the hell happened? A tornado?”

“Earthquake, I think.”

Wilbur looked wild, wide eyes staring from the coating of blood that rained down his face. “There must’ve been a hundred people in there. We’ve got to help them.”

Larry shook his head. “One thing at a time,” he said. “The reactor comes first. We’ve got to make sure we have an SSE. Deal with the diesels before anything else.”

Wilbur blinked blood from his eyes. SSE was Safe Shutdown, Earthquake. There were supposed to be contingencies already worked out. “Yeah,” Wilbur said. “Guess you’re right.”

“Let’s go.”

The ground was covered with broken concrete and bright sharp metal. The metal was strangely twisted, torqued and strained and drawn, as if by steel hands, into bizarre shapes. Chunks sharp as guillotine blades were embedded in the wall of the control building, as if they’d been hurled there by a hundred-handed giant. The building wall, with its shining embedded blades, looked like some weird modernist sculpture.

The turbine’s main shaft, Larry thought, had been rotating thirty times per second when the earthquake struck. If the quake had bent the turbine shaft, or if something massive had fallen on it and stopped its rotation…

Good Lord, he thought. Tons of swiftly rotating metal had slammed to a sudden halt. Turbine blades, even big ones, were notoriously delicate. Bringing the Allis-Chalmers to a sudden stop would have been like throwing a huge boulder into a 160-foot-long jet engine. The turbine would have come apart, spraying deadly metal in all directions. It would have been like a storm of ten thousand flying razor blades. No wonder parts of the turbine house looked as if they had been shredded. And the shaft itself…? A hundred sixty feet of rotating steel?

It would have gone somewhere. Maybe straight up in the air, like a giant spear. It sure wasn’t in the turbine house anymore.

He didn’t want to think of the people who had been inside when it happened.

Behind the turbine house, a column of dark smoke rose into the sky. Between the obscuring mist and the smoke itself, it was hard to tell just what it was that burned.

He came to the southwest corner of the control structure. His path diverged from Wilbur’s here: Larry would continue to head west to the number one auxiliary diesel behind the auxiliary structure, while Wilbur would detour south again around the remains of the turbine house to try to find the number three generator by the machine plant.

“Good luck,” Larry said.

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope for Wilbur’s success. The machine plant was too close to the turbine house. Very likely it had been destroyed when the turbine came apart, and the auxiliary diesel structure with it. One or the other structure might even be the one that was producing the column of smoke. But still, he had to make certain the safety backup systems were working. If only one of the three backup diesel generators went on, it was enough to secure a safe shutdown for the reactor. With that necessity in mind, the three generators had been placed far apart so that the same catastrophe could not overwhelm them all.

One of them, he thought, had to have survived. It didn’t matter which one. So Wilbur had to try to get to the number three diesel, just on the chance that it was still intact.

Geysers shot out of the ground here, on the west side, but they weren’t as numerous, or as forceful, as they had been on the other side of the building. Larry loosened his collar and tie, and then he and Wilbur each chose paths between the jets of water and began to run. Larry threw his arms over his head for protection in case one of the geysers decided to spit a rock at him. Pain shot through his right shoulder. Water splashed up around his ankles as he ran. Where was it all coming from? Larry wondered. Underground, yes, but from a hidden artesian system that had somehow escaped the geologists’ reports, or…?

A stone as big as his head splashed down a few feet away and Larry gave a jump, his heart thudding. He decided to think only about running. Pain jolted through his shoulder at every step. Larry cleared the area where the geyser debris was raining down, and Mississippi’s summer heat wrapped him like a suffocating blanket. He stumbled on something hidden under the water, recovered, and swiped at his glasses with his sleeve, trying to clear the droplets of spray. He panted for breath, not used to running, not used to any sort of real exercise in this heat. His heart bounced around his ribcage like a loose stone.

He blinked as he saw a bent form in front of him, A man in coveralls kneeling in the water, debris all over, his back bent, face close to the surface. It looked like he was praying. It looked like he was dead.

Larry splashed closer. Slowed, heart rattling in his ribs. He stopped, panting for breath. Reached out a hand, touched the man on the back. “You okay?” he asked.

The man raised his head, and Larry’s heart turned over in shock. There was a dividing line across the man’s forehead, right at eyebrow level. Below the line the man’s face was very pale, and his lips a bit blue, but he seemed otherwise normal. Above the line the flesh was bright red, and shiny. It was the most unnatural color Larry had ever seen, like an overripe red plum stretched tight and about to burst. Huge blisters had exploded over his skin, and some of them had broken and were weeping fluid. Larry saw, as the man pulled his hands from the water, that the backs of the man’s hands were bright red, too, and just as badly blistered.

“What happened?” Larry gasped.

The man blinked at him with pale blue eyes. “I was in the turbine house,” he said. “Primary steam line went.” The man’s lobster-red hands fumbled at his collar in memory. “I used to work at a plant in Santa Barbara, so I knew it was a quake right off. Soon’s I knew, I pulled my coverall over my face and ran for the door.” The man’s lower lip trembled. “Everyone else must’ve breathed the steam in, and died.” Larry stared at him in shock. A primary steam line rupture would have flooded the turbine house with thousand-degree steam straight from the reactor. If anyone had breathed it, his lungs would have gone into instant shock and he would have died within seconds.

When the turbine had, a few seconds later, torn itself into murderous razor-edged shards of metal, everyone around it was probably already dead.

“Dang thing blew up behind me,” the man said. “I just kept running. Ran all this way.” He looked down at the water in which he was kneeling, then slowly put his hands into the water again. “Hurts,” he said. “The cool water helps.” He bent forward, lowered his blistered forehead into the water.

“You’ve got to get help,” Larry said. “You got to…” His mind flailed. “To get to the infirmary,” he finished.

“Figure it’s still standing?” the man said, his sad voice muffled by the water.

“I… don’t know.” The infirmary was in the administration building, southeast of here, behind the smoke pall of whatever it was that was burning. Larry hadn’t seen it behind the smoke.

“I’ll just stay here awhile, then,” the man said. He sighed heavily, his body almost visibly deflating. Larry splashed around him in agitation. “Listen,” he said. “I’m coming back for you. I’ve just got to… I’ve got to run now.”

“Take your time,” the man said. “I ain’t got nowhere to

Larry loped on, gasping in the humid air. His boots had filled to the ankles with water and they were like iron weights on the ends of his legs. The auxiliary building loomed up on his right, the building that held over thirty years’ worth of Poinsett Landing’s spent fuel in its stainless-steel-lined concrete pond. Larry looked at it anxiously as he jogged past. The buff-colored aluminum siding had peeled away here and there, revealing the ugly concrete beneath, but the walls seemed still to be standing. From the stumps of steel girders tilted skyward atop the flat roof, it looked as if part of the roof had caved in. There were two separate pumping systems in the auxiliary building to keep cooling water circulating through the spent fuel. He wondered if either one of them was working.

First things first, he reminded himself. The reactor came before everything else. Where was this water coming from? The geysers weren’t throwing up enough water to cover the ground like this.

As he splashed around the corner of the Auxiliary Building he saw a group of a dozen workers standing behind the building. Panting, he approached them.

“Hey, Mr. Hallock.” The speaker was Meg Tarlton, one of the foremen on the fuel handling system. Her red-blond braids peeked out from the brim of her hard hat.

“Hey,” Larry said, and then he had to bend over, hands on knees, while he caught his breath.

“What was that?” Meg asked. “A bomb or something?”

“Earthquake,” Larry gasped.

“Told you, Meg,” someone said.

“How’s the…” Larry gasped in air. “Fuel.”

“It’s a mess. Roof’s caved in. Active cooling’s down. Fuel pond’s cracked in at least two places, but the leaking isn’t too bad just yet. I don’t think.”

“You’ve got…” Larry straightened, tried not to whoop for breath. “You’ve got to get in there and make an inspection.”

Meg’s eyes hardened. “You’re not getting us up on those catwalks again. Not till we know it’s safe.”

“But—”

“We had three people hurt bad. Jameel and some people just carried them to the infirmary.”

“We’re not going back in there, Mr. Hallock,” someone said. “Just look at what happened to the tower!” Larry’s eyes followed the man’s pointing finger, and his mouth dropped open in wonder. Little trailers of steam still rose above the cooling tower—what remained of it—but the elegant double hyperboloid curves were gone. It was as if the concrete skin of the upper tower had peeled away, like the rind of a fruit, in long diagonal sections, leaving behind only a skeleton of twisted rebar. First things first! he reminded himself.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve got to check the backup diesel. Meg, can you and a couple others help me with that?”

Meg nodded.

Larry pointed around the corner, toward where the lone survivor knelt in the flood. “There’s a man back there, been badly burned. Can someone help him to the infirmary, or wherever it is that Jameel took those other people?”

Meg, who knew her people better than Larry did, made the assignments. The others following, Larry sloshed toward the backup diesel. Their route took them around a collapsed workshop and through a parking lot—water was up to the axles of the cars, and a geyser had coughed up a cone of white sand in the center of the parking lot. The cars were no longer parked in orderly rows: the moving earth had shuffled them like dominoes.

Well before Larry reached the diesel building he could see that there was going to be trouble. The walls and roof had fallen, and the only thing that kept them propped up was the steel mass of the diesel itself. If the diesel were operating, Larry should hear it. It sounded like a locomotive. The surface of the water trembled as an aftershock rolled beneath the land. The aluminum walls and roof of the diesel building rattled and creaked as the earth shivered. Larry stopped moving, arms held out for balance. Fear jangled through his nerves. He could hear the workers muttering behind him, and a splash as one of them fell.

The earth fell silent. Larry slogged forward.

He approached the diesel building, his pulse crashing in his ears. The steel door was crumpled on its foundation, clearly unusable, but there were wide gaps in the walls, and Larry stepped through one of these.

“Sir?” someone said behind him. “You maybe want a hard hat for that?” Larry stepped into the broken building. His nerves gave a leap as the broken roof gave an ominous creak. The silent diesel loomed above him, tall as a house and 150 feet long if you counted the generator stuck on the end. Its mass propped up fallen roof beams.

Oily water shimmered around Larry’s boots. There was a horrible chemical smell that didn’t seem to belong in this scenario. He gave a sudden cough as something stung his throat. He tried to remember all the backup procedures he’d once memorized, the schematics of the diesel’s systems. He hadn’t dealt with any of this in years.

The roof gave another groan. Larry’s eyes watered. “Mr. Hallock?” Meg called. Larry backed out. “Batteries have spilled,” he said.

The batteries were used to power the diesel’s control systems once the big engine started. But the diesel hadn’t started at all, which meant that the mechanical system running on compressed air had somehow failed. So why hadn’t that worked?

He turned as he heard someone splashing up through the parking lot. It was Wilbur.

“Number three diesel’s kaput,” he said. “Fuel spilled, and it’s on fire.” So that was the pillar of smoke behind the turbine house.

“Okay,” Larry said.

“And the administration building’s gone,” Wilbur said. His staring eyes gazed out from the blood that streaked his face. “Just gone. Nothing but wreckage.”

“Jesus,” said Meg.

“It was the turbine shaft.” There was awe in Wilbur’s voice. “It must have tumbled through the air and… there’s nothing left.”

Larry put a hand on Wilbur’s shoulder. Thought about the reactor core simmering in its boric acid solution, heat and pressure building. The possibility of leaks, jammed valves, heat building in the core. The core turning to slag. Steam exploding out into the containment building. And who could tell, the way things were going, if the containment building was able to contain much of anything?

“Waaal,” he said, “best get this ol’ boy started, then.”

He and Wilbur slipped into the diesel building again to check the compressed air cylinders. They were in a separate room, but were easy enough to find because the wall that separated the rooms had fallen to bits. In agreement with the massive redundancy that characterized the plant’s design, there were three cylinders, each big as a house. The pressure gauges showed that two had discharged at some point in the quake. The third still held its charge, but the valve atop the cylinder was in the open position, showing that it had tripped and tried, but failed, to discharge. With eyes that stung from spilled battery acid, Larry peered through the darkened, ruined building and traced the couplings that connected the diesel to the third cylinder. The couplings ran overhead, in plain sight, and Larry traced them into the diesel room, past another valve… there.

When the roof had caved in, one of the roof beams had fallen across the valve. The weight had probably distorted the valve to the point where it wouldn’t operate properly. Everything in order, Larry thought. He had traced the compressed air system, and now he traced the roof beam. His eyes were streaming. Okay, he thought, the beam connects there, and… A sudden shock threw them both against the air cylinder. Pain jolted along Larry’s injured shoulder. He ducked and covered his head as, with a long metallic groan, more of the roof came down, metal panels falling like the blades of guillotines.

There was sudden silence as they waited for another shock. Larry’s heart throbbed in his chest. The silence was broken by Wilbur’s cough.

“Jesus,” he said, “my lungs are burning.”

“I got what we came for,” Larry said. “Let’s get out of here.” They sloshed out of the diesel building. Larry’s stinging eyes blinked in the bright sunlight. “We need to move a roof beam,” he said. “Can we get something from the machine shop?”

“I’d hate to dig through there,” Meg said. “Can you show me what needs doing?” Larry took a few breaths of clear air, then led Meg back into the crumpled building. He pointed out the beam, and Meg gave a laugh.

“My pickup’s in the lot just outside,” she said, “and I’ve got tow chains.” Meg splashed off to her truck. Larry stood for a while outside, breathed clean air into his aching lungs while he wondered whether it would be safe to wash his eyes in this water. There was more splashing as someone ran up, and Larry saw one of his control room crew.

“I’ve been to the secondary shutdown room,” he said, “and it’s flooded.”

“Flooded?” Larry echoed, then looked at the water that was rising above his boots. Where was it coming from?

There was a roar and a splash as Meg drove up in her white Dodge Ram. Her crew helped as she shackled the beam to her truck, and then she shifted the Dodge into low gear and gave it the gas. Everyone stood back as the chains straightened and took the weight. The Dodge growled, its exhaust pipe almost under water. There was a long cry of metal as the beam began to move, as pieces of the roof spilled free with a cacophonous jangled sound. Larry held his breath. There was a clang as the roof beam pulled free of the structure, and Meg’s Dodge leaped free, water surging around its thick tires, the roof beam dragging behind.

Then there was a compressed air hiss, so painfully loud that Larry held his palms over his ears, and a throaty, hesitant rumble from the diesel. Larry held his breath. The diesel coughed, spat, coughed again. Then caught. The fallen roof rattled and shivered as the diesel began a businesslike throb. Fumes gushed up from a broken exhaust pipe.

Larry found himself in a cheering knot of workers. Meg spun the truck around, returned to the others with the beam dragging behind. A big grin was spread across her face. “Yes!” Wilbur yelled, splashing as he jumped up and down in the water. “Yes!”

Well, Larry thought. He had done it, by God.

But that only meant, when you got down to it, that he needed to get busy and do something else. He looked down at the water, nearing the tops of his boots.

He wished he knew where it was coming from.

ELEVEN

WHAM WHAM WHAM.

Omar lay in his front yard and watched his house shake to pieces. The old double shotgun home was lightly built—no need for heavy construction in a place where there was no winter, no weather worse than a thunderstorm—and it was not built to stand up to tremors on this scale. All the work, he thought. All the work in this heat. And now it’s falling apart. The brick chimney had rumbled down before he, Wilona, and Micah Knox had realized what was happening, and had run—staggered, really—out onto the lawn. Once there, it proved difficult to keep on their feet, and so they lay down in an open area, away both from the house and the magnolia tree in front, where nothing would fall on them, nothing but a blizzard of tumbling blossoms from the tree. WHAM WHAM WHAM.

The earth quaked and shuddered and moaned.

Wilona gave a cry as the old shiplap house was shaken off its brick piers and came lurching to the ground. There were crashes from the interior as furniture tumbled or slid. The carport caved onto the car with a metal whine. Omar reached out and put an arm around Wilona’s shoulders.

“Don’t worry,” he called. “We’re insured.” And wondered, Are we? He didn’t have the slightest idea what the policy had to say about earthquakes.

Wilona just stared at the house, one hand to her throat as if to secure Great-Aunt Clover’s pearls, her one treasure. Her other hand clutched her white gloves, the only thing she’d snatched from the room on her way out.

Knox crouched on the quaking ground in a kind of three-point balance, like a football player waiting for a signal from the quarterback. His expression was a mixture of fear and excitement, like a kid on a roller coaster.

WHAM WHAM WHAM.

Shingles and chimney bricks tumbled off the roof. Paint flakes flew in little blizzards. Many of the clapboards shook right off the side of the building. Wilona’s lace curtains fluttered through empty windows. Omar could feel his teeth rattling together with every tremor.

And then the shaking faded away. In the silence they were aware of a baby’s shrieks, the frenzied barking of cur dogs, the blaring of a car horn. The quake was over.

But there was a rushing, and a coughing, and rubble burst from the yard of the neighbor across the street. It was like a mine going off, throwing debris arching into the air. Omar’s heart gave a leap. He threw himself over Wilona as stones and chunks of wood rained down. A gush of water came up, blasting from the fissure as if from a fireman’s hose. The neighbor’s trailer, which had tipped to one side with its metal wall tortured and bent, gave a tormented booming rattle as the geyser tried to tear the sides from the building.

Mist began raining down. Omar stood up, tried to shield Wilona. “Let’s move away from this,” he said. Knox stood, swayed. “What was that?” he asked.

“Earthquake, I guess.”

“You got earthquakes, too?” Knox was staring. “Hurricanes and swamps and niggers just down from the trees and earthquakes, too?”

“Every hunnerd years, I guess,” Omar said. He helped Wilona to stand, and she began to walk toward the house. He caught her arm. “Don’t go back in the house, hon,” he said. “It might not be safe.”

“I want to call my Davey!” Wilona’s glare was fierce. “I want to know my boy’s all right!” Omar blinked. Their son was attending LSU in Baton Rouge—could the earthquake have reached that far?

He drew her gently from the house. “Come to the car, hon,” he said. “We can make phone calls from the police radio.”

The mention of the radio reminded Omar that he was sheriff, that he was going to be needed here in this emergency, that people would be depending on him.

His mind swam. He had no idea what to do next. Numbly, while he tried to think, he began to steer Wilona toward the crumpled car port, away from the spouting water.

Knox danced in front of him. He seemed full of energy. His eyes glittered, and there was an intent grin on his face. “Hey, Omar,” he said. “Let’s get the carport off your car. You need to get to headquarters, establish a command post.”

The words seemed to enter Omar’s mind from a great distance. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I’d better do that.”

“But what do I do?” Wilona asked.

Omar licked his lips. “Come along, I guess,” he said. “The courthouse is probably the safest place around.”

“Great!” Knox said. “You know—you should deputize me. You’re gonna need a lot of special deputies in a crisis like this.”

Omar wondered if this was something he could actually do.

“In fact,” Knox went on, “disaster on this scale, you’re gonna need a lot of paramilitaries.” He gave a glittering smile, bounced up on his steel-capped boots. “You’re gonna have trouble keeping order in this county—parish, I mean. You might just wanna call in the Klan. Everyone you can trust. Because sure as there is God in Heaven, nobody’s gonna be looking after the white people of this parish but you.” Charlie Johns belly-crawled from his house as it rocked beneath him. He crossed the portico, tumbled down the stairs, and lay on the hot front walk gasping for breath. The earth heaved under him. Megan’s car, in his driveway, was jumping up and down in place, as if it had suddenly been possessed by the spirit of a pogo stick. In fact, all the cars on the street were jumping up and down. Charlie’s head swam to the echo of thunder. There was a stench in the air. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath. He thought his head was going to explode.

The earth’s motion ceased, but it was some minutes before Charlie could move. He opened his eyes—the sky was full of murk—and he tried to sit up. His head spun and he had to close his eyes again until the spinning stopped.

He wondered if a bomb had gone off. Or a tractor-trailer rig filled with liquid natural gas. The bad smell made him think it must have been gas.

Charlie opened his eyes. His house was before him, strangely shrunken. Part of it seemed to have collapsed. The big oak tree in the front lawn had split in half, raw white wood showing, but it still stood. The garage had fallen on his car. The ornamental brick on the front of the house had peeled off and lay in little dusty piles. All the windows were broken and the yard was littered with cedar shakes fallen from the roof.

He couldn’t believe it. He had paid a lot for that house. It wasn’t supposed to just fall down. The sounds of shouts and screams came dimly to his ringing ears. He looked left and right, saw more ruin. All the houses on his quiet, expensive Germantown road were damaged. Windows gaped. Trees had fallen across hedges and rooftops. Chimneys sprawled across lawns. A three-story brick house, two doors down, had simply collapsed into a pile. Porches had fallen, and roofs leaned at strange angles. Stunned people lay stretched on lawns. Some people, some-where, were calling for help. Charlie stared dumbly at the carnage. It must have been a big bomb, he thought. Terrorists. No—probably the U.S. Air Force had dropped a bomb by accident. He would be able to sue for damages.

Megan’s BMW 328i, he saw, sat in his driveway with its hood and windscreen covered in cedar shakes from the fallen garage. She would be happy, he thought, the car hadn’t suffered much more than a few nicks.

Megan.

She had been in the shower, he remembered. She was going to shower, and then they would make love on his big king-sized bed, and then they would open a bottle of champagne and wait for the caterers to deliver his canard a la Montmorency and Megan’s croustades aux crevettes, and they would celebrate the fact that they were both very, very rich. While he waited for Megan to get out of the shower, Charlie sat in the front room to listen to the financial reports on CNN.

And then the bomb, or whatever it was, had gone off.

Charlie wondered where Megan was. Perhaps she was still in the shower.

He tried to get to his feet. His head whirled, and his stomach was tied in knots. Vomit stung the back of his throat. He took a few steps to the house and leaned on one of the portico’s pillars, but the pillar swayed as he put his weight on it, and he saw now that the portico was no longer attached to the house, it had taken a few jumps onto the lawn, and there was a yawning two-foot gap, studded with nails, between the portico and the house proper.

“Megan?” he called. “Are you in there?”

He walked across the portico, feeling planks sag beneath his feet, and stepped across the gap between the house and the portico and into the front hall. Inside was a shambles: every shelf fallen, every glass object broken, the furniture moved around as if scrambled by a giant. The bottle of Moet had fallen from the bucket and rolled across the hall from the spilled ice.

“Megan?” he called.

He went to the back hall and looked down it. It was dark. Charlie flipped the light switch and the light did not come on.

There was a little closet off the back hall where the water heater and the furnace boiler were located. The door was open, and the water heater had fallen out and was sprawled in the hallway like a drunken sailor. Water spread across the thick carpet.

Charlie ventured down the hall and stopped before the water heater. He saw that the flexible metal gas line had been yanked taut when the water heater fell. He could smell a whiff of gas.

“Megan?” he called. “Are you there?”

He wondered if he should call a repairman, but then decided that the gas maybe couldn’t wait. He leaned forward and turned the gas tap off at the wall.

Then he went back down the hallway, picked up the phone, and tried to call 911. The phone line was dead.

Charlie returned to the water heater and looked at it a while. He took a big stride and stepped over the fallen water heater, then continued down the hall to the master bedroom. The wet carpet squelched under his shoes.

“Megan?” he called. “Love?”

Everything leaned at a strange angle here, and it seemed to Charlie as if he were walking downhill. The house seemed partly to have fallen into the cellar. The doorframes were very crooked. The water from the broken water heater was all running downhill.

He paused at the door to the master bedroom. He was afraid to look inside.

Maybe, he thought, he should try calling 911 again.

“Megan?” he called.

He took a breath and looked around the corner into the master bedroom.

Acid flooded into his throat, and he turned away and fell to his knees and vomited. Directly above the master bed and bath was the deck, with the hot tub. This was convenient, because the spa shared a lot of the plumbing with the master bath.

But the hot tub, which weighed over a ton when full, had gone through the deck, and everything was wet and Megan was dead and she was lying beneath the tub and there was no question that she was dead and the room was wrecked and the water was red and Megan was dead beneath the tub. Tears stung Charlie’s eyes. He got off his knees and went down the hall as fast as he could, stepping over the water heater and almost running until he got to the front room. He picked up the phone again, but the phone was still dead. Glass crunched under his feet as he ran for the front door, and then he crashed down because he stepped into the gap between the house and the portico, and he fell hard and felt a bolt of pain as nails tore at his shin. He jumped upright—nails tore at his trouser leg—and hobbled forward off the porch. He ran to the middle of the lawn and then stopped, because he didn’t know where to go next.

The brick house that had fallen down entirely was on fire, big leaping flames jumping through holes in its curiously intact roof. Another building, across the street and two houses down, was also on fire, though the fire seemed to be confined only to one corner of the building. Smoke poured out the broken windows, but Charlie could see no flames.

People were in the streets running. Charlie recognized one neighbor, who looked at him and waved.

“Come on!” he said. “McPhee’s on fire!”

Charlie stared after the neighbor as he ran. This was ridiculous, he thought. He was not the fire department. Someone should call the fire department.

He could feel the warm blood as it ran down his wounded leg.

He remembered that Megan had a cellphone in her car, so he walked to the BMW and opened the door and slid into the front seat. The car smelled securely of leather and Megan’s perfume. He took the phone from its cradle between the two front seats and tried to call.

Nothing. Nothing but a distant hiss.

“Megan,” he said, “are you there?”

Damn, she thought. Guessed wrong.

She should have read the earthquake report.

Major General Frazetta looked cautiously from beneath the dining room table. Took a breath. Took another. Waited to make sure that her words wouldn’t turn into a shriek that she’d felt bottled up in her throat as the world shattered around her, as she felt their new house try to shake itself to bits, and then she shouted out, “Pat! You okay in there?”

From the room that Pat had designated as his workshop came the sound of something heavy shifting, of things tumbling to the floor. “Think so,” came the mumbled answer. Jessica crawled from beneath the table, noted as she rose to her feet that her house had been ruined, and then made her way through the wrecked living room and hall to Pat’s room. Pat was trying to get his lanky body from beneath one of his worktables that had fallen across him. Jessica helped to lever the table back upright—tools and bits of fragrant wood clattered on the floor—a fallen mandolin sang a plaintive chord—and then Pat got cautiously to his feet, brushed dirt off his shanks.

“Nothing broken, I think.” He gave a ragged grin. “Thanks for the warning. Gave me time to duck.” Jessica had recognized the quake’s initial strike—the primary, or P wave—the jolt that felt like a giant fist punching the house from underneath, that set the plates and saucers leaping on the kitchen shelves. She knew that the P wave was only the fastest of an earthquake’s many weapons to travel through the earth, that the P wave would be followed by the shearing force of the slower secondary, or S waves, and then by the madcap dance of the Rayleigh and Love waves that could churn the earth like ocean breakers or spin objects in wild circles like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the fair.

And she knew, as soon as she felt the incredible force of that first jolt, the P wave that lifted her from the floor of the house and almost threw her through the kitchen window, that within seconds she would be experiencing all four kinds of movement at once. And so she dived beneath the solid dark wood shelter of the dining room table while shouting at Pat to take cover, that the big quake had come at last. Only to have her words devoured by the express-train sound of the quake, by the shattering of glass and the crashing of shelves.

The mandolin sang again as Pat rescued it from the floor. “I’ve got to get to headquarters,” Jessica said.

“The road is likely to be a mess. It might take two of us to get through—can you drive me in the Cherokee?”

“Sure.”

She looked at her watch, passed a hand over her forehead. It was just after five-thirty, and the quake had lasted more than ten minutes. My God, she thought, the quake hit during rush hour. Millions of people caught on the roads, on or beneath bridges and overpasses as they fell… And with all the rivers in spring flood, too.

“Go start the Jeep,” she said. “Put the chainsaw in it. I’m going to chaise—put on my BDUs.” Damned, she thought, if she was going to confront a major national emergency in torn pantyhose. The earthquake must have gone on at least ten minutes.

Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch still stood above the Mississippi. If the old man had still been alive, Marcy Douglas would have kissed him.

One of the Frenchmen had suffered a heart attack. Everyone else had been so preoccupied during the quake that no one had noticed him until after the arch shivered to the quake’s final tremor. The Frenchman was pale and glabrous and his lips were turning blue. Marcy’s colleague Evan was giving him CPR. The victim’s friends milled around loudly explaining the situation to each other in French. Hot prairie wind blasted through broken windows, and only partially cleared away the smell of vomit. Several people had come down with motion sickness, including one little boy who had thrown up what looked like an entire bucket of popcorn. The arch did not normally move much—it would sway less than an inch even in the highest wind—but things were obviously different when bedrock was jumping around.

Marcy crawled to the station from which she controlled the tram, and used the telephone to call Richards, her superior, down on the ground level.

“We need to get paramedics up here,” she said. “We’ve got a medical emergency.”

“Good luck,” Richards said. His speech was fast and breathy, as if he’d just run several miles. “There must be hundreds of casualties in town. The ambulance crews will have plenty of people to treat without climbing the Gateway Arch.”

“What should we do?”

“Get your casualty down here. Our generators have kicked in—the trams’ll work. Then get everyone else down to ground level as soon as you can.”

“Can you send some people up to—”

“No. I’m not sending anyone up there!”

“But—”

“Besides, you can’t believe how many people we’ve got hurt down here.” Marcy replaced the phone receiver, gripped the console, and carefully steered herself to her feet. A powerful wind blew through the shattered windows, flooding the observation deck with heat and dust. She walked with care—it felt as if she were stepping on pillows, expecting the floor to leap at any instant—to where the Frenchman was lying in the midst of a group.

“How’s he doing?” she asked Evan.

Evan was in his late twenties, a white guy who had lived in Missouri all his life. “He’s breathing all right,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay if we can get the parameds here.”

“Richards wants us to get him down on the trams,” Marcy said. “He doesn’t think the parameds will get here for some time.”

Evan pushed his glasses back on his nose. “That’s gonna be tough,” he said. “Can they send us somebody beefy to help carry—”

“Richards says no.” She looked up in alarm. “Stay away from the windows, please!” One of the children was bellying up to one of the shattered windows. He pointed out into the air. “Busch Stadium fell down!” he said.

Marcy pulled him back from the broken window, but she couldn’t quite resist looking out herself. The view made her heart lurch.

Busch Stadium hadn’t fallen down, exactly, but the roof had collapsed, and the rest was clearly damaged. City Hall looked as if a giant had gone over it with a hammer. Some of the older buildings—brick office buildings and hotels—had collapsed to rubble. There didn’t seem to be a single intact window in the entire city.

Above the shattered cityscape, a few thin columns of smoke were beginning to corkscrew into the sky. As the strong wind batted at her face Marcy thought about her apartment, the comfortable old brownstone she’d felt lucky to find and be able to afford. It was brick, and she wondered if all her belongings were now buried under piles of rubble.

She was lucky, she thought. She was lucky she was working the swing shift, lucky to be in the most solid structure in all Missouri.

“Marcy,” Evan reminded. “We’re in a hurry.”

Marcy walked to Evan’s station controlling the north tramway and thumbed on the microphone. She took on a breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “we’re sorry about the delay. We have a visitor who has fallen ill, so we ask you will be patient while he is loaded aboard a tram. After he has been sent to ground level, we will start regular boarding, and we’ll get you all to the surface as quickly as possible.” Evan recruited one of the other Frenchmen to link arms beneath the sick man, forming support beneath his back and knees in a two-man carry. Marcy was relieved that she hadn’t been requested to support half the man’s weight on her skinny frame, but wondered if she should be insulted that she hadn’t even been asked.

The casualty was carried gingerly down the stairs until an aftershock slammed the arch. The French rescuer lost his grip, and the invalid spilled to the metal stairs. His friends clustered around and began shouting at each other in French.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Evan muttered. Marcy shoved her way through the crowd and tried to restore order. Evan and his partner lifted the victim again, shuffled him to the first tram, then laid him inside. Evan, the other Frenchman, and one of the women—the victim’s wife, possibly—got into the tram car with him.

Marcy closed the tram doors and heard the rumble recede as the little train began its long trip to the ground.

“Excuse me?” The speaker was the young Japanese man. He was shy, and his voice was so low that Marcy could barely hear him above the blast of wind. “We are going down elevators?”

“Yes,” Marcy said.

“Is not safe on elevators,” the man said. “Is earthquake.” A number of the visitors had clustered around to listen to this exchange. “That’s right,” one man said. “We could get stranded.”

“The Gateway Arch has its own emergency power supply,” Marcy said. “I’ve been up here during two power failures in the city, and the emergency power cut in both times, and the people in the trams never even noticed.”

“Is earthquake,” the Japanese man insisted. “Must take stairs.”

“There are over a thousand stairs,” Marcy said. “We’re twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a long way down.” The man seemed unconvinced, and Marcy wondered if she was at all urging the right thing. There were earthquakes in Japan all the time, and maybe the Japanese man knew what he was talking about.

She summoned as much authority as she could, squared her shoulders, looked at everyone from under the brim of her Smokey Bear hat. “It’s much safer on the trams,” she said, and hoped her voice was steady.

The phone buzzed. She picked it up, heard Evan’s voice.

“We’ve got him down. I’m sending the tram back up.”

“Good. I’m going to need your help to—”

“No way, Marcy. I’m gone.”

Surprise took Marcy by the throat. “What—?” she managed.

“I’ve got a pregnant wife and two small kids in Florissant. That’s my priority. I’ve got to be with them.”

“Evan,” Marcy said. “This is an emergency. We’ve got to get these people to the ground. You can’t leave.”

“The Park Service can sue me. See you later, maybe.”

The telephone clicked off. Marcy felt her skin flush with anger, not simply at Evan’s desertion but at the futility of his decision. Florissant was miles away, right through the inner city, and there was no way Evan could hope to get there in the horrid ruin St. Louis had become. All he had done by running off was to make himself useless, to his family and the tourists and everyone else.

Marcy called Richards’s office, but no one answered. Neither did anyone else. Maybe they’d all run home.

The tram rattled back into the station. Marcy smelled smoke on the wind that was blasting through the observation platform. She opened the tram doors and thumbed on the microphone.

“We will start boarding the tram in a moment,” she said. “Please form a line…” Marcy was somewhat surprised to find that a line was actually formed—two-thirds of her visitors silently took up their places on the stairs.

She turned to look at the remainder. The Japanese couple, who seemed uncertain. A few others. And the elderly woman and her mother, both of whom looked very stubborn indeed.

Marcy approached the group. Licked her lips, tried to sound reasonable and persuasive. “The tram is safe, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve just seen it go down and come up. No one was hurt. No one was stranded.”

The elderly woman’s lips were compressed in a thin line. “I’m not getting into one of those cars again. I want to see the stairs.”

“Ma’am,” Marcy said. An aftershock rumbled up through the soles of her shoes. Just a little tremor, she thought, and decided to ignore it, but she saw her visitors turn pale, saw their eyes grow wide. “Ma’am,” she began again, “there are a lot of those stairs. And I don’t know how safe they are—there could be damage there.”

“Elevator not safe,” the Japanese man said. “Is earthquake.” The elderly woman’s daughter looked angry. “I’m not sending my mother down in those elevators!” she said. Her voice was nearly a shout. “They weren’t safe the first time!” Marcy took a step back from this ferocity. She wished she were older and had more authority. She wished she were a football player and could just mash these people into the trams one by one.

“Please keep your voice down, ma’am,” she said. “I don’t want you starting a panic.” The woman lowered her voice to a hiss. “Then don’t bother my mother!” she snapped. Marcy backed away again. “I’ll send this group down,” she said. “That should show you it’s safe.”

“Not safe,” the Japanese man repeated. “Earthquake.”

Marcy went to her station and told the passengers to board the trams. None of them looked very happy. At the last second two of them froze, and one of them ran back to the observation platform with panic plain on his face. Marcy knew that she wasn’t going to stop him.

“Please enter the tram, sir,” she told the other. He was a burly older man, dressed in bright shorts and a kind of tarn o’ shanter. He carried a disposable Kodak camera, one of those that came in a yellow cardboard wrapper. His face was pale.

Marcy went down the stairs and touched the man on the arm. “Please go in, sir,” she said. She saw that the nearest tram had two women already seated. “Those ladies need someone to look after them, okay?” she said.

“Hm?” he said, surprised. “Why yes, all right.”

He allowed Marcy to lead him to the tram. She seated him between the two women and returned to her station. She closed the doors and set the little train rolling downward.

She picked up the phone and called to let someone know the tram was on its way, but there was no answer. What were they all doing? she wondered.

Or maybe, she thought, they were all dead. The huge concourse and museum beneath the Gateway Arch were below ground level: what if the roof had fallen in? What if a pipe had burst, or the Mississippi found its way in, and the whole place was flooded? What if she was sending the visitors to certain death by drowning?

No. She had been on the phone with people since the quake. The concourse was above the level of the Mississippi even at flood stage. Nothing had happened down on the concourse except that people were very busy dealing with damage to the exhibits and to people.

Marcy turned to her remaining visitors. She counted nine, including the man who had panicked and run rather than board the tram.

She took a deep breath and began to argue. The trams were safe. She’d run them up and down twice and no one had been injured. The power supply to the Gateway Arch had multiple backups and had never failed.

Her heart sank as she spoke. She didn’t convince a one of them.

Nick and Viondi stood by the Oldsmobile. The car was in the crevasse, pitched over at an angle of maybe forty degrees, rear wheels still on the road with the tail in the air, the grille rammed into the side of the fracture. The front wheels hung in air. Something had cut Viondi, and blood ran down his face—the car had an air bag only on the driver’s side. Nick and Viondi had got out of the car by climbing over the front seats into the back, and then leaving the car by the back doors, from which they could take the long, nervous step to firm ground.

It was hard to say how deep the crevasse was. The water table was high here, and water had filled the crack to within ten feet of the surface. The water was far from still—a storm of bubbles rose to the top, and foam was beginning to gather in stripes on the surface.

“Earthquake, I guess,” Nick said, gazing down. His heart still throbbed in his chest.

“New Madrid fault,” Viondi said. “Shit.” He wiped blood from his face. “I gotta get back to St. Louis. Gotta get to my family.”

“At least my family’s well out of it.”

Viondi gave him a quick glance, blood dripping down his face. “You sure about that?” Nick hesitated. “The earthquake couldn’t hit Toussaint that hard.” He hesitated. “Could it?”

“We get out of here, then we’ll know.”

Nick looked at the car. “Wherever we go, it’ll be on foot.”

“Give me the keys.” Viondi opened the trunk, took out Nick’s suitcase, his own box of clothes, and the silver samovar, which he jammed down on top of his clothing.

“You’re not going to take the samovar, are you?” Nick asked.

“Shit, man, it’s solid silver. I’m not gonna leave it in an abandoned car in Buttfuck, Tennessee, that’s for sure.” His grim look grew more thoughtful. “Besides, if we can find drinkable water, we’re going to need something to carry it in, and this is all we’ve got.”

“Let me try to stop that bleeding before we go anywhere. I’ve got some Band-Aids and stuff in my bag.” There was nothing to clean the wound with, so Nick ended up using one of his T-shirts. He had some disinfectant cream, which Viondi patiently let him smear on the cut, and then he tried to close it with the adhesive strips. The cut was big, and blood kept pouring out while he was working, so Nick ended up using three different strips to try to hold the edges of the wound together. The adhesive strips, which he’d bought on sale, were what used to be called “flesh,” meaning a light tan color intended to blend in with the skin of Caucasians, and it contrasted strangely with Viondi’s black skin.

The strips also had little green dinosaurs on them.

At least they stopped some of the bleeding.

“I guess we might as well go,” Nick said. He put his satchel on his shoulder, picked up his soft-sided suitcase, then turned north.

“Hold on there,” Viondi said. “We ain’t going north. There’s nothing there—we’re miles from the highway or any big towns.”

“There were some farms,” Nick said. “And that restaurant.” There was anger in Viondi’s look. “You want to bet that restaurant ain’t floatin’ down the Hatchie by now? And those farms—whoever lives there ain’t gonna be in any better shape than we are.” He pointed south, across the crevasse and the soybean fields. “Memphis is down that way. It’s a big city. We can find a tow truck there, and people to help us.”

Nick was confused. “How are we going to get over the crack? I can’t jump that.” Viondi slammed the trunk with his big hands. “We got a bridge right here.” Nick was dubious, but Viondi put down his box, put one foot on the rear bumper, and climbed up onto the trunk. Nick held his breath, expecting at any second for the car to pitch nose-first into the crevasse, but all that happened was that the back of the car sank under Viondi’s weight. Viondi crawled onto the roof, reversed himself, then slid his legs down the windscreen and onto the car’s hood.

“There,” he said. “Now pass me the box and the bags.”

Nick put a foot on the rear bumper and passed Viondi their gear, and then Viondi belly-crawled backward down the length of the hood until he could stand on the other side of the crevasse. “Your turn,” he said.

Nick felt his stomach clench. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

He crawled slowly over the car, his heart giving a leap every time it shifted under his weight. But the bridge remained in place, and when he backed his feet to the broken pavement on the other side of the crevasse, he felt his breath ease.

Viondi handed him his suitcase. “Let’s get moving,” he said.

A shadow fell across the sun. Nick looked up, and was surprised to find how much of the sky was now covered with dark cloud.

“Maybe it’s going to rain,” he said.

And then he followed Viondi down the lonely, broken road.

The interior of the Gateway Arch was airless and musty and at least a hundred degrees. Sweat dripped from beneath Marcy’s Smokey Bear hat, and her thighs ached. She’d been going down stairs forever.

“Careful,” she told the people behind her. She pointed her flashlight. “The rail here is a little shaky.” There were 1076 steps altogether, one of those facts that Marcy had been obliged to memorize as part of her job. She hadn’t bothered to count them as she descended, and she was glad. She didn’t want to walk to the point of exhaustion and realize that there were still 600 steps to go. The monumental skeleton of the arch loomed around her. Massive I-beams, giant stanchions, cross-braces of steel. The stair that wound its way down the arch rested in part on the framework itself, and wasn’t going to move unless the arch itself gave way.

So far the stair had been safe enough. It was the little things that had been damaged. About two-thirds of the light-bulbs had shattered, leaving the stair a passage through gloom and shadow. The handrail had given way in places, and Marcy cautioned her visitors about putting their weight on it. Some of the smaller fixtures had fallen—bits of steel mesh, some cable, the lighter crossbraces. These could be worked around, with care.

“Take your time, now,” she told her people. “We’re not in any hurry.” She’d given one of her two flashlights to the Japanese man, and told him to keep to the rear of the column. Marcy kept the elderly lady right behind her, so that she could keep an eye on her, be certain not to overtax her, and make sure she wasn’t about to drop dead of a coronary. Marcy came to a landing, peered at the next flight of stairs, decided to call a halt.

“Everyone catch your breath,” she said.

Simply catching one’s breath was hard enough inside the stainless steel shaft. The heat was almost overwhelming.

Everyone clustered onto the landing, as supported by massive crossbraces it was clearly safer than the stairs themselves. “How much farther do we have to go?” a man asked.

“I don’t know,” Marcy said. “I’ve never done this before.” An aftershock slammed up through all the girders and beams and almost threw Marcy to her knees. She clapped hands over her ears as the metal around her began to shriek as if in pain. Something fell, somewhere, with a loud clang that echoed forever in the curving metal stairwell.

“I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” Marcy heard the words as though they came from far away. She looked up to see a man’s distorted face, eyes so round that his irises stood out as tiny dots in a lake of white. “I want to take the elevator!”

It was the same man who had panicked just before entering the tram. He lurched on the landing, knocking into people bodily, and then he spun about, shoved aside the Japanese man at the tail of the column, and began to run up the metal stair in the direction of the observation deck.

“No!” Marcy shrieked, and lunged after him. She was not going to lose another one. Her shoe caught on a stair riser and she fell face-first on the metal treads, but her outstretched hand caught the panicked man’s pants cuff. Marcy snarled as she clenched her fist around the fabric and pulled. The man was off-balance on the quaking stairway and fell. “Get back here!” Marcy yelled, and climbed up the man’s body, putting all her weight on him as the man thrashed beneath her.

“I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” the man shouted.

Marcy straddled the panicked man and punched him in the face with her flashlight. “Shut up!” she shouted. He began to scream, a strange, scratchy wailing sound, as inhuman and metallic as the scream of the arch under tension. “Shut up, motherfucker!” Marcy hammered him with the flashlight again, then a third time.

The aftershock faded. The metal shrieking of the arch died away, and the man’s screams faded at the same time. Marcy stared with fury into the panicked man’s bloodstained face.

“I want to go to the elevator,” he said.

“No way, asshole,” Marcy said. “I’m not having another damn deserter.” She grabbed him by his collar and hauled him to his feet, shoved him down the platform. “You walk ahead of me,” she told him. “Now march.”

Ten minutes later they shouldered open a bent metal door and stepped out into the concourse. Marcy gasped in cooler air, took off her hat, wiped sweat from her forehead. She heard moans of relief from her tourists.

The huge underground room was a mess. The glass ticket windows had gone, and the ticket counters leaned at strange angles. Displays had toppled, signs had come down, light fixtures had shattered. The floor was littered with tourist brochures, tickets, guidebooks, maps, and broken glass. Marcy had never been so glad to see a wreck in her life.

She stepped aside and let her visitors file out of the stairwell. The elderly lady stopped for a moment, fumbled in her pocketbook. “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said. Marcy stared in surprise as the old lady held out a ten-dollar bill.

“No thanks, ma’am,” she said. “We’re not allowed to take tips.” Carrying her two flashlights, Marcy found her French party in the middle of the concourse, shouting at each other as usual. The heart attack victim lay on the floor, conscious but showing little interest in his friends. Other casualties lay nearby, maybe thirty of them. Some of them were very bloody, some unconscious. A number were covered in what looked like gray brick dust.

Marcy saw no one in khakis, no Park Service people at all. She glanced around her in shock. Could they all have run away? All of them? Had Evan started a panic?

She turned at the sound of shouts and saw two of her colleagues carrying an unconscious woman down the stairs and onto the concourse. Marcy’s head lurched as she saw blood pouring from a wound in the woman’s lower leg. Marcy ran and helped carry the woman to an empty space on the concourse floor.

“Where is everybody?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

“Parking structure collapsed,” one of the park rangers said. He was gasping with the effort of carrying the injured woman. “There are dozens of people in there. We’re trying to dig them out.”

“We’ve got this one,” the other ranger said. “Get out there and see if you can help someone else.” Marcy cast a last look at the bleeding woman and sprinted for the wide stair. The parking structure adjacent to the Gateway Arch was several stories tall and held hundreds of cars. If it had collapsed, there was no telling how many people were trapped in the rubble.

She ran out into the open and into a hot wind that blew burning cinders across her path. Heat flared on her exposed skin. Her feet slowed as she stared in horror at the wall of fire blazing on the other side of Memorial Drive.

Half the city seemed ablaze, everything from the tallest structures to the smallest heaps of rubble. She held up a hand to shield her face from the heat, and her palm turned hot. Clouds of black smoke curled up between her and the arch, obscuring its gleaming stainless steel skin. Hundreds of people swarmed across the highway toward her, crossing the park as they tried to get away from the fires. Others had collapsed on the grass, exhausted simply by the effort of getting here.

Marcy kept trotting toward the parking structure. Most of the trees that lined the walkways had fallen, and she had to keep zigzagging around fallen trunks and limbs.

She glanced in the other direction, saw another cloud of dense smoke, growing from roots of flame, in East St. Louis. The Casino Queen, the huge riverboat that fed the East St. Louis economy with its gambling income, was lying on its side in the river. Its ornate smokestacks had fallen, and the ginger-bread on its balconies was broken. A few people were seen clinging to the part of the boat remaining above the water.

St. Louis’s boats hadn’t fared much better. The excursion boats Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher had been moored for the evening on the landing right under the Gateway Arch. Only Becky Thatcher seemed reasonably intact: Tom Sawyer had sunk at its moorings, and Huck Finn drifted downriver, trailing its mooring cables in the water. All had lost their stacks. Marcy swerved around a fallen tree and came within sight of the parking structure. It looked like a crater of the moon. A hideous pit filled with broken concrete and mangled steel. Smoke burned Marcy’s eyes. She slowed, gasping for breath.

“Evan!” she shouted. “Damn you!” And then, though her feet felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds apiece, she went down into the pit to rescue her visitors.

A neighbor girl knocked on the window of the BMW. Charlie looked at her in some surprise. The electric window wouldn’t go down, because he didn’t have the ignition key, so he opened the door. The air smelled of smoke from the houses that were burning.

The girl was maybe fifteen and lived next door. Charlie saw her and her friends from his deck all the time. Charlie tried to remember her name.

“Are you all right, Mr. Johns?” the girl said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Everything’s fine.” He thought about Megan in the master bedroom, and his mind shied away from the thought.

“Fine,” he repeated.

“My dad says we shouldn’t go into our houses,” the girl said. “In case there’s another earthquake.”

“Earthquake,” Charlie repeated. It was an earthquake, he thought in surprise. For some reason he hadn’t even considered earthquake. He’d seen public service announcements on television every so often, usually late at night, but none of the locals seemed to take earthquakes seriously, and he didn’t either.

Besides, everyone knew that earthquakes only happened in California and Japan.

“We’re going to pitch a tent in the backyard and camp,” the girl said. “We have a spare sleeping bag if you want one.”

“No,” Charlie said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

“We were wondering if we could get some water from your swimming pool.” Charlie blinked as he processed this strange request. He couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Fine,” he said finally.

“Thanks, Mr. Johns. See you later, okay?”

“Fine,” Charlie said again.

He closed the door. Now the BMW smelled of burning.

He looked at the cellphone receiver he’d thrown down on the next seat, at the red lights winking. He picked it up again. He tried to call emergency numbers and nothing worked. He tried to call Dearborne, because Dearborne had been at the country club and perhaps hadn’t realized they were all rich. The phone didn’t work. He threw it on the passenger seat in disgust.

Earthquake, he thought. His mum and dad would think it very strange when he told them. McPhee’s house was burning by now in a very lively manner. The neighbors had saved some of the furniture, which was all over the lawn and street, but could not save the house. There was a huge pall of rising smoke over down-town Memphis, as if a lot of things down there were burning. Charlie realized he was hungry.

Too bad, he thought, that the caterers were going to be late.

TWELVE

Jason huddled between the lightning and the flood. He had lost track of the number of thunderclaps, the number of times lightning had blasted the top of the mound. Storm gusts blew dust, spray, mud, and rain, the alternations from one to the other coming with bewildering speed.

Jason clung to the steep side of the mound, away from the lightning. All he could hope was that one of the tall trees that loomed above him would not attract a bolt of lightning, topple, and kill him. The water continued to rise. And on the northern horizon, Cabells Mound continued to burn. There was wreckage, some of it still on fire, tangled with the row of trees to the north that marked the boundary of the cotton field. It was all that was left of the row of homes that Jason had lived in. The hope that Jason’s mother might still be alive, somewhere in that wreckage, haunted his mind. If only, he thought, I could get over there…

But then what? If he were out there on those pieces of wreckage, what could he do for his mother, or even himself?

At least, he thought as windblown mud spattered his face, he wouldn’t be alone. When the lightning finally dwindled, the sky was so dark that it was not clear whether dusk had come or not. The mound was surrounded by a sluggish black river so wide Jason could not see its banks. He realized he was thirsty.

He wondered if he dared to drink the water.

He thought about the water jug in his mother’s refrigerator, with the quartz crystal that was supposed to give the water magical powers. For some absurd reason tears came to his eyes at the thought of that jug, of the forlorn plastic container of magic water rolling along the bottom of the river. He pressed his head into the mud-spattered moss and let the tears flow down his face, let his breath fight past the hard lump in his throat.

From above the clouds, from above the darkness itself, he could hear the sound of a jet aircraft rumbling far overhead, like the echo of a vanished world.

Eventually he rose, wiped the tears from his face with a muddy hand, and carefully descended the mound’s steep side. The water had stilled and seemed to be receding a little. He thought about bending over the surface of the water, anchored firmly to the mound with one hand on a tree limb, and easing his thirst.

No, he thought. There are dead people in that water.

He shuddered and drew back.

And then he saw, half-concealed by a fallen elm, the scrolled words. The letters were upside-down. Jason tilted his head, read Retired and Gone Fishin’.

Mr. Regan’s bass boat.

Jason remembered the carport tearing away on the Regan’s house, falling into the cellar along with the rest of the building. Apparently the boat had been liberated at the same time, though he didn’t remember seeing it bob to the surface.

Weird hope fluttered through him, tentative as the wings of a new-born butterfly. With the boat, he could rescue his mother from the ruins of their home and take them both to someplace safe. Jason approached the boat, one foot sloshing ankle-deep on the steep slope. He climbed over the fallen elm, then was jerked back by a weight on his shoulder.

The telescope. He’d forgotten he was carrying it by its strap.

He disentangled the telescope from a tree limb, then hiked both feet over the bole of the tree. The boat floated upside-down before him, its aluminum hull scarred by collision with trees and debris. It was caught in a tangle of leaves and branches, and its bows were half-sunk beneath the waters. Jason hung the telescope from a limb and splashed into the water. He tried to heave the boat over, but it was very heavy, his footing kept sliding away beneath him, and at one point he found himself swimming. He paddled back to the mound, but it was too slippery for him to climb, and eventually he hauled himself, hand over hand, up the length of a sapling.

He lay on the steep mound for a moment and panted for breath. The boat was too awkward and heavy to turn over by main strength. He was going to have to find another way.

He decided to try hauling it up onto the mound as far as it would go, then try to turn it over. He waded into the water, reached under the stern, and grabbed the stern counter with both hands. He heaved, throwing himself backward. Water poured off the boat, and it moved. Jason sat down, the stern of the boat in his lap. He dug his heels into the wet soil and scrambled backward up the bank, hauling the boat after him, gasping for breath after each heave. Sweat popped onto his forehead. There was something springy in the feel of the boat, something that kept trying to pull the boat back into the water. With every heave, the boat’s bows sank deeper into the water. Eventually Jason couldn’t haul the boat any higher. It was caught, he realized.

He had to uncatch it, obviously enough. He scrambled out from underneath the stern, then waded out into the water, feeling his way around the port side of the boat. The steep mound fell out from under him very rapidly, and soon he was up to his chest. He gave a careful look at the bow of the boat, at the branches trailing in the water, to see if there was any dangerous current.

The water appeared to be barely moving at all. Jason slid into the water, kicking as he moved along the side of the boat. The bow ducked beneath the waters as he put weight on it. Underwater branches slashed at his kicking legs. He felt along the underside of the submerged bow, found nothing holding the nose of the boat under water. As he hung onto the submerged bow, the water was past his chin. He dog-paddled over, and began to feel along the starboard side.

Nothing.

Jason paddled back to the mound, climbed out of the water, and tried to catch his breath. Whatever was holding the nose of the boat down was clearly underneath the boat. He would have to dive beneath the boat to free it.

A cold tremor shook his nerves. He imagined being under the cold, dark water that had already killed so many. Groping in the blackness. He could so easily be caught and held underneath—by a branch, a cable, a piece of wreckage, anything.

He imagined drowning in the dark water, alone and lost, trapped under the river where he would never be found.

His gaze involuntarily turned northward, toward the line of trees where the wreckage of his house had been caught. The boat was his only way of reaching it, of finding whether his mother still lived. The water seemed colder than it had before, and it made him gasp. Water lapped up to his lips, his chin. He felt his way along the overturned boat, took a gasping breath, and pulled himself under by his fingers. He could see nothing in the murky water. He held onto the boat with his left hand and swept out with his right, trying to encounter the obstruction. Tree limbs lashed him—and for a moment he felt a pang of fear at the thought they might hold him under—but none of the limbs seemed to be attached to the boat in any way.

Jason surfaced, caught his breath, moved a little closer to the bow of the boat, and dived again. Again he held on with one hand and probed with the other. And this time he touched something different, something braided and slick.

Rope. Nylon rope.

He felt along its length, found a metal shackle hooked to an eye on the boat’s bow. It was the rope that was used to winch the boat onto its trailer at the end of a day’s fishing. Apparently the boat’s trailer was somewhere underwater, carried along with the boat by the flood, and the two were still connected. Jason was out of air. He pushed off from the boat toward the surface, kicking, but he ran into a tangle overhead, sharp and unforgiving branches. He batted at them as panic rose in his throat. Twigs stabbed at his face. His frantic kicks only seemed to lodge him more securely in the tangled, spiny nest. Bubbles burst from Jason’s lips. There was a throbbing ache in his throat. He snatched at the branches as his pulse beat in his ears. And then it occurred to him that he was going the wrong way, that he couldn’t go up, that in order to get free he’d have to go down and then over. He pushed at the overhead branches, trying to force himself down. His legs thrashed. He struck out with a breast stroke, trying to move laterally in the dark water. Invisible fingers clawed at his scalp. He thought of the hands of dead men and thrashed out frantically, more bubbles bursting from his nostrils and lips. He came to the surface with thunderous splashes, gasping for air. He beat for the shore, dragged himself up the steep bank. Coughs racked his ribs. Nausea gripped his stomach.

When he had calmed, when his head finally swam clear of terror, he looked back at the water, saw the elm branch that had caught at him, and realized he’d probably been less than two feet under water. It had been so dark that he had felt he was much deeper.

He lay back on the bank, closed his eyes, tried to gather his strength. His teeth chattered from cold. It was some time before he could bring himself to enter the water again, and when he did, it was on the opposite side of the boat from the tree limb. He ventured carefully, his fingers edging along the bows of the boat an inch at a time. He took a series of breaths, closed his eyes, and pulled himself under. On the third swipe of his arm Jason found the rope. He followed it to the shackle, felt for the toggle that would release it. He found the toggle, tried to push it open with his thumb, rattled the shackle back and forth. It wouldn’t come.

He was out of air. He pushed back from the boat and kicked to the surface, then treaded water while he caught his breath. Then he dove again.

He found the shackle more quickly this time, thumbed it open, tried to pull it from the metal eye at the boat’s bow. The line had too much tension, he realized, for him to get the inch or so of slack needed to slip the shackle from the eye. So he reached to the bow, gripped the edge, and put his weight on it, made the bow bob in the water.

He reached out for the line again, and that’s when he grabbed the dead man.

It felt wrong. Not the slick texture of the nylon line, but something soft and yielding and cold. He felt along it, trying to puzzle out what it was, and then he felt the cold fingers brushing light as gossamer against his wrist and he screamed.

He lunged to the surface in a boil of white foam. Water seared his throat. He clawed his way to the bank and lay retching. River water drooled from his mouth and nose.

Mr. Regan, he realized, had died with his beloved boat. Caught in the rope, apparently, and drowned. Jason shivered on the bank and gasped for air. He sat up, spat out river water, and stared in at the boat in horror. He thought of old Mr. Regan lying under the water waiting for him, arms reaching out, eyes staring into the darkness, white hair floating. He thought of the distant flame-scorched rubbish on the horizon, and his mother clinging to it, clinging to life in the cold river water. Without thought he flung himself into the river. He swam to the bow of the boat, put his weight on it, snatched for the mooring line, found it on the first grab. He felt slack on the line, and quickly he snapped off the shackle and let it fall.

The bow rose to the surface and brought Jason with it. He turned and swam straight to the mound, because he didn’t want to see if Mr. Regan bobbed to the surface behind him.

He climbed onto the mound and caught his breath, and only then did he dare to look behind. No dead men floated in the water. Relief flooded his heart. He was going to rescue his mother, sail them back to California on the Retired and Gone Fishin’.

It was getting very dark. The sun must have set. Jason looked northward and saw that the fires of Cabells Mound had largely died down. He shuddered with a sudden chill and decided it was time to get his boat rightside-up.

He climbed to the stern, got a grip on the underside, and heaved. There was a splash, a rain of water from the bow, and the boat moved. Jason ducked, got his feet and body beneath the boat, and straightened, giving a shout as the boat moved, rolling away from him.

With a great splash, Retired and Gone Fishin’ landed on its keel. Jason’s heart leaped. He never could have turned the boat over on dry land. But the water had supported the boat’s weight, and taken most of his burden from him.

The bass boat had clearly seen better days. It had platforms fore and aft, so that fishermen could stand and cast. There had been a padded swivel chair on each platform, but these had been torn away. Right amidships there was a small cockpit, with two forward-facing seats and a small jumpseat between them. The small windscreen in front of the driver’s seat had been torn away, and the fore part was half-flooded with water.

Jason got into the boat, groped in the darkness for any equipment.

Nothing.

No engine, no paddles, no life vests, no fishing poles. No water, no food, no fuel. No way to bail out the water that filled the bottom of the boat. A steering wheel that wasn’t hooked up to anything, a throttle that flopped uselessly back and forth like a screen door in the wind.

He wondered how he was going to get to the wreckage of his home. That cotton field might be fifty miles wide for all this boat was going to help him.

Pole along, he supposed. Or use a stick as a paddle. Or hang his feet off the back of the boat and kick. Still, Jason could see no point in staying on the mound. It wasn’t as if some rescue craft was going to parachute him an emergency outboard motor. If he stayed on the mound, who knew how long it would take for people to find him? The river would bring him to other people sooner or later. He groped around on the flank of the mound for sticks suitable for paddles, and found several leafy branches that would do as well as anything else he was likely to find. He threw the branches into the boat, put his hands on the stern counter, and prepared to push off. Something solid banged him on the forehead.

He swiped at it and felt the hard plastic casing of his new telescope. He took the scope from where he’d hung it and, a bit self-consciously, hung it over his shoulder. Suddenly he felt like laughing. He looked down at the boat and imagined a crew of sailors waiting for his orders.

“We’ve got a telescope, men!” he said. “We’re ready for sea now!” And with a laugh, he pushed the boat off from the mound and jumped into the stern as it surged away. The river was sluggish and still. Retired and Gone Fishin’ turned slow circles as Jason fumbled his way over the boat. He found a locker that was reasonably dry, and put the telescope in it. The dying fires of Cabells Mound reflected red off the water.

He sat on the edge of the boat and tried paddling with one of the branches, but that only turned the boat in circles, and the effort was exhausting. The boat was too wide for him to paddle on both sides to keep it straight, not unless he kept jumping from one side to the other, and that seemed useless. Jason tried hanging over the end of the boat and swishing the branch back and forth, hoping to propel himself along by lashing his tail like a sperm, but when he tried it nothing seemed to happen. He looked at the bulk of the mound on his left, and it seemed farther away. He was slowly drifting south with the river, not north as he wished.

He threw the branch into the boat in disgust and heard it land in the water that splashed ankle-deep in the bottom. He was going to have to try kicking the boat northward.

He took off his sneakers and socks, then carefully lowered himself off the back of the boat. A shiver ran through him at the water’s chill. He hung onto the metal plate to which the outboard was usually bolted, and he began to kick. Water splashed as his heels broke the surface.

He kicked steadily for a few minutes, but from behind the boat he couldn’t tell if he was on the right course, so he stopped kicking and pulled his head above the gunwale to take a bearing on the red glow of Cabells Mound. He seemed to be aimed more or less in the right direction, so he dropped into the water once more and began to kick.

That was the way it went for a long time. Kick for several minutes, take a bearing while he panted for breath, kick some more. The glow seemed to be getting a little nearer.

The air rasped in and out of Jason’s lungs. His hands were numb on the metal plate. His head spun, and he felt the beginnings of a cramp threatening his left calf. He paused, hanging off the end of the boat, and tried to massage the cramp out of his calf with a half-paralyzed hand. He could feel his teeth chattering in the cold. There was an ache in his throat from his labored breathing.

A brief gust of wind flurried the surface of the water. The boat swung to the right, and Jason tried to kick to correct his course. He failed, and the boat swung farther.

He saw the Indian mound looming up close on his left. It shouldn’t be there, he realized. It should be farther astern.

A flame of panic brightened in Jason’s heart. He pulled himself above the boat’s counter, tried to get a bearing. The fires of Cabells Mound seemed more distant. He looked frantically at the mound again, tried to get a bearing on it. The clouds above the mound were breaking up, with stars visible here and there, but the clouds were moving swiftly, and it was difficult to gauge motion relative to the water. The boat swung to another gust. Jason’s pulse throbbed in his ears as he turned his head to view the mound. He fixed his gaze at a star just visible above the tree-topped mound, tried to see how fast it was moving relative to the mound…

The star seemed to be flying in relation to the mound. Which meant that neither the star nor the mound were moving, it was Jason that was moving, Jason and his boat… The lazy current had picked up speed and intent, and was carrying him swiftly away from the wreckage of his home, away from any chance of rescuing his mother.

Jason gave a frantic yell and dropped back into the water, kicking furiously to get the boat back on its proper course. Heaving the boat’s slab side against the wind was difficult, and by the time he got the boat pointed in the right direction again he was already breathing hard, and he could feel the cramp building in his calf again.

He knew that he could not allow himself the luxury of weariness. He had to kick, and kick hard. So he kicked, and from the first minute it was torture. His hands ached, his lungs were agony. Blackness filled his eyes. The cramp came in his leg and he clenched his teeth and ignored it, tried to keep kicking despite the muscles that turned hard as iron, that tried to tear his tendons from the bone. He didn’t dare stop. The pain filled him and he became the pain, and the pain was in his heart and his mind and his body, and it filled the world and the night, and he kept kicking, because it would be worse pain to stop. He shook water from his eyes and blinked at the bulk of the mound—he could see it sliding past, could see he was losing ground to the current. Mad determination brought a scream to his throat, a cry of hoarse defiance. Fresh energy seemed to glow in his limbs. The pain was not gone, but somehow it didn’t matter now, he had managed to put himself somewhere else, to let the pain flow through him without touching him. He kept kicking, kept pushing the boat ahead of him, fighting the wind and the current, until he caught another glimpse of the mound again and saw that it was far away, far upriver, and he knew that all the effort had been in vain, that the current had him now and that the river was taking him away south, far from the fires of Cabells Mound, the floating wreckage that was his home, far from the muddy grave of his mother, who was, he knew, dead, a lifeless thing lying in the river mud, drowned or burned or broken, wreckage herself, flotsam, food for animals that swam or crawled in the muddy darkness… So he threw one arm over the boat’s stern and just hung there, legs dangling in the water, and let the pain claim him at last, the sobs tearing at his throat, as the boat turned slow pointless circles in the water that carried it to a destination that waited patiently somewhere to the south, concealed by the soft Mississippi darkness.

The Reverend Noble Frankland rose from his knees. His clothes were soaked with rain, and his knees with mud, but he had not felt that this was any moment to cease raining prayers and praise back to heaven.

Despite the downpour, the air still smelled agreeably of brimstone.

He reentered the radio station, walked across the littered floor to the control room. Though power had been restored, the station was mostly dark. Very few lightbulbs had survived the quake. The dials on the control panel—the ones that hadn’t shattered, anyway—showed that he was still on the air. He fetched his old metal wheeled chair from across the room, dusted some broken glass off the green plastic seat, then sat before the microphone. His wet pants squished beneath him, and he gave a tug to one trouser leg. He put on his earphones, then spoke.

“Brothers and sisters,” he intoned, “the Last Days have begun. These are the days of lightning and brimstone and shakings of the earth, the prophecies of the Bible coming true. We praise you, Lord Jesus, for letting us see this day.” As he spoke his hands automatically worked the potentiometers. During the lengthy time he’d spent praying on his knees he’d had time enough to plan what he was going to say once he returned to the mike.

“If anyone in the Rails Bluff area can hear me, the first thing I want you to do is thank the Lord’s mercy for allowing you the opportunity to build His kingdom here on earth during the next seven years of Tribulation. And the second thing I want you to do is see to the safety of your family and your neighbors. And the third thing I want you to do, if your home is destroyed or damaged, or if you are afraid to be alone in this difficult time, or if you are in need of spiritual aid, I want you to come here—here, to the Rails Bluff Church of the End Times here on Highway 417. We will see that everyone is cared for and fed. We have enough supplies to support a large number of people, and we have the organization to make sure that everyone is cared for.

“If you don’t have transportation, or if you’re injured and can’t move, try to call emergency services. If you can’t get through, try to care for yourself as best as possible, and we will find you.

“If anyone from the Family Values campaign can hear me, I want you to look after those children and return them to their families if you can. If that’s impossible, I want you to bring them here, to the Church of the End Times, where we will care for them till their parents can come for them.

“To any Christians in the Rails Bluff area—if you have no other duties, come here now. We need you at the church! We know how to organize you for survival here in the End Times—we have studied this problem for years!”

Frankland took a breath. “And now, let us all give thanks…”

He spoke a lengthy prayer, and then he found a sixty-second cart—a tape cartridge looped so as to repeat itself infinitely, usually intended for announcements or advertisements—and then Frankland broadcast his message again, recording it this time on the cart, making certain that it lasted a precise sixty seconds. Then he slapped the cart into the player and set it on infinite repeat. He listened to it once to make sure that it sounded all right, and then he took his ear-phones from his head. It was only then that he heard the noise in the outside office. Someone had come into the station. He could see a large, shadowy form moving in the outer office.

Frankland’s mouth went dry. In a movement that seemed to take forever, he reached into the drawer next to his chair and put his fingers securely around the custom grip of his P38 semiautomatic pistol. He eased the wheeled chair back from the control panel, but the wheels crunched over broken glass, and swift, angry reproach flashed through his mind at the sound.

The intruder halted at the sound, then moved down the corridor. Glass and wreckage crunched under his feet. Trying to breath in utter silence, Frankland thumbed back the hammer on the pistol and slowly raised the weapon. The intruder loomed closer. The pistol seemed heavy as sin.

“Reverend?” Hilkiah’s voice. “You in there?”

Frankland let his breath sigh from his throat. His head swam with relief.

“Yes, Hilkiah. I’m here.”

The big man groped uncertainly toward the doorway. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Frankland eased the hammer of the P38. “I’m just fine.”

“Praise the Lord you’re all right! I can’t see a damn—whups, sorry, Brother Frankland—a dang thing in here.”

Frankland put the pistol back in its drawer, rose from his chair, and shuffled through the rubble toward the door.

“Were you in town?” he asked. “What happened there?”

“Town’s wrecked,” he said. “The courthouse and the old Bijoux theater are the only buildings still standing, pretty much. A buncha houses caught on fire. Bet you we’ve got five, six hundred homeless people in this county, probably more.”

The Bijoux was an old opera house from the nineteenth century, later converted to cinema, but abandoned now for years. It had a strong iron frame, and Frankland had once considered buying it for the site of his church.

“God bless it!” Frankland said as he barked his shin on a fallen shelf. “How about my wife? Our kids?” meaning the Family Values picketers in front of Bear State Videoramics.

“A few cuts and bruises, but they’re okay. We were all knocked down when it started, but it was safer in the parking lot than inside the buildings, and we were away from the store fronts and the flying glass.” He gave a chuckle deep in his throat, hugh hugh. “You shoulda seen them cars jump! Like they was trying to fly to the moon!”

“And the Piggly Wiggly? The video store?”

“Roof came down. We had to pull people out. Some busted legs and heads—I didn’t stay to take count, I just helped round up the kids and then Sister Sheryl sent me here to make sure you were okay.” They emerged from darkness into the gloom of the outer office. “Where are the kids now?” Frankland asked. “Did you hear my message?”

“I don’t got no working radio in the pickup, pastor. But Sister Sheryl was going to try to get them back to their families, then come here. And Dr. Calhoun had his bus there, and he was going to take care of the kids that live out of town.”

If the bus doesn’t break down somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Frankland thought. He sighed.

“We’ve got to get ready,” he said. “I’ve told people to come here if they’re in need. We’d better be set for them when they come.”

He opened the metal door, let murky sunlight flood the room. “We need to clean the glass out of the church, so people can sleep there. Hang some plastic sheets on lines inside so the women can have privacy.”

He looked across the road and saw Joe Johnson with a blade on his tractor, trying to shore up his leaking catfish ponds. Those catfish, he thought, they could feed a lot of people.

“Is it time to open the vault?” Hilkiah asked.

Frankland stepped into the parking lot and savored the sulfur in the air. Even though there were a number of vaults, all containing supplies laid under concrete until the End Times, Frankland knew which one Hilkiah was thinking of. “Not yet,” he said. “We don’t want to scare people with all those guns before we have to.”

Jessica rolled up to the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division in Pat’s red civilian Jeep Cherokee, with her husband behind the wheel, half her senior military staff either in the back or hanging off the vehicle’s sides, and Sergeant Zook, her driver, sitting on the vehicle’s hood brandishing a Homelite chainsaw.

No one could say she didn’t know how to make an entrance.

It had taken Jessica almost half an hour to get to her head-quarters, normally a three-minute drive. The roads were badly torn, blocked with fallen trees, power poles, and land-slides. The aftershocks that came every few minutes theatened them with further slides and falling trees. Only the Cherokee’s four-wheel-drive made the journey at all possible. Along the way she’d picked up most of her staff, who lived on the same road above the WES, and found Zook, who after the quake had tried to fetch her in her car, but had got bogged down trying to negotiate a landslide.

The headquarters building was still standing, but Jessica suspected that this was going to be about the only good news. She bounded out of the Jeep before it quite pulled to a stop on Arkansas Road, and she headed for the group of soldiers she saw on the grass inside Brazos Circle. She was followed by a wedge of senior officers.

To the poor junior MP lieutenant on duty, it must have looked as if the whole Pentagon was descending on him. All the soldiers were in battle dress, BDUs, and most were wearing helmets, a sensible precaution in an environment where things might fall on their heads at any second. The lieutenant had no good news. “We evacuated the building, General, because it’s damaged and we figured it was dangerous to stay inside,” he said. “Ground lines are down. Power’s out. Most of our communications gear is wrecked, inaccessible, or without power. We got a Hammer Ace radio out of stores, but the batteries were dead, so we’re recharging with the solar recharger…” Jessica looked at the radio. It had a segmented antenna with a metal flower at the end, meant to communicate via satellite. Now useless, until they could recharge the batteries that were sitting in the solar array next to the radio on the lawn.

“How long is that going to take?”

“Quite a while, General.”

Jessica looked at the red Cherokee. “Recharge it with the vehicle engine.”

“Ma’am!” The lieutenant looked happy for an excuse to leave the cluster of senior officers.

“Just a minute, soldier,” Jessica said. “How many personnel do we have on station?”

“You’re looking at most of us, General. Most of our people went home at five o’clock, just before the quake.”

They should know to report back, Jessica hoped.

No communication, no information. No information, no decisions. No decisions, no orders. No orders meant waiting. Jessica was not very good at waiting.

“Have you tried cellphones?” she asked.

The lieutenant looked embarrassed. “Didn’t think to,” he said. “I don’t happen to have one, and I guess nobody else here does, either.”

“Right. Get that battery recharged.” Jessica’s cellphone was clipped to her belt. It was connected to the Iridium network: 66 satellites sent into canted polar orbits in the late nineties by a consortium headed by Motorola. The satellites were supposed to cover every inch of the globe, capable of patching into every active phone network in existence.

The disadvantage was that, if the local cells were down, the phones had to be used out of doors, because buildings would impede the signal to and from the satellite. Jessica considered that the advantage of instant communication with Moscow, say, or Antarctica, outweighed the disadvantage of having a conversation during the occasional rainstorm.

She unclipped the phone and turned to Sergeant Zook.

“Report to the motor pool,” she said, “and sign me out a Humvee.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I want a report on what you find there, particularly the earth-moving machines. I want to get the roads open around here so that our own personnel can report for duty.”

She looked at the faces around her. “I hope some of you have experience in operating bulldozers and graders, gentlemen.”

The colonels and majors looked at each other uneasily.

Zook trotted off, then stumbled as the sudden shearing force of an aftershock almost took him off his feet. As the earth began to growl, Jessica stood in place, feet braced apart, knees bent slightly. The ground felt liquid below her feet, like Jell-O. Vertigo shimmered in her inner ear. There was a crash in the headquarters building as something very large fell. The aftershock faded, though the uneasy sensation in Jessica’s inner ear continued.

“Come with me, gentlemen,” Jessica said, and began walking for the headquarters building. Jessica opened her cellphone, punched in her father’s number in New York, and was delighted to hear a ringing signal. Her mother answered: Jessica told her that there had been a severe earthquake, that she and Pat were fine, but that she was very busy and couldn’t talk.

“I know,” her mother said. “It’s been on TV.”

“What do they say, Ma?”

“They don’t seem to know much of anything.”

“Do they know what cities have been hit?”

“We felt it here.”

Jessica was horrified. “You felt it in Queens?”

“Your grandfather’s Toby jug—the one he got in England during the war—it fell off the shelf and broke.”

“In Queens…” Jessica’s mind whirled as she tried to understand the scope of it all.

“The TV says they can’t raise anyone in St. Louis or Memphis. None of their, what d’you call ’em, affiliates. Chicago got shook up, and Kansas City. And this place that’s named after the syrup, you know…”

Jessica looked at the phone in disbelief. “Syrup, Ma?”

“Kayro! That’s it.”

“Cairo.”

“They said they got a radio message from someone in Kayro, wherever that is, and the town got knocked down and flooded.”

Well, it would be. Cairo was at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio and practically surrounded by water. Protected by flood walls, but an earthquake would breach those easily enough. Jessica paused in front of the headquarters’ glassed-in front. Most of the glass was broken or shattered. Jessica’s mother began complaining about the incompetence of the Korean family that had just bought the grocery on the corner.

“I gotta go, Ma,” she said. “I got work to do.”

“Call when you can.” Jessica’s mother sounded resigned. “You know how we worry.”

“Love you. Bye.”

She closed the cellphone, clipped it again to her belt. Her staff were looking at her.

“The earthquake was big enough to break crockery in New York City,” she said. “St. Louis and Memphis are out of communication, and that leads me to suspect that it was the New Madrid fault that slipped.” Jessica looked up into their eyes, and wondered why every person she’d ever served with was so much taller than she. “This means, gentlemen,” she said, “we’re going to be coping with a three-hundred-year event. Maybe even a thousand-year event. Which means that we are involved in a calamity akin to that of a major war, with bloodshed, property destruction, and damage to communications all on a similar scale.”

Colonel Davidovich, her second-in-command, blew out his cheeks in surprise at this notion. Jessica spoke on.

“We’re going to have to assume significant damage to Corps installations throughout the MVD. As soon as we get into communication with the outside, I want to check the dams first—I want a complete list, however many hundred there are.” Walls of water pouring down river valleys from broken dams was the vision that frightened Jessica most.

“We’re in Vicksburg,” she went on, “which is built on a bluff—reasonably solid ground, even if there’s no bedrock. But most of the Mississippi Valley is built on goo. We’re going to have to assume that the damage we’ve seen here is probably on a lesser scale than has been inflicted elsewhere.” Her staff looked at the building behind them, with its shattered windows and ominous-looking cracks, and for the first time looked intimidated.

“What I need now is an evaluation of the buildings here—HQ in particular. I want to know if it’s safe to reoccupy the building. And even if the building is safe, we’re still going to have to break some tents out of stores. So who’s qualified to do an assessment?”

Davidovich and a couple others raised hands. She looked at Davidovich, said, “Right, you take charge of the survey party. Report to me when you’ve reached a conclusion about HQ.” Davidovich drew the others off for a quick briefing. Jessica looked at the wreckage of the porch.

“I’m going to go to my office,” she said, “and get some maps and phone numbers.” She felt a presence hovering behind her and turned to see her husband. Pat wore an expectant look.

“Once the battery’s charged,” she said, “I guess you can head on home.” He looked dubious. “Not much for me there,” he said. “And I’d as soon not have to make that drive alone.” He rubbed his face. “Maybe I can make myself useful.”

Jessica thought about it. “Right,” she said. “In the absence of proper communications protocols, I hereby appoint you my message-runner.”

“Jeb Stuart,” Pat reminded, “had a banjo player on staff.”

“He was in another army,” Jessica said, “but I’ll take that suggestion under advisement.” The Situation Room was still filling up. The Vice President’s helicopter would be landing at any time. The National Security Advisor was in the building but had not yet arrived. The Secretary of the Interior was in Alaska, and the Secretary of Defense was on a tour of the Balkans. The Secretary of Labor was on his way from West Virginia. The head of the Forest Service and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were stuck in traffic on the Alexandria Bridge, but hoped to be present within the hour. But Boris Lipinsky, the Ukrainian-born head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had arrived at the same time as the President, and he and the President had a lot to talk about even without the others.

“We have less than three thousand employees in FEMA, sir,” Lipinsky said. “We depend for the most part on volunteers, and on personnel supplied by other agencies.”

“What can you do now?” the President said.

Lipinsky spoke slowly, with a pronounced Ukrainian accent. His blue eyes were vaguely focused on empty space, as if he were reading his words from an invisible TelePrompTer.

“Normally we act only in response to requests from the governors of individual states,” he said. “But when I felt the shock earlier this evening, and received confirmation from the National Earthquake Information Center that a major quake had occurred, I alerted the staffs of the Catastrophic Disaster Response Group and the Emergency Information and Coordination Center.”

“We have to assume,” he continued, “that any emergency services in the affected areas will have been swallowed up by the catastrophe and be able to achieve very little of substance. The citizens can count on no help from the police, from National Guard, from hospital and ambulance services, or from electrical, transportation, or sewer workers unless they are sent in from outside the area.” Any emergency services swallowed up by the catastrophe… The President found the thought stupefying. He was a modern man, and the thought of existence without any of the most basic modern comforts—shelter, police and fire protection, electricity, running water, the telephone, television—it was almost beyond his conception.

Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be that bad.

“Therefore, Mr. President,” Lipinsky went on, “on my own authority, I began the process of alerting all response teams concerned with Urban Search and Rescue, Firefighting, Transportation, Health and Medical, Public Works, Hazardous Materials, and Mass Care. Such elements as Energy, Food, and Public Resource Support can wait until the full scope of the emergency is better determined. I also took it upon myself to alert the Public Health Service.” Lipinsky raised his bushy eyebrows. “I hope this display of initiative meets with your approval, sir?”

“Yes,” said the President, happy to finally have a chance to speak. Lipinsky plodded on. “Most of our response teams will be ready to deploy into the affected areas within six hours. The deployment will be through MARS, so we will need to coordinate with DOD, U.S. Transportation Command as soon as possible. I hope that my staff will have recommendations for deployment within a few hours.”

MARS was shorthand for military units under the authority of the Department of Defense. The President nodded and said, “Very good.”

“We are contacting the regional phone companies. During a disaster of this scope, the phone lines are often jammed with calls from outside the area trying to discover if their friends and relatives are all right. This can prevent genuine emergency calls from going through. So we are asking the phone companies to close down long-distance service from outside the area. People in the disaster area will be able to call out, and they will be able to call each other and emergency services, but those from outside will not be able to call into the area unless they are calling on official business.” The President nodded again.

“My office has been trying to contact General Breedlove, our Defense Coordinating Officer, who is the military gentleman responsible for coordinating FEMA’s teams with those of MARS. But he is on a fishing vacation in Arkansas, which is one of the affected areas, and may be out of communication for some time. Perhaps you, Mr. President, or some other person in a position of authority, will take it upon yourself to appoint a Supported Commander-in-Chief to manage the deployment of our civilian/military Joint Task Forces?”

There was a moment before the President realized that this was his cue to speak. Lipinsky’s labored rhythms had a certain hypnotic effect, and the President had been lulled into a near-trance.

“I’ll consider that when General Shortland arrives,” the President said. “I want his advice on any military matters.”

Lipinsky nodded. “Very good, sir. I must also ask you to appoint a Federal Coordinating Officer for each affected state. The FCOs will travel to each state and coordinate state, local, and federal disaster response.”

“I presume you have recommendations?”

Lipinsky signaled to one of his aides, who came forward and opened a briefcase. “I have taken the liberty of making up a list of candidates that I consider suitable.”

The President ground his teeth as he took a copy of the list and reached for his reading glasses. Bureaucracy, he thought. You couldn’t do anything without the bureaucracy. Everything had to be crammed into organization charts, boxes, lists, accounts, departments, labeled with acronyms, staffed by bureaucrats who used other acronyms as their titles.

A major disaster would take all those neat organizational charts and tear them into shreds. But he had to deal with them anyway.

What was the choice? Particularly now? The President could stand on his desk and scream, “Everyone help those people!”, and people would probably try to do their best, but unless the efforts were organized and directed by all those people with the acronyms, little good would result. And so the President resigned himself to his duty. He consulted with Lipinsky, appointed his FCOs, and once General Shortland appeared, the President appointed a Supported CINC to handle MARS deployments via the AMC and USTRANSCOM. Then SAAMs could be tasked to deliver US&R teams and other JTOs to affected areas. USACE personnel trained in Basic and Light US&R were placed on alert. Attempts were made to contact SCOs in their individual states. DOMS established a CAT in the Army Operations Center. USTRANSCOM SAAMs were tasked to deliver FCOs into the field.

And all along, information kept arriving as to the scope of the crisis. Memphis and St. Louis had been, apparently, flattened. Parts of Chicago were on fire. Little Rock was hard hit. Bridges, roadways, airports, and railroads were out. Even large military units seemed to have dropped off the map. Millions might well be homeless.

And almost all the military air missions had to be rescheduled. All airfields in the quake areas had been destroyed, and fixed-wing aircraft couldn’t land. SAAMs—Special Airlift Assignment Missions, for those who lived outside the world of acronyms—had to be landed at the nearest intact airports, and the rescue teams, and their equipment, reassigned to helicopters.

Selected Reserve units were mobilized—engineers to rebuild runways and other vital transport, signal units, logistics commands, supply, transport, plus ground units to provide them with security. National Guard had already been called up by the governors of the quake-ravaged states. At the insistence of the National Security Advisor, the entire U.S. military was put on alert. Terrorists or other enemies, he warned, might try to take advantage of the situation.

In the end, the President was thankful for the acronyms. They kept him from thinking about the people, the people trapped in rubble or cringing from the flames or watching the flood waters rise slowly above their children’s knees…

“We have the word from the Earthquake Information Center, sir,” Lipinsky said around midnight. “The quake tops out at eight point nine on the Richter scale.”

The President blinked. “That’s not so bad, is it?” he said. “I gave a speech in Monterey in ’98, I think it was, and there was a five point five. Just a big bang and it was over. And eight point nine, that’s, what, not even twice as large.”

Lipinsky’s bland blue eyes didn’t so much as twitch. “The Richter Scale isn’t numerical, sir,” he said. “It’s logarithmic. A three on the Richter scale isn’t half again powerful as two, it’s ten times as powerful. And a four isn’t twice as powerful as two, it’s a hundred times the size of a two. So the 8.9 in Missouri is therefore—” the blue eyes turned inward for just a half-second “—one thousand four hundred times the strength of the quake you experienced in Monterey.”

Numerals swarmed through the President’s mind. One thousand four hundred times… Lipinsky went on. “In fact, Mr. President, the Information Center told me that the earth probably can’t hold enough energy to deliver a quake larger than eight point nine.” He looked solemn. “This is the worst the geosphere can do to us, Mr. President. There’s only one earthquake in human history that compares with it, and that was in China four thousand years ago.”

The worst natural disaster since the Bronze Age, the President thought. And on my watch.

“I need to get out there,” he said. “I need to get into the field myself.” And, as his press secretary would no doubt remind him, he would need to be seen in the field. The Secret Service would go nuts. The presidential bodyguard wouldn’t want the President anywhere near a catastrophe on this scale. Assassins were the least of their worries, not when an aftershock could drop the Gateway Arch on him.

“Sir.” One of his aides, holding a phone. “The chairman of the Federal Reserve would like a meeting with you tomorrow, as early as possible.”

The President stared, a new realization rolling through his mind.

He had completely forgot that all this was going to have to be paid for.

Jason could feel the speed of the boat increase, hear the roaring ahead. He had been drowsing in the front seat, leaning forward on the boat’s useless wheel, but the grinding of the boat over some debris had woken him, and once awake he sensed a change. The wind was blowing much more steadily, a cool fresh breeze with the scent of spray in it. The black river was moving fast, raising a chop that slapped water against the sides of the boat. In the fitful starlight Jason could see debris crowding the water, boxes and bottles and lumber, limbs and whole trees. In the dark Jason couldn’t tell where the bank was, but he sensed it was close.

It was as if the river had spread itself out into a lake. And now someone had pulled a cork on the bottom of the lake, and it was all draining out at once.

The roaring sound increased. Water sloshed around his ankles as Jason stood on the pitching boat, holding on the wheel for support as he peered downriver.

A cold fist clamped on Jason’s throat.

Ahead, even through the darkness, he could see the white water, the white-crested chop leaping higher than his head.

In the hot Tennessee night, Nick could see the lights of Memphis glowing on low cloud ahead, an angry red. At least Nick hoped they were lights and not fire.

He hoped, but hope was fading. He’d already seen too much.

As he and Viondi trudged toward Memphis, they began to pass into areas with a larger population, but they passed nothing but ruin. Every house was flattened. Sometimes the homeowners stood numbly in front of their shattered dwellings, or made vague attempts to fetch belongings from the fallen structures. Some of them waved as Nick and Viondi passed. Some were injured, but most of the injuries seemed light.

The badly injured ones, Nick figured, never made it out of their houses. Once Nick and Viondi heard someone calling from a shattered storefront, some kind of clothing store. They dug into the ruin, throwing bricks and ruined clothes behind them into the street, and found an elderly Asian man with a beam fallen across his legs.

There was no way to move that beam. All they could do was promise that they’d contact the police or somebody to help him.

At least the storefront wasn’t on fire, Nick thought. Many of the buildings were in flames. Nick didn’t want to think about people who might have lain in those ruins waiting for the fire to reach them, calling for help that never came. By the time Nick and Viondi passed by, the buildings were already blazing. Anyone inside was already long dead.

The road was often blocked by fallen trees or by crevasses, and every vehicle on it had been abandoned. Furious rain-storms pelted down on them, and they plodded on wearing windbreakers dug out of their luggage. Lightning boomed overhead even when it wasn’t raining. When night came on, there were no traffic lights, no street lights, no lights at all but the stars and the flare of burning structures. Nick saw no police, no fire engines, no ambulances. Everyone out here was on his own.

And then, just ahead, Nick saw the lights of a police cruiser, its flashers illuminating the rubble that was once a brick Mobil station. The Mobil sign, dark, was still intact on its metal pole, and pulsed faintly, blue and red, in the flashing police lights. The Mobil station was a pile of rubble. Standing by the open door of the car was a state trooper talking into a microphone.

“Hey,” Viondi said, and took a closer grip on his soggy cardboard box. He squinted ahead at the state trooper. “And the man’s a brother, too. Looks like we finally got lucky. I’d sure as hell hate to walk up to a cracker cop on a night like this.”

The dead boy kept staring at him with a face that looked like Victor’s. And the old man—he didn’t want to think about the old man.

Eukie James was trapped. He’d figured that out. He was trapped and he couldn’t help Victor or Emily or Showanda or anybody.

“Damn it?” he said into the mike. “What was that about Latimer Street?” The whole damn city was on fire. That was clear enough. All a man had to do was look at that glow on the clouds.

He thought about Victor and tears came burning to his eyes.

“Where was that?” Eukie demanded of the mike. “Where was that damn looting?” And the dead boy kept staring at him with his son’s eyes. Reminding him that there wasn’t anything he could do.

It was usually quiet on these back roads. The worst thing he’d ever seen since he’d been patrolling here were some car accidents where nobody was badly hurt, even if a lot of metal got bent. His presence helped to keep the speed down, and people waved at him in a friendly way when he drove past. And now this. Nuclear war or something, Eukie figured, somebody finally pushed the button. Some asshole shot a rocket at Memphis, and the whole place had gone up in fire.

And there was nothing Eukie could do to help his family, who were probably right smack in the middle of that—what was it called?—firestorm.

He couldn’t get to them. A whole forest of trees had fallen across the road both in front of him and behind, and he couldn’t move the patrol car off this little piece of ground. He’d barely avoided a power pole that tried to fall right on the car—there was a big scar on the trunk where it had bounded off. He’d never before thought a public utility would try to kill him.

All that seemed to exist on his little strip of state road was the collapsed Mobil station with its little population of dead people. Eukie had heard the screams from the wreckage as soon as he pulled over to the side of the road after the nuclear strike, or whatever it was. He’d dug through the fallen brick Mobil station, gashing his hands on broken glass, till he’d found the kid, the little black boy with the staring eyes, no more than six years old. But even after he’d dragged the boy out of the rubble and wiped the brick dust from his face and tried to revive him with mouth-to-mouth—even after he’d pounded on the kid’s chest and breathed for him and shouted at the kid to wake up—even after all that, the screams went on, and so Eukie finally worked out that there was someone else trapped in the building. And then, digging farther into the wreckage, he found the old man, an old white-haired black man in overalls. Maybe he was the kid’s grandpa. All the man could do was stare up with his yellow eyes and scream. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t answer Eukie’s questions, all he could do was take another breath and yell. So Eukie grabbed him under the arms and put his back into hauling him out of the wreckage. The old man gave one last full-blooded shriek and then fell limp.

And as soon as Eukie got him clear, he knew why.

The old man had left his legs in the wrecked station. Sliced off by falling glass or something. Eukie fell to the ground in shock when he saw the stumps spurting blood. The man just rolled his head to the left and died. Eukie’s hauling him out had completed the partial severing of his legs. Had sliced the arteries and killed him.

Eukie jumped up and felt himself all over to make sure he didn’t have blood on him. If he found a wet spot, he tried to brush it off.

It was then that he noticed how much the dead boy looked like his own son Victor. Fear tingled cold along his nerves. He ran back to the car, got on the radio. But nobody would listen to his ten-fifty-five, his call for an ambulance. All the other officers seemed to have plenty of ten-fifty-fives of their own. The air rang with ten-threes, commands to clear the air and let someone talk. But people kept jabbering away anyhow.

Maybe they weren’t hearing each other properly, because Eukie’s reception was very spotty. Sometimes that happened, the flat wet ground tended to soak up radio signals, but now there was a lot of static, too, as if there was some kind of serious electrical disturbance. There were a lot of ten-ones, people signaling they were having trouble receiving the radio calls.

Eukie sagged into the car and listened to all the calls. Darkness gathered around him. Every so often the ground would shake, as if another bomb was going off somewhere.

Ten-forty-three, rescue call. Ten-thirty-three, fire. Ten-eighty-three, officer in trouble. Ten-fifty-eight, dead on arrival. Ten-seventy, chemical spill. Ten-nine, repeat. Ten-three, clear this channel. Ten-seventy-two, street blocked. Ten-thirty-three-four, hospital on fire. Ten-fifty-three-one, fire alarm. Ten-nine, repeat. Ten-forty-six, send a wrecker. Ten-nine, repeat transmission. Ten-three, clear this channel. Ten-nine, repeat. And calls for which there were no ten-codes: Power lines down. People trapped in building. Flooding on the riverfront.

He looked at the dead boy, and he saw Victor’s eyes.

Ten-eighty-one, civil disturbance.

Ten-sixty-nine, sniper.

Ten-eighty-three, officer in trouble.

Eukie grabbed the mike, thumbed the button. “Where?” he said.

“Looters.” A breathless voice. “Latimer Street.”

Damn. Eukie lived on Latimer street.

“You are authorized—”

“Ten-three! Stop transmitting, for Christ’s sake!”

“—to shoot looters on sight. Repeat.”

“Ten-one, dispatch. I am not receiving—”

“What?” Eukie demanded. “Where on Latimer Street?”

“Will you ten-three, damn it!”

“Shoot on sight. Repeat.”

“Ten-one, dispatch. I am not—”

“God damn it!” Eukie took off his hat and threw it down the road. People were shooting on his own damn street and there was nothing he could do about it. He wanted to grab the shotgun out of the car and run south to Latimer Street to defend his family, but it was twenty miles away, and he knew he’d never make it through the kind of chaos he could hear on the radio. He stamped back and forth past the door of his car, tethered at the limit of the mike cord. He tried not to look at the dead boy with his son’s face.

In disgust he threw down the mike and stalked down the broken road to find his hat.

“Where the hell—?” he asked the world. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” He jammed his hat back on his head and gazed defiantly into the darkness. And then twigs and brush crackled as something moved ahead on the road. Adrenaline sang in Eukie’s veins. “Who’s that?” he demanded.

There was no answer, but the sounds got closer.

Eukie backed for a few steps, then turned and sprinted for his car. He was breathing hard by the time he dived head-first into the passenger compartment, grabbed the Remington shotgun, and racked in a round. The ten-codes spat out of the radio. Officer in trouble. Fire. Looters.

Eukie turned on the driver’s door spotlight and panned it across the darkness. A white-faced cow gazed back at him.

A cow.

Eukie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus God Almighty.” The cow ambled past, oblivious to whatever had destroyed the city to the south. That cow, Eukie thought, was having herself an adventure. She had probably never been out of her pasture before.

“Jesus,” he said again. He leaned the shotgun against the side of the vehicle. The radio continued to rattle out its ten-codes.

Ten-thirty-three-four, hospital on fire.

Ten-fifty-three-one, fire alarm.

Ten-nine, repeat.

Ten-forty-six, send a wrecker.

Looters.

You are authorized to shoot…

Victor’s dead eyes gazed up at him from the broken pavement.

“What about Latimer Street?” he said into the mike. “What about that ten-eighty-three?”

“Ten-three! Ten-three!”

“Damn it,” Eukie said, “what about Latimer Street?”

“Officer needs assistance…”

“Ten-three! Clear the air, whoever you are!”

“Listen, motherfucker,” Eukie said. He could feel tears springing to his eyes. “What about Latimer Street! What’s going down out there?” All he could see was Victor’s dead face.

“Asshole!” the dispatcher yelled. “Ten-three when I tell you to ten-three!”

“What about my son?” Eukie demanded.

It was then that the looters came out of the darkness. “Say, brother,” one of them said. Fear and anger blazed through Eukie’s veins. He spun and through his mask of tears saw the looter looming right out of the darkness, a huge man, big hands clasped around a cardboard box full of stuff he’d stolen, complete with a huge silver pot he’d probably killed somebody for. There was blood all on his face and clothes, probably from beating someone to death over that silver pot, and the looter had some kind of weird stripes on his forehead that strobed in the emergency lights of the car. The looter looked like the Frankenstein Monster.

And there was another looter right behind him, a tall man whose features were obscured by the darkness. And probably there were more looters behind, circling the car, trying to sneak up on Eukie while the first two distracted him.

All Eukie could think of was that Victor and Showanda and Emily were depending on him.

“Don’t you move, nigger!” Eukie yelled, and reached for the shotgun. The looter’s eyes widened in surprise. And when Eukie fired, it was those eyes he used for an aiming point.

Nick’s heart dropped into his shoes at the sound of the shotgun, and he stared at the scene in shock. The first round was birdshot, lightweight pellets, but it hit Viondi in the face. Viondi staggered back, dropping the cardboard box. The silver samovar clanged on the pavement. Viondi raised his hands to his eyes.

“Hey,” Nick said, too surprised even to move, but the cop was shouting, “God damn it, God damn it!” and he jacked another round in the shotgun.

The second round was double-ought buckshot, twelve steel pellets each the size of a 9mm pistol round, and it struck Viondi full in the chest. He threw his arms wide and fell back into Nick. Nick dropped his suitcase and tried to catch Viondi, but Viondi’s big body was all great ungainly weight, and Nick found himself falling with Viondi on top of him. He landed hard, feeling the impact slam up his spine, and while he was falling he heard the awful click-clack of another round being fed into the chamber.

“Hey,” he said again, but the cop kept shouting.

“Stay away from my family, motherfucker!” And then another round went off, and Nick felt a breath of air on his face as the pellets whirred past his face.

Click-clack. Nick felt concrete bite his hands as he scrambled out from beneath Viondi’s heavy body. The cop was standing right over him, and the barrel looked the size of a cannon. Nick stared for a long, cold eternity at his own death, an invisible fist closing off the air in his throat, and he saw the cop’s brown finger twitch on the trigger.

Snap. That was all. No explosion. The shotgun had jammed.

“Shit!” the cop screamed, and he banged the butt of the shotgun on the ground. Nick took off. He didn’t know how he got to his feet, how he managed to start running, suddenly he just was, and he was running fast. And when the gun went off again, he just ran faster. He could hear the cop’s screams behind him as he fled into the night.

After a while, he realized he’d run off the road into a field, and that in the dark he couldn’t find his way back.

And then, when he ran into the water, he couldn’t find his way out of it.

Before nightfall Dr. Calhoun drove up to the Church of the End Times in his bus. “Heard your message on the radio,” he told Frankland. “The Rails River bridge is out, and I can’t get all my kids home. And they won’t have homes anyway, because every home out here is wrecked, and so is my church, and so is my trailer.”

“Your people are welcome,” Frankland said.

The bus was full, adults as well as children. Calhoun had been trying to drop off the kids, but instead he’d ended up rescuing their families from wrecked homes.

“I’ve put Sheryl in charge down at the church,” Frankland said. “She’ll find room for your kids to sleep.”

“Thank you, Brother Frankland.”

Calhoun gave the news to his people on the bus. People began pouring out. Frankland recognized some of his own parishioners, adults and children both, and some of Reverend Garb’s black kids, still in their white shirts and slacks. Frankland turned to Calhoun.

“Can you ask some of the men if they’re willing to join some teams I want to send out to find the injured and bring them in? And also to scavenge for food and such? We should get back to the Piggly Wiggly just to get the food before it spoils.”

Calhoun nodded his bald head. “That’s good thinking, Reverend.”

“I knew this would happen. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.” Frankland smiled. “In just seven years, Christ’s kingdom will be established here on earth. And we can help, if we can get things organized fast enough.”

“Well,” Dr. Calhoun said, “as someone who just gave up being a pre-Tribulationist Rapture wimp, let me just say that I’m pleased to offer any assistance that you or the Lord may require.” Frankland smiled down at the shorter man. His heart glowed at the sound of this endorsement.

“Well,” he said, “I’m sure I will be thankful for your assistance.” Larry Hallock gazed out at the flooded remains of the Poinsett Landing Nuclear Station, the broken double hyperboloids of the cooling tower that glowed softly in the night. The soft darkness and bright starlight gave the power station a majestic, almost ancient air, like the ruins of the Coliseum crouching beneath the Roman moon.

Water lapped at Larry’s feet, and Larry wondered if it was still rising. It had kept rising after the earthquake, and finally Larry and everyone else realized that the levees had gone—some distance away, apparently, because the flood, however inexorable, came slowly. It was clear that the plant personnel would have to evacuate.

There was but one place to go. The buildings were unsafe, the roads blocked by fallen timber. The only high ground was the old Indian mound that the archaeologists had insisted remain on the plant site.

It was there that the plant survivors fled. Those who could brought their vehicles, and the old mound now resembled more of a gypsy encampment than a gathering of highly trained engineers and technicians. None of the paramedics in the infirmary had survived the destruction of the administration building. The senior administrators had either been absent during the catastrophe, or died in it. Larry, if anyone, was in charge. He had done his best for the injured, sheltered them from the elements by putting them in a few pickup trucks that had camper shells. He had found some people with Red Cross or Boy Scout training to put in charge of his pathetic infirmary. He had counted heads, and had made a survey of the survivors’ food (none) and water (ditto). He had seen to the digging of a pair of slit trenches to use as latrines.

And he had tried to make contact with the outside world. But nothing worked. Even cellphones were dead. He would have sworn that somebody among all these people would have had a citizens’ band radio, but no one did.

There were a few radio stations that car and truck radios could pick up. Aside from one crazy preacher in Arkansas ranting—barely audible at this distance—about the end of the world, everyone on radio was discussing the earthquake, retelling over and over the few bits of news they seemed to think were certain. Memphis and St. Louis were hard hit, apparently—in flames, the radios said. Roads were out. Electricity was out. Communications were out. Floods, broken levees, fire. Even the Mexican station they picked up was discussing the quake in Spanish.

Larry and his cohorts were stuck on the mound till somebody came to get them. And surely, no matter how comprehensive the disaster seemed, it would be somebody’s job—either at the power company or at the NRC or at one of the contractors—to remember that there was a nuclear power station at Poinsett Landing.

He had done all that he could do. He had ridden that mare in as many circles as she was going to go. There was nothing to do now but worry.

He was capable of worrying on the same level of thoroughness with which he did everything else. He had no reason to think that his wife Helen was anything other than alive and well. The quake had been bad, but their frame house in Vicksburg was sturdy, and Vicksburg was safe from flood on its bluff. There was no reason to think that Helen would not have escaped the quake: she would have known to stand in a doorway, or roll under a table.

The problem was that his imagination was too strong to find this logic in any way reassuring. Extrapolating from the way things had flown around the control room, he was fairly certain that his house would have been full of deadly missiles. He pictured Helen on the phone in the dining room, the sideboard flying at her, all deadly broken glass, crystal, and china. Or the heavy bookshelf in the living room toppling on her as she ran for the front door.

Or the water heater or the furnace—which so far as he knew were not secured to the floor, but just rested there—leaping into the hallway from their closet, spilling hot water and fire… The worry gnawed at him. He needed something to do, so he made the rounds again, making sure his people were as comfortable as the night, the flood, and the insects would permit. The burned man that Larry had met was there, and in agonizing pain. Two worried coworkers were sitting on his arms to keep him from tearing the flesh from his scalp. All they had to give him was Tylenol. Larry couldn’t think of any way to help the man.

Larry hadn’t mentioned his own shoulder injury to anyone—it hadn’t seemed important enough—but he found that his injured shoulder hurt less if he cradled the right arm in his left, so that’s what he did. It didn’t occur to him to ask someone to make him a sling.

He went to the edge of the mound and gazed out at the plant, giant concrete and steel islands in the flood. It was the darkest night he could remember. There were no lights anywhere, none. Normally the station was ablaze at night, flood-lights illuminating the parking lots, air warning flashers on the cooling tower, the other buildings outlined by spotlights and illuminated offices. There were no lights on the river, no lights from nearby towns. The whole country had gone dark, and that meant the whole power grid was down. Not just Poinsett Landing, but everywhere for hundreds of miles around. As a consolation, perhaps, there were the stars. Larry had never seen so many—just looking up took his breath away. He could see the broad swath of the Milky Way, the red glow of Arcturus, the bright yellow gleam of some planet or other, probably Jupiter. The stars of the Corona blazed with an intensity he had never seen, and Cygnus and Aquila wheeled about the pole.

It was to a sky such as this, he thought, which ancient Britons had in homage raised the monument of Stonehenge.

His shoulder ached. The thought of Helen kept rising to his mind.

He needed something more to do.

THIRTEEN

The Mississippi is lazy between Cairo and Memphis, and in no hurry to reach its destination. It moves in long, swooping, snakelike curves, heading generally south, but also turning east, west, and sometimes north. At the New Madrid bend it manages to move in all four directions, one after the other. On occasion the river shortens its path. Sometimes the Mississippi, instead of taking a gentle curve around a bend or point, will decide to cut right through the point at its base, shortening its length and leaving, in its old course, one of the many picturesque oxbow lakes that ornament the Mississippi valley. On occasion the river has left a piece of Tennessee attached to Arkansas, or annexed a piece of Arkansas to the state of Mississippi.

Mark Twain, who noted that in his time the Mississippi shortened itself on average by a mile and a third per year, remarked that at this rate, in seven hundred years the Lower Mississippi would be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans would share their streets. Sometimes these shortcuts do not occur naturally, but are imposed on the river. Before the Civil War, some planters, resentful that their inland plantations were less valuable than those blessed with access to the river, brought their field hands out to the nearest point in the dead of night, armed with pick and shovel, to cut the river a new channel, giving themselves river access and stranding their neighbors on a newly formed oxbow lake. Sometimes these attempts succeeded. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes, whatever the outcome, the ambitious planter was shot dead by a neighbor firing in defense of his property values.

During the Civil War, General U.S. Grant tried to cut the river a new path across DeSoto Point in hopes that this would strand the rebel fortress of Vicksburg inland, making it useless to the Confederacy. He failed, but a few years later a flood rushed across his old works on DeSoto Point and carved the river a new path through Centennial Cutoff, ending Vicksburg’s access to the river until the Corps of Engineers restored it a quarter-century later.

Later, in the twentieth century, the Corps eliminated the four Greenville Bends—Rowdy, Miller, Spanish Moss, and Bachelor—shortening the Mississippi’s length by thirty miles and creating Lake Ferguson, named after the Army general who masterminded the project.

But these cutoffs were created artificially, attended by all the massive Corps engineering necessary to achieve a safe result and a deep, navigable channel.

When the river carves its own path, the result is less gentle. The path is cut across country, sometimes over a farmer’s fields, sometimes through stands of heavy timber. The channel is narrow at first, full of shoal water, and the Mississippi rages through it, the weight of the entire river turning it to foam. There are rapids and falls, and the channel is littered with trees, rocks, snags, and stumps. The bank on either side is continually eroded and falls in half-acre chunks into the water. Large steamboats were sometimes sucked out of control into these new channels, flung through the new-made chutes, and either dashed to pieces on obstacles or spat out spinning into the old river.

South of Cabells Mound, the flooding Mississippi had cut through the bend called Uncle Chowder’s, and the flood waters were about to drain through it as if someone had pulled a cork at the bottom of the river. The boat dropped down a precipice and hit a mass of glistening black water stern-first. A fan of spray rose high and fell into the boat. The impact knocked the breath out of Jason as he clung to the wheel. He never realized that water could be so hard.

The sound of the rapid was overwhelming, loud as the earthquake. Spray filled the air. Jason could feel the boat’s vibration up his spine, through his bones. A piece of wreckage—a whole tree, Jason realized—ground against the side of the boat, knocking it into a sideways lurch that brought another gush of spray into the boat. As the big tree surged past, tree limbs caught the bow and spun the boat around. Branches clawed at Jason’s face.

Jason hung onto the wheel and wished that the boat had seat belts.

The torrent whirled around him as the boat spun helplessly in the channel. Something slammed into the boat, sent it airborne for a few seconds, then dropped it into a hole. Jason gave a yell as the steering wheel punched his sternum. He had barely caught his breath before the boat took another bounce—this time off the bole of a cottonwood that was somehow still standing upright in the middle of the white water.

He wondered how long the boat could take this kind of pounding before it was beaten into a shapeless hunk of metal.

Retired and Gone Fishin’ careened down a chute of white water. The spray was so dense that Jason couldn’t tell if he was underwater or not—the boat might have capsized for all he could tell. At the bottom of the chute the boat hit something hard, and the impact threw Jason back away from the wheel, against the seat behind. The boat was spinning like a yo-yo at the end of its string. Jason clawed blindly for the metal wheel as the world rumbled and shuddered around him. He pulled himself forward onto the wheel again, felt the boat lurch madly to port. His inner ear spun. He opened his eyes and saw that the boat was tipped on its right side, that the starboard gunwale was underwater, that another ounce of weight added to rightward side of the balance could capsize her… Terror clutched at Jason’s heart. He flung himself to the left, threw his arms over the gunwale, tried to add as much weight as possible to the forces dropping the boat back onto an even keel.

The boat skated on its side for several long, terrifying seconds, then slowly began to tip to port. Jason gasped: he realized he’d been holding his breath. He slid back into the seat as the boat tipped, as its bottom slammed on water.

The terror ride continued: Jason clung on as the bass boat raced along between steep banks, smashed into rocks, trees, and less identifiable debris. Something huge and black loomed up—Jason realized it was a stranded river barge—and the boat slammed into it, grating along its rust-streaked side. Jason ducked as steel cable whipped over his head. And then there was one last, horrible grinding noise—the boat tipped on its port side, sending Jason clawing to starboard as a frantic counterweight—and then the boat was over the obstacle and was being pushed by the rushing river into wide, calm water. Jason gasped for breath as the roaring faded behind him. His heart pounded in his chest. He glanced around, saw nothing but starlight glinting off debris-filled water. There was six or eight inches of water in the boat, and no way to bail.

Though the rapids were falling behind, the boat was still moving fast. The river still had purpose, was still hurrying to get somewhere.

Jason was too tired to wonder what the river had on its mind. He nodded over the wheel and let exhaustion claim him.

Until a few hours later, when he woke to the sound of another rapid ahead.

The sound of the human voice, raised in praise of God, floated toward Frankland through the broken windows of the church. Sheryl had everyone there singing, children and adults both, to keep them occupied and out of trouble. What they lacked in harmony they made up in enthusiasm. But Frankland had visitors. Sheriff Gorton was a lean, slit-eyed man of sixty who had been the town’s mortician until his business had failed. There weren’t enough people left in the county to keep the burying business profitable. He’d run for sheriff and got elected because his neighbors felt sorry for the way he’d lost his business after working hard all his life.

Gorton was also, Frankland knew, one of Dr. Calhoun’s parishioners.

“I heard your message on the radio for people to come here if they was in trouble,” Gorton said. “I wanted to see for myself what kind of facilities you had here.”

Frankland explained that his church, house, and radio station had all been specially reinforced against earthquake, and that he had food supplies enough to last for weeks, maybe months. He had a big tent left over from his days as a traveling preacher, and a number of large surplus Army tents. All these would be set up if the church began to overflow. “This is the safest place you’re going to find in Rails Bluff,” he said.

Gorton nodded. “Can I send people here from town? We’ve got so many homeless…”

“I will provide for them,” Frankland said. “Dr. Calhoun, Reverend Garb, and I have been conferring on how best to care for the people, and we are organizing everything now.”

He hadn’t actually talked to Garb yet, but he knew that Garb was perfectly reliable on the subject of the Tribulation and how to handle it.

Gorton looked anxious. “You don’t have any doctors or nurses, do you? We don’t have anyone who can take care of the injured except for old Maggie Swensen, who used to be a nurse before she retired. But she’s in her seventies, and she’s completely overwhelmed. We’re putting the injured in the old Bijoux, but it’s a real nightmare in there.”

Frankland gave him a serious look. The county had lacked a doctor ever since old Sam Haraldsen had died—there wasn’t enough money in Rails Bluff to attract a doctor. “No,” Frankland said, “I regret to say that we have no one with any formal medical training. The boys and girls in the Christian Gun Club learned first aid, though, and I will send some of them to you. Maggie can give them some work, and teach them how to do some things, and they can help take a load off her that way.” Gorton seemed relieved. “I thought I’d seen it all, you know,” he said. “Korea, working around bodies. But this…” He leaned close to Frankland, lowered his voice. “Do you really think this is the end?” Frankland nodded. “Earthquake, brimstone, fire from heaven,” he said. “It’s all in the Book.” Gorton was solemn. “That’s what I thought, first thing. When the ground started to shake. Dr. Calhoun told us the signs.”

“It’s clear enough to those who can see,” Frankland said. “And I’ll tell you frankly—the odds of a person surviving the next seven years of Tribulation is not good. The Antichrist will rise, and the world will burn with fire. There is not any part of the planet that will not be consumed with war. The comet Wormwood alone will poison a third of the world’s water. But what happens to their bodies doesn’t matter, we need to prepare the souls of everyone here, so that they can survive the Judgment of God. That’s the important thing now, whether they survive in the flesh or not.”

Gorton tilted his hat back, wiped his forehead. “I’ve been worrying about that, pastor. You know, I think there are people down at the Bijoux who are dying. I would hate for them to die without the Word. And Pete Swenson’s been killed, you know—buried in his church.”

The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, the graceful nineteenth-century brick building that had been greatly envied by those parsons in the vicinity who had not been blessed by such well-established congregations, had not been built with earthquake in mind. Frankland had taken one look at it, when he’d first moved to the district, and known it wouldn’t survive the End Times.

He closed his eyes, said a little blessing for Pete Swenson.

Frankland opened his eyes. “His entire flock will be needing consolation and guidance. I will go there directly. With you, if that’s all right.”

“That’s good, Brother Frankland, that’s good.”

“I will round up some of the Gun Club members,” Frankland said. “And they’ll follow us down.” Hilkiah brought some of the Gun Club kids in his pickup truck to act as nurses, while Frankland rode with Gorton in his cruiser. On the way he told Gorton his plan to send out people to scavenge food and other supplies from fallen buildings, and bring injured people from outlying areas into the town. Gorton said that it all sounded fine to him.

“Only thing is, my people could be mistaken for looters,” Frankland said. “We want you to be able to identify ’em, so that your deputies won’t make any bad mistakes and people get hurt.”

“I’ll depitize ’em, if you like.”

“That’ll be good. That’ll be good. But maybe I should just put white armbands on ’em, like I did with the Family Values Campaign.”

“That’ll work. I’ll tell my deputies.”

“We’ll send them out tomorrow morning, then.”

Frankland leaned back in the seat and smiled.

Things were going to work out.

The Old Man’s voice sounded faintly in Jessica’s headphones. “Have you been able to contact the St. Louis District or the Memphis District?”

“No, sir,” Jessica said.

“How ’bout Rock Island?”

Jessica took a breath. “Not so far, sir.”

“And your own headquarters has suffered considerable damage, especially in regard to its communications.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause as Jessica’s superior considered his next step. Jessica bit her lip. She had a suspicion that right in the middle of the worst natural disaster the United States had ever faced, she might find herself taken out of the loop.

Communications with other military and Corps of Engineer units had finally been restored through use of Jessica’s lone satellite radio. But no word had come from the Corps of Engineers’ St. Louis and Memphis district, those closest to the New Madrid fault system. It had been anticipated that these districts might fall victim to a major quake, unable to carry out their assigned tasks, and the Kansas City and Vicksburg districts were the selected backups. But Vicksburg itself had been hard hit, and no one had expected the Rock Island Division, north of St. Louis, to fall victim as well.

With all four of USACE’s Mississippi Valley districts either victims or potential victims, the earthquake had seriously compromised the Corps of Engineers’ ability to respond effectively in the crisis.

“General Frazetta,” Jessica’s superior said at last. “I am declaring St. Louis and Memphis to be victim districts.”

“Yes, sir,” Jessica said. “I concur.”

“Should I declare Rock Island a victim as well?”

Well. It was nice of the Old Man to let Jessica express an opinion.

“With respect, sir,” she said, “I think that may be premature.”

“What’s Rock Island’s backup district?”

“Chicago, sir.”

“Chicago’s been hit, too,” the Old Man mused.

Jessica was shocked. Chicago? No one had imagined that Chicago would suffer in a New Madrid shock. How big was this quake? She had told her officers that this might be a three-hundred-year event. A thousand-year event, more like. Or five thousand.

“Very well,” the Old Man said. “I will reserve judgment on Rock Island, but I will tell Chicago they may have to assume Rock Island’s responsibilities.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Now. Vicksburg.”

Jessica’s heart gave an anxious little throb. If the Old Man decided that Vicksburg was a victim district as well, then she might well find herself and her command handed over to their backup in Mobile. The Mississippi Valley was hers, damn it. She wanted to keep it.

“Sir,” she said, “we won’t be able to do anything till dawn, anyway. I think we will be back on line by then. We are doing a good job of recovery here. I see no reason to declare Vicksburg a victim district at this time.”

A voice yammered faintly on the radio channel, then faded. Whoever it was, he sounded panicked.

“You’re certain of that, Jessica?” the Old Man said. “You know that you’ll have to take on the Memphis District’s responsibilities, too.”

“Yes, sir,” Jessica said. “It will take us some hours before we will be able to respond with efficiency, but once we’ve sorted ourselves out, I think we’re admirably placed for running the Joint Division Team.”

“Very well,” the Old Man said. “If you’re that positive.”

“I am, sir,” Jessica said, and hoped she wasn’t deluding herself.

“What can I do for you,” he said, “to make your job easier?” Jessica had been waiting for this. “Communications, sir,” she said. “And Prime Power.” Jessica’s subordinates were almost entirely civilians, and her Prime Power—the actual military units under her command—consisted of only the 249th Engineer Battalion. If she was going to have to rebuild or reinforce most of the flood control structures between Rock Island and St. Louis, along with reconstructing roads, railroads, and airfields, getting power stations, communications, and waste treatment plants back online, the one battalion was clearly inadequate.

“General Shortland has put the entire U.S. military on alert,” the Old Man said. “You can have your pick.”

“Yes, sir!” Jessica said.

Well now. That’s what she considered an adequate response.

By midnight Omar began to feel that he had things in hand. Wilona had called their son David and heard that he and the city of Baton Rouge had been shaken up, but that both David and the city had got through the quake all right. In Spottswood Parish, the courthouse and many of the larger buildings had come through the earthquake well enough, with just windows and fixtures broken, and sometimes doors jammed. But in the semitropical climate many of the buildings in the parish, including Omar’s own, were lightly built, and many of them suffered. Homes and trailers fell off their pier foundations, and clapboards and roof shingles had been shaken off.

It could have been worse, Omar thought thankfully. And according to the radio, it was worse north of there, with whole cities flattened.

In Omar’s jurisdiction, all that might be necessary was some carpentry, a few jacks to get the houses back on their foundations, and most of the parish would be back in business. And tomorrow, Omar thought, he was going to get his own house fixed. The poor neighborhoods in Hardee were going to get repaired as well as the well-off areas in Shelburne City. And sooner, because the poor people were the ones living in the most heavily damaged buildings.

No one had been killed, so far as Omar knew, but there were broken legs and heads, and scores of minor injuries. Dr. Patel, whose office was soon overwhelmed, set up a clinic in the Presbyterian church. Other churches—those built sturdily enough to survive the quake, anyway—offered space for those unable to sleep in their homes.

Electricity and phones were still working in most parts of the parish. Between phones and the radio, Omar was able to get ahold of all his deputies. The local National Guard unit mobilized, and was able to help Omar’s deputies in checking the parts of the parish that were out of communication, looking for damage and seeing if people needed medical attention.

The roads were in bad shape, with dropoffs and crevasses everywhere, but then the roads here were normally in sorry condition, and the parish road crews would work long shifts until they were all driveable again.

Wilona worked the night as an assistant, making sure there was coffee for the deputies and that messages got passed to the right people. And the Crusader Micah Knox had put himself to work, helping to direct traffic, volunteering to ride with the deputies and help bring people to the infirmary. At least the kid had energy. Omar, who was soon yawning and keeping himself fueled with Wilona’s coffee, had to admire that.

And then Knox came into Omar’s office, a puzzled look in his green eyes. “I don’t get it, Omar,” he said.

“Is your doctor here a nigger?”

“Dr. Patel?” Omar looked up at him. “He’s from India.”

Knox’s mouth dropped open. “Goddamn, Omar! I thought those wogs were only in the cities!” He shook his head. “They’re everywhere!”

“Indians are Aryans, I think.” Omar frowned. “Aren’t they?” Knox paced back and forth in front of Omar’s desk. “What the hell is he doing here in Liberated America? Jesus—that man’s putting his hands on white women!”

“Patel’s all right,” Omar said. “And if you can find a white doctor willing to move to Shelburne City, Louisiana, you just tell me, okay? We went without a doctor for two years till Judge Moseley got us Patel.”

“I wanted to bust his damn hands after I saw him touch some of your women,” Knox said. “I wouldn’t want him to touch me, that’s for sure.”

“Well, he’s not going to try to touch you, I guess. Patel’s all right for setting busted legs, and that’s what we’ve got mostly.”

He and Wilona went to a white doctor in Vicksburg for their checkups, a habit they’d got into when the parish was without an MD. But Omar, as a deputy, had brought enough injuries into Patel’s office to have seen that the man seemed to know what he was doing.

“So—” Knox stepped closer, lowered his voice. He kept jiggling in place, though, bouncing on his heels.

“Shall we start calling? Get some paramilitaries here? Some of my boys, some of your Klan people?” Omar thought of a couple dozen Knoxes running around his parish, and slowly shook his head. “I don’t think we need ’em,” he said. “We’re in good shape. We’ve got the Guard out. We haven’t had any reports of looting. Once we get the roads fixed, the power and phone lines repaired, we’re back in business.” He looked at Knox. “I reckon your people would be more useful farther north, where there’s looting and such.”

Knox thought about this for a moment, still bouncing on his heels. “Yeah,” he said. “Looting.” His strange eyes glittered. “I guess you’re right, Omar.” He dug in the pocket of his jeans. “I got a phone card… I’ll just make some calls from that pay phone out in the lobby, if it’s working.”

“Fine,” Omar said. Knox bounced out of the room. Omar gazed after him thoughtfully. Knox, planning who knew what with his buddies, made him uneasy, but whatever it was that Knox was planning, he looked to be doing it elsewhere.

A Micah Knox elsewhere was a Micah Knox that Omar didn’t have to worry about. And Omar figured he had enough worries as it was.

FOURTEEN

The first big May quake—M1, as it was later known—began at 5:19 Central Daylight Time as a sudden ten-meter bilateral dextral strike-slip motion along the whole length of the twenty-five-mile Reelfoot rift, a subterranean fault structure running beneath the Mississippi from Missouri to Tennessee. The Reelfoot rift intersects several other faults or fault segments—the Bootheel lineament, the New Madrid north fault, the New Madrid west seismicity trend, and others. The Bootheel lineament in turn intersects the fifty-mile-long Blytheville arch, an axial fault running more or less beneath the Mississippi. The original Reelfoot slip triggered further slippage and upthrusting along all nearby faults, each fault contributing in its turn to the intensity of the destruction—over 150 miles of built-up tectonic energy cutting loose at nearly the same instant. The shock waves from this massive disturbance traveled across mid-continental North America with admirable efficiency.

Most earthquakes occur near the boundaries of the earth’s tectonic plates, the giant twenty-two-mile-thick pieces of the earth’s crust, which drift slowly and massively on the semi-liquid mass of the planet’s interior. The collisions of the earth’s plates throw up mountain ranges, cause deep fractures in the earth’s crust, and precipitate almost all the earthquakes in the world. California’s famous San Andreas fault runs along the boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate, which are grinding against one another as they move in opposite directions.

The quakes generated at the edges of plate boundaries tend to be limited in scope. The fractured nature of the earth itself tends to disperse the tremblors, or channel them into a small area. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a stupendous 8.3 on the Richter scale, but most of the destruction was confined to a compact part of the Bay Area, and deaths were limited to about 700. The San Fernando quakes of 1994 were likewise restricted to a small area, and caused less than a hundred deaths.

But the Reelfoot rift and other mid-American fault structures are not situated on a plate boundary, like the San Andreas fault. They are square in the middle of a very solid continent, and when something hammers the bedrock of the Midwest, the North American plate rings like a giant bell. There is nothing to stop the quake energy from traveling hundreds of miles from the epicenter. P and S waves leaped from the fracture zones at a speed of around two miles per second, and the terrifying Rayleigh and Love waves, though moving a little more slowly, propagated across the American continent and through the entire structure of the earth, met on the far side of the planet, then returned, circling the globe a half-dozen times before subsiding.

The particular structure of the Mississippi Valley contributed to the catastrophe. A hundred and ninety million years ago, the North American continent almost split in two along the line of the Mississippi Valley. Had this geological action continued, a rift valley would have formed, similar to the Great Rift Valley in Africa. But the continent seemed to have changed its mind. The rift never formed, but the geological action left behind weaknesses in the earth’s crust, including the tangle of faults around New Madrid.

The Mississippi River, magnificent as it is, follows the course of what once was an even more magnificent bay, a branch of the ocean that reached as far north as Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Over hundreds of centuries, the Mississippi gradually filled this bay with sediment, creating the Mississippi Delta that stretches from Cape Girardeau to the Gulf of Mexico. The sediment—soil, mud, clay, gravel, vegetable matter, sand—is in some places thousands of feet thick.

When the Mississippi periodically flooded and covered a part of the Delta with a new layer of soil, the soil was intermingled with water and air. Over the course of many years, the water and air normally percolate to the surface and disperse. But if the Mississippi flooded again before this could take place, laying down another layer of a less permeable sediment—clay, for instance—then the water and air was trapped beneath the surface, and as more and more heavy layers of alluvial soil was deposited on top, this water and air was put under enormous pressure.

With layers of clay or other heavier sediment sitting atop a goo of soft soil mixed with air and water, the geology of the Mississippi Valley resembles nothing so much as a layer of bricks placed carefully on a foundation of Jell-O.

The bricks are perfectly stable, so long as nothing shakes the Jell-O.

But when the complex of fault structures beneath the Mississippi snapped, the carefully balanced structure was disrupted. Pressurized water and air blasted its way to the surface, resulting in the so-called “sand blows,” thousands of geysers bursting through the surface to loft water, sand, coal, ancient chunks of wood, and rocks far into the air. More water found its way to the surface in less violent fashion, as M1’s power liquified the alluvial soil.

It is common for sediment or fill to liquify during an earthquake. Otherwise solid structures, built on alluvium, suddenly find themselves supported by nothing more solid than soup. Sometimes they can tumble downhill like a winter tourist on an inner tube. Much of the property damage suffered during the Bay Area quake of 1989 occurred in the Marina District, a part of San Francisco built on fill. All of the Mississippi Delta—all of it, from Cape Girardeau south—is alluvial soil. Structures everywhere suffered catastrophic failure. Levees, dikes, and flood walls were broken, or weakened. Riverbanks collapsed. Whole forests were laid low. Water geysering into the sky or welling up through the sediment poured off the saturated land to join rivers already filled with spring snow melt. Even areas built on solid ground did not fare well. The Chickasaw Bluffs, standing above the Mississippi Valley in Tennessee and Kentucky, were subject to landslides that dropped trees, roads, and expensive houses into the valley below. Cape Girardeau suffered a failure of its flood wall, and the lower part of town was inundated. The old French town of Ste. Genevieve, south of Girardeau in Missouri, was likewise partially flooded, and lost several of its historical structures to the flood or to the quake. The Mississippi town of Natchez, with its proud, pillared collection of antebellum mansions perched atop the loess bluff, windblown soil piled high in the last Ice Age, lost a small city park to landslide as well as a quintessential Southern mansion house, Rosalie, built in 1820. Natchez also lost its riverboat gambling venue when a landslide spilled right through the rough old port town of Lower Natchez and into the casino boat, sinking it at its moorings.

Buildings of unreinforced masonry are more susceptible to earthquake than any other type, and unfortunately the entire area struck by the quake rejoiced in tens of thousands of brick buildings, most of which were destroyed or damaged. Mobile homes were shaken to bits or pitched off their foundations. Frame buildings fared better than others, though some, in the worst-affected areas, were simply shaken to pieces.

Throughout the area, significant damage was suffered as a result of the failure of foundations. Most basement walls were not reinforced and simply caved in, the house falling atop them. Throughout the region, particularly in areas where the water table was high, houses had been set above the ground on small brick piers. The masonry piers either shattered in the tremblors, or the complex motions of the quake walked the houses off their foundations and dropped them onto the broken earth. Approximately a million people were in their automobiles when the quake struck, most of them heading home from work. In many areas the road systems were destroyed in an instant. Bridges and elevated roadways fell or were mangled; roads were torn across by fissures; right-of-ways were flooded. The roadways were packed with desperate people stranded in their vehicles, far from their homes, away from supplies of food and water.

Rail transport suffered as well. Bridges fell, tracks were torn or wrenched into pretzel shapes, depots were destroyed. The most economical and efficient method of getting food and other supplies to affected areas, by rail, was rendered temporarily unusable.

At airports, runways were destroyed, fuel depots ruined, control towers pitched to the ground, and hangars collapsed on aircraft. Radar installations were wrecked, or lost the ground lines by which they transmitted their data. Entire districts of the country disappeared from air controllers’ screens. Aircraft, stranded aloft when their destinations were turned to rubble, began to call frantically for controllers to find them a place to land.

Following the shattering catastrophe of the quake came the swift catastrophe of fire. Propane tanks spewed their explosive contents through shattered couplings. Unsecured stoves and water heaters marched from their places, spilling scalding water and breaking their gas connections. Underground oil and gas pipelines were broken. Above-ground storage tanks ruptured. The unexpected lightning storm over Swampeast Missouri struck forests and buildings alike. And shattered buildings provided tinder that could ignite a conflagration.

Winds fanned the flames. Shattered communications and inundated emergency communication systems ensured that the fires would go unreported or unnoticed until they had taken hold. Broken water mains meant there was no water available to fight the fires.

Conflagration took hold everywhere in the stricken land, and on every scale. Isolated barns and houses burned, small stores and large, small towns and large towns, and the city centers of St. Louis, East St. Louis, and Memphis. Thousands of people, trapped in rubble or with their retreat cut off by flames, died in terror. Forests and prairie took fire as well, and with the authorities concentrating on quelling fires in cities and towns, there was nothing to stop the flames in the countryside but what Nature provided in the form of rain and flood.

The author Robert A. Heinlein once mocked what he called the wooden fire escapes on Chicago’s apartment buildings, unaware that he was looking not at fire escapes, but at wooden back porches equipped with stairs. But Heinlein may have had the last laugh when M1 shivered a part of the city to bits. Though Chicago, well away from the quake’s epicenter, on the whole survived the quake fairly well, a fluke of geology carried the earthquake’s full power to the northeast district of Rogers Park, and the heavy wooden porches, dry as tinder after years of weathering in the outdoors, turned to flaming deathtraps.

After the shattering catastrophe of the quake and the swift catastrophe of fire came the slow-motion catastrophe of flood. The Mississippi and its tributaries were full with snow melt, and spring rains had saturated the soil. Sand blows and soil liquefaction brought subterranean water to the surface. And when the levees and dams broke, river water had nowhere to go but to spill across country. Flood is a disaster slow enough so that people can normally get out of its way, but in this case broken road and communications systems made it impossible to manage proper evacuations. Flood caught tens of thousands in their homes, and tens of thousands of others were caught in the open, trying to get away from their wrecked homes or their stranded automobiles.

Nor was the flooding confined to the Mississippi alone. The Father of Waters has 250 tributaries, including many that are mighty rivers in their own right: the Missouri, the Arkansas, the Ohio, the Red, the Des Moines, the Illinois. Each of these rivers has its own system of levees, locks, dams, and reservoirs, and each was filled with spring snow melt. The tragedy of the Mississippi, the flooding and destruction and death, was repeated many times throughout the country, from Iowa and Illinois south to Louisiana. And sometimes flood was as sudden as fire. The Carlyle Dam in Illinois failed completely, causing a multimillion-gallon wall of water to roar down the Kaskaskia. Mark Twain Lake spilled through the shattered Clarence Cannon Dam, roared over the town of Louisiana, Missouri, into the Mississippi, where it turned into a wave that obliterated Lock and Dam No. 24. The failure of Dam No. 24 in turn released the millions of gallons it had been holding, and the two united bodies of water spilled south toward St. Louis, already vulnerable due to the shattering of its floodwalls. There were hundreds of little dams throughout the Midwest, many privately owned. Many were simple earthen embankments that held just enough water to support a herd of cattle, or to keep a creek from flooding a field, and others were larger. When the quake came, many of them failed. Though the breaking of these small dams did not cause catastrophic flooding, it nevertheless added to the burden of water carried by the already shattered system.

Perhaps the worst thing, amid all this loss and tragedy, was that for many hours following M1, none of the people in a position to aid the survivors, from the President through General Frazetta and on down the chain of command, were in a position to understand the full scope of the catastrophe, or to mitigate its destructive power in any way.

“We’re fine, General. Shook up, but fine.”

Jessica felt the tension in her neck ease as the words crackled out of her cellphone. The Kentucky Dam, holding back the combined waters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, was intact. If it had gone, pouring both Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley into the Ohio, it would have created a colossal wall of water that would have turned the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys from Evansville to Memphis into one long, blank, lifeless smear of mud.

“I want the dam surveyed for damage,” Jessica said. “And every other dam in the area.”

“Yah. I’ll get right on it.”

“I need to make some other calls right now. But let me give you my number—call me only if you’ve got bad news, understand? If things are fine, I don’t want to hear from you.”

“You betcha. Guess you’re kinda busy down there, yah?”

Jessica grinned. That you betcha, spoken in a classic Red River of the North accent, was far from a proper military response. But the Army Corps of Engineers, though operated by the military, was not entirely a military outfit. Most of the people who worked for Jessica in the Mississippi Valley Division—engineers, inspectors, architects, and lock masters, surveyors, boat captains, equipment operators, and managers—were civilians, and not subject to military discipline. Entire Corps districts saw a person in uniform only rarely.

A clash between military and civilian cultures was a constant possibility. Jessica preferred to think of this not as a disadvantage, but as a stimulating opportunity for cross-cultural discourse. Jessica disconnected and batted moths away from her flashlight. She was squatting on the lawn in front of her headquarters building, looking at maps and lists of phone numbers spread out on the grass. Flashlights and the head-lights of vehicles were the only illumination.

She called the Clarence Cannon dam again, and received no reply. “Fuckingskunksuckingsonofabitch,” she muttered rapid-fire. Too many critical installations were out of communication.

“General Caldwell?” The voice came out of the darkness. Jessica looked up to see a man approaching. He wore civilian clothing and his eyes glittered strangely from behind thick glasses.

“I’m General Frazetta,” she said as she rose to her feet. Caldwell had been the name of her predecessor, a tall, burly man who looked more like a sandhog than an engineer.

“I brought this, General. I knew you’d need it.”

He held out something that glittered in the headlights. Jessica reached out a hand and something metal and heavy was placed in her palm. A heavy double-ended chrome-plated wrench.

“Took me a long time to find it,” the man said. “But I knew you’d need it.” He gave a serious nod, then faded back into the night. Jessica looked down at the wrench in her hand, then at the dark silhouette of the spectacled man as he vanished into the night.

The earthquake had shaken people up. She had met relatively few people since the quake, but a disturbing number of them weren’t behaving rationally. It was as if the disaster was so far outside their experience that they had no way of reacting to it logically; the scale of the thing had unstrung their minds. Something had to be done for these people, she thought. There were probably thousands of them. But she had other things to do first.

She squatted down into the light of the headlights and began to press buttons on her cellular phone. An aftershock woke Charlie some time after midnight. The BMW trembled on its suspension as the earth shivered for a good three minutes.

Earthquake, he thought. It was an earthquake.

How strange. Earthquakes were only in California and Japan.

He could still see downtown Memphis glowing red on the horizon, beneath a spreading gloom of smoke. Charlie blinked and stroked the stubble on his chin. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He felt feverish.

More than the earth was moving, he knew.

Prices were moving.

He needed to get a grip, he thought. Prices were moving. There was money to be made. He needed to get to his desk and make some sales.

Stocks were going to plummet, he thought. Which meant there were going to be all sorts of cheap bargains to be picked up.

America, he further considered, was going to need to rebuild. Which meant that they would need dollars. Which meant that Charlie needed to buy dollars right now, because lots of investors were going to panic when they heard about the quake, and they would try to sell their dollars. So Charlie would buy, because the Federal Reserve was going to have to buy billions of dollars to finance the reconstruction, so the dollar would eventually go up, and he would profit. Which would result in depressed prices in places like London and Tokyo, as American dollars came home, so he’d have to start shorting those markets. And bonds. He needed to talk to his bond traders. Because the Fed would be loaning out its dollars at very low interest rates to finance reconstruction, and that would mean higher bond prices. He considered other side effects. He would buy oil, lots of it. Refinery capacity would be reduced, and the price would be up. And foodstuffs, because a lot of agricultural land had just got trashed, so food prices would be rising.

He needed to move right now, because the whole situation could change by the time the markets closed tomorrow.

He picked up the cellphone again, tried to call Dearborne. Nothing. He called some of his traders. Nothing but a hiss.

Move! he thought, and pounded the car wheel in front of him with his fists. Nothing moved in the still night. Nothing but the drifting cloud of smoke overhead. As dawn approached, the news from the quake zone only grew worse. Huge fires raged out of control, both in cities and national forests. Communication and transportation were shattered. Millions in need, and no way to get aid to all of them.

“Mr. President,” Lipinsky said finally, “I am afraid that the limits of our efforts are very rapidly being reached. There are large sections of the country—mostly rural—that will be on their own for some time. We cannot get help to them, not with our efforts concentrated in the cities.” The President licked his lips. “We can put more soldiers in the disaster area,” he said. “Call up more reserves. Bring the National Guard in from other states…”

Lipinsky shook his head. “We can’t put in more soldiers until there’s a way to move them into the field, and to supply them once they get there. Right now we can only move our people into the badly damaged areas with helicopters, and we only have so many, and they have to divide their limited time between rescue, supply, and delivering our rescue teams to their objectives. Helicopters are also very delicate—they spend more time in maintenance than in the air.” He gazed into the President’s face. “Sir, I recommend that you address the American people. Tell them frankly that many of them cannot expect our assistance for some time to come. I think they will be safer for that knowledge.” The President clenched his teeth. “It is not my job,” he said, “in the midst of the worst disaster in history, to tell the taxpayers of the most powerful nation in the world that their government can’t help them!” He realized he was shouting, that the Situation Room had fallen silent.

He looked at the crowd of people for a moment, then realized how tired he was.

“Five-minute break,” he said, turned, and left the room.

He went to one of the rest rooms, moistened a towel in cool water, and applied the towel to the back of his neck. His kidneys ached. He closed his eyes, then had to open them because he began to sway with weariness. He stared into the hollow-eyed scarecrow that stared back at him from the mirror.

“Let Lipinsky be wrong,” he said.

He was the President, his mind protested. The President of the most powerful nation on earth. So why was he feeling more helpless than any other time in his life?

The water rolled into St. Louis with the dawn. Farther upstream, just below where the waters of Mark Twain Lake had broken Lock and Dam No. 24, the flood had become a literal wall of water, foaming, eight feet high, that obliterated everything in its path like a bowling ball rolling down a pipe. But by the time the water reached St. Louis, it had moderated into a series of steep rollers, each one higher than the one before.

Most people were able to head for higher ground as the waters rose, but still thousands drowned. These were trapped in collapsed buildings and unable to flee, others were injured, caught in areas away from high ground, caught in the flood when they were caught behind uncrossable fissures, or caught in floating debris that carried them to their deaths.

Marcy Douglas watched the waves go by. She greeted the dawn from her post at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, standing below the soaring stainless steel Gateway Arch that marked the safe, high ground where neither floor nor fire had reached. Marcy had worked all night in the collapsed parking garage, pulling people free of the debris. She had seen men crushed in their cars, women trapped beneath falling concrete, children lying blue-lipped and cold, smothered beneath the arched bodies of the parents who died trying to protect them. She had helped to carry the bodies out as well as the survivors, but there was nowhere to lay them but on the grass of the Memorial park. There were a few doctors and nurses among the crowd of refugees that had fled across Memorial Drive, and these did what they could for the injured. There was no medicine, no supplies, no beds, no blankets. But the doctors and nurses and Park personnel and a thousand ordinary people did what they could, and over the course of the night they performed miracles, and saved scores of people who otherwise would have died.

And so Marcy—with no sleep, no food, no rest—stood to greet the dawn, the red sunrise that gleamed on the Arch. She stood tall in her stained khaki uniform, her wide hat square on her head, and knew, through her weariness, that she had done everything possible for her tourists, for those caught in the parking garage, and for everyone else that had come within the boundary of the Memorial. As Marcy watched the sun rise, she saw the long foaming waves rolling along the channel of the Mississippi. The brown water mounted higher and higher, nudging at the groaning wreckage of the Casino Queen and the Tom Sawyer. Marcy knew that the day would be long, and that her part was not over.

And a few miles south of where Marcy stood on the river, a man watched the waters rise and felt ice run up his spine.

His name was Stewart DeForest, and he was fire chief of the City of St. Louis. When he felt the first tremors slam into his home, even as the glass shattered and the furniture leaped, as shingles spilled from the roof and the house rocked on its foundation, he knew that his place was in south St. Louis, by the River Des Peres.

The Des Peres was a tributary of the Mississippi and formed the southern boundary of St. Louis proper. The Des Peres’s flood protection was inadequate, and everyone knew it. If the Mississippi backed up into the Des Peres, the area near the river was threatened with inundation.

Mere flooding was not what frightened the fire chief. What terrified DeForest were the long white rows of liquid propane cylinders that crouched near the river. Each cylinder held 30,000 pressurized gallons of one of the most explosive substances on earth, and there were more than fifty of them, making for over a million and a half gallons altogether.

One leak, one spark, was all it would take to ignite the greatest conflagration that Missouri had ever seen. The catastrophe had barely been averted in the flood of 1993. DeForest was determined that it would be averted now.

Two characteristics of propane combined to make the situation dangerous. Propane was heavier than air, but lighter than water. When confined in its cylinders in a flooded area, propane would try to float to the surface. When released, it would lie atop the water in a dense cloud, caught between air and water. If the area was flooded to a sufficient depth, the 30,000-gallon propane cylinders would rise, float loose from their moorings, then break their cables and bob with the current, ramming into buildings, trees, and other obstacles. Leaks were probably inevitable, and leaks would create a dense, flammable fog that would float downstream to the Mississippi in search of a source of ignition.

Against this danger, DeForest could do little. Over the course of the night he deployed his men on rafts and boats and temporary platforms. Fire hoses, nozzles set to maximum dispersion, played on the huge cylinders in hopes that this would diffuse any leaking propane. Propane was very slightly soluble in water, if DeForest could keep his artificial rain playing on the area, he might absorb some of the propane, and scatter the rest.

By dawn it was working well. The area had flooded to a little over three feet, then receded slightly. Breaks in the levees upstream and down were keeping the pressure off the Des Peres. But then the water from Mark Twain Lake began rolling in—DeForest could see it, see brown waves rippling in from the Des Peres—and DeForest knew he was in a toe-to-toe battle with a holocaust. The waters rose. DeForest told his men to stay at their stations and summoned other units. He called in police to make certain the area was evacuated.

The pumpers pulled flood water into their intakes, then spewed it out over the tank field. From his command post on a hill overlooking the tank field, DeForest could see the propane cylinders rising, straining at their moorings.

The water just kept on rising. DeForest deployed more hoses and called for more backup. He ordered a fire boat to wait at the outlet to the Des Peres, ready to catch any cylinders that floated that far. He gave a start at the sound of a shot. One of the cylinders had broken a cable. There was another shot, another. DeForest felt sweat gathering beneath his helmet. He blinked salt droplets from his eyes and began to pray.

God help those people, he thought earnestly. God help us all. More shots, a metallic shriek. One of the cylinders broke free, began bobbing on the tide. It floated up against one of the other cylinders with a metallic clang.

“Can we corral it somehow?” One of DeForest’s deputy chiefs, with panic in his eyes. DeForest shook his head. “Do you know how much one of those things weighs? It will go where it wants. The only way we could move it around would be with motorboats, and I don’t want hot motor exhaust around any of those cylinders.”

More bangs, more cables parting. Weary hopelessness washed over DeForest. People down in the tank field were reporting the smell of propane. They asked permission to evacuate.

“Denied,” DeForest said. “Put on your respirators, and keep that water pumping.” The huge unmoored cylinders were spreading like oil on the surface of a pond. Some of them caught in a line of trees on the edge of the property. Others floated off into residential areas. DeForest didn’t have any way to chase them down. All he could do was hope that they would disperse so much that if one of them blew, it wouldn’t set off any of the others.

But he knew too much about liquid propane to really believe in that hope.

He had a daughter in college in Wisconsin. A son lived in Colorado. Both were safe. He began to mentally say goodbye to them. And to his wife, whom he had left in her housecoat on their front lawn, and whom he hadn’t been able to contact since. He hoped she would be out of the blast radius.

Two of his men breathed in too much propane and collapsed. They were dragged to ambulances and replaced. The hoses continued to flood the area with gentle rain.

Even on his little hill, DeForest could smell an occasional gust of propane. It was everywhere. The cylinders spread across the quiet inland sea. The waters were still rising. The city was very quiet. And then he saw the flame rolling in from the direction of the Des Peres, a little blue wavy line that fluttered and shifted in the wind, but that raced like lightning toward the huge leaking cylinders. DeForest turned to dive behind his car, and he thumbed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie and opened his mouth to tell his men to take cover.

It was a futile gesture.

The fireball, one and a half million gallons of liquid propane going up in an instant, was over a mile in diameter.

Five or so miles to the north, Marcy Douglas felt the earth tremble. She was working to clear fallen trees from a part of the Jefferson Memorial Park so that the area could be used as a helipad. Army helicopters had soared in just after dawn, and were questing for a place to land.

Marcy thought the tremor was just another aftershock, but then she saw the flash brighten the shining steel of the Gateway Arch, and turned south to watch in awestruck horror as the bright fireball rose over south St. Louis. Bright arching trails of flame shot out of the fireball, like Fourth of July rockets, as debris rose and fell.

The sound came a few seconds later, the colossal concussion that drowned out the roar of the helicopters circling overhead. The copters spun dangerously as the concussion caught them. It is the Bomb, Marcy thought. It is the End.

The bubble of fire rose into the heavens, and its reflection turned the Mississippi to the color of blood.

“For then shall be great tribulation!” Frankland barked, “such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be!

“And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.” He glanced down at his notes to make certain of the citation. “Matthew,” he said, “chapter twenty-four.”

Frankland looked from the pulpit at the crowded people in his church. People murmured and shuffled and grumbled, and a number of children were wailing. Frankland’s amplified voice had no problem being heard over the cries of the children, however. He shouted over the cries for at least an hour. He had begun his preaching at six o’clock in the morning, jolting the people awake with the sound and fervor of his call. He knew that the bellies of his audience were empty, that many had no rest. That was all to the good. It made them less likely to disregard his message. It was necessary to convince them, to terrify them, to make them want and need his guidance. Some of the grownups were weeping, he saw. Others stared up at him as if they’d been hit with sticks.

It didn’t slow him down. He’d written the sermon years before. It had been waiting in one of the fireproof safes in the guest bedroom closet, in a manila envelope labeled End Times First Sermon. There had been many other sermons filed alongside it.

“For the elect’s sake!” he repeated. “For the sake of those who remain true to Jesus’ word, the Tribulation will be shortened! Otherwise nothing would be left! The catastrophes of yesterday would go on and on until every last human being is destroyed! But out of compassion for those who hold true to the Word, the Lord will have mercy on us, elect and sinners both. For God promises, later in the Book of Matthew.” He looked down at his notes. “‘Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.’ And at the end of that time, Jesus will return in righteousness and reign for a thousand years. Amen.”

Afterward he called for volunteers—strong, young able people—to go out into the county round to look for survivors, and to bring in food. He called for more volunteers from among the ladies to help with cooking. And he called for the older men to help with jobs of construction, raising tents and building latrines.

There were plenty of volunteers. He divided them into groups, and put them under reliable people from his own congregation. “Bring in radios,” he told the leaders. “All the radios you can find. And if any of your people are carrying radios, tell them we’re going to need them. We need all the radios so that we can listen to the news, and pass it on to the people.”

And to keep them from hearing the word of the Devil, which would probably be on every radio station but his own. Amen.

Nick shivered as dawn leaked over the eastern horizon. He had spent the night in a cottonwood tree with black flood waters rushing beneath him.

The levees must have broken, he thought. There were eight or ten feet of water under him, and the water was moving fast. Every so often the tree would shudder to the impact of floating debris. He thought about Viondi’s body floating in the darkness, past the broken Mobil station, heading south toward his Aunt Loretta in Mississippi.

He thought about the Asian man trapped in his broken storefront, pinned down by a beam, the waters rising past his outstretched chin.

His left arm ached in the tricep region, and when he put his right hand there it came away sticky. He’d been shot. That crazy cop had shot him.

There didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it. He didn’t even have his stupid pale Band-Aids with dinosaurs on them.

Nick straddled a limb, leaned back against the bole of the tree, and tried to sleep. The wound throbbed all night long, and there were insistent biting insects, a truly amazing number of them, that kept him busy slapping them away. Occasional aftershocks rocked the tree, causing him to clutch at his bough and hope that the shock wouldn’t loosen the tree’s roots and topple it into the water. He must have finally fallen asleep, though, because when he opened his eyes he found it was light, just past dawn. Birdsong rang through the trees. Nick blinked gum from his eyes and peered out at the drowned world.

He was in a grove, an old stand of cottonwood. His tree bore so many leafy branches that it was difficult to see through them. The area was brushy, and the tops of bushes waved from the murky water below. Far off to his right—southeast, to judge by the sun—there was a wide open area covered with water. He couldn’t tell if it was a flooded field, a lake, or a river.

There was a rustling out on the big limb that Nick was straddling. He looked out and gazed into a pair of brown eyes. He started and banged the back of his head on the bole of the tree. Opossum, he recognized. With little pink-nosed babies clinging to its fur.

“Damn,” Nick said, and rubbed the back of his head where he’d knocked it on the tree. The opossum gave a disappointed murmur and climbed higher into the tree, out of sight.

“Possum,” Nick told it, “you don’t want to get down now, anyway.” Loud bird calls barked from the next tree over. Nick hitched himself out on his limb to get a better view, peered between branches and saw a flock of guinea fowl, survivors from someone’s farm. In another tree, he saw a pair of squirrels leaping from one branch to another, just above the sullen, bedraggled form of a hen turkey. He could hear the cawing of a whole flock of crows, but he couldn’t see them. All nature had gone aloft when the water began to rise.

No, he discovered, not all nature.

The corpse of a drowned deer, already stiff, floated half-submerged in the current. Nick gave a shudder. At least the body wasn’t that of a human being.

It occurred to him that there might be someone within hailing distance. Even someone else stranded in a cotton-wood would be company. He cupped his hands to his mouth, turned his head in the direction he suspected was inland, then hesitated.

What does a person say under these circumstances? he wondered. ‘Help’? ‘Get me down!’? ‘I’m stuck in a tree’?

He settled on “Hello.”

He called out his hello, waited for an answer, called again. Called in all directions. Only the guinea fowl in the next tree answered.

He sagged on the bough, discouragement rising in him like the rising flood. He was very thirsty, very hungry. His wounded arm ached. He tried to get a look at it in the morning light, but it was on a part of his arm that he couldn’t see, no matter how much he tried.

He decided to check his pockets, make an inventory. Billfold with credit cards and ID. Money clip with a hundred and sixty in cash, more or less. Thirty-seven cents in loose change. House keys. These, and the Timex on his wrist, seemed to be the sum total of his resources.

He felt something in his shirt pocket, and fished it out. Opened the box. Saw the lily-shaped pendant on the necklace, saw dawn light winking off diamonds and rubies.

For Arlette. He looked at the golden lily in his palm. He would have to survive for Arlette. Nick felt a stinging bite on the back of his right arm and slapped at it with the left. Felt another bite, made another slap. Then he felt a bite on his back, and after slapping it away looked behind him to see what was the matter.

His heart gave a leap. Down the bole of the tree behind him poured a red river of insects. There were so many that the tree seemed to shimmer with the reflection of their glittering eyes. He spasmed forward along the tree limb, slapping furiously at his back and behind. There were red ants all over his body. He moved forward along the limb, feeling it dip under his weight, leaves trailing in the water. The mother opossum, from somewhere in the clump of leaves, gave a cry of warning. Nick threw one leg over the limb, turned to face the tree, swung the other leg over. An implacable swarm of ants marched along the bark toward him. He beat at them with his palms, then slapped at his body where other ants were still biting.

He wondered where the ants were coming from and looked up: a huge glistening ball of ants pulsed on the bole of the tree, only a few feet above where he’d laid his head all night. The ants must have evacuated their nest when the river rose, carrying with them their eggs, pupae, and queen; and now their nest was composed principally of their bodies, a ravenous scarlet sphere boiling with angry life, now wakened by the dawn and gone in quest of food.

There was a squawk above him, a flurry of beating wings, and a pair of grackles, cawing furiously, burst free of the foliage and thundered madly into the air. Apparently the ants had just invaded their perch. For a moment he considered abandoning the tree in favor of another. But there was no guarantee that a new tree would be any more hospitable, or that he would be able to climb it as easily as he climbed this one.

Besides, something in him resisted dropping into the cold water below. He could all too easily get caught in brush or debris, and drown.

He reached behind him to one of the cottonwood’s many small branches, and wrestled it back and forth until he succeeded in snapping it off. Then he used the leafy branch as a broom to sweep the tide of ants off the limb.

Another large bird squawked and flapped out of the tree. Nick didn’t see what kind, he only heard it. The ants were hungry, or angry, or both.

There was more thrashing in the tree, and Nick saw a raccoon, big as a dog, bound out of one branch and to another, clawing madly to get a firm grip. Once safe on the new limb, the raccoon began a frenzy of frantic scratching.

“Be thankful, man,” Nick said, sweeping with his branch. “It could be worse. They could be fire ants.” The raccoon gave him a resentful look and kept scratching.

Nick looked up at the ant nest, the ball of glittering angry insects, and he considered attacking it directly. Maybe with his branch he could knock them into the river by the thousands.

On the other hand, maybe he’d just piss them off.

He decided it was worth a try. He edged along the limb until the knot of ants was within easy sweeping distance of his branch, and then he cocked the branch back and slapped it against the ball of ants. He was surprised at how easily it worked—the seeming solidity of the ball of ants had made him think they would be harder to dislodge. A large chunk of the ant nest was knocked off the tree and fell in the water. He was surprised that the knot did not disintegrate: the ants clung to each other, forming a nearly solid raft as the current swept them away.

When they hit another tree, Nick thought, they’d all climb it.

A catbird gave its mewling cry of alarm and fluttered to safety. Another bird burst from the higher branches, dropped low across the water before gaining altitude. Some kind of owl, he saw, a big one, with horns. Didn’t like the ants, either.

He cocked his arm back, swept again. More ants spilled into the water.

He swept a third time. And then something flashed white and tan in the tree, and glittering fangs clamped on the leafy twigs. Cold primordial fear shot up Nick’s spine.

Cottonmouth, he thought.

His father had taken him all over the world when Nick was growing up. Nick had grown up on Army bases in Europe, in Korea, and in Thailand. But he had spent much of his youth on bases in the American South. And, like every Southern child who shares his swimming hole with nature, he had learned terror of the cottonmouth moccasin.

Snake! some boy would cry, and there would be a flurry of arms and legs and white water, and the boys would stand panting on the shore while a cottonmouth, long and thick as a grown man’s arm, prowled the water in search of something to kill.

Coral snakes and rattlers were shy, avoided humans when they could, and never bit unless threatened. A cotton-mouth moccasin was afraid of nothing, would aggressively invade territory occupied by others, and would bite without hesitation. Their venom, unlike that of the copperhead, was deadly.

“A cottonmouth will bite you just to watch you die.” That’s what the old folks told their children. And when the children grew older, fear and hatred of all snakes was buried so deep that it might as well have been seared on their bones. A lot of the children with whom Nick had shared his boyhood swimming holes grew up to kill every snake they saw, whether they were poisonous or not. That was what the fear of the cottonmouth could do.

Nick had never been as afraid of anything in his life as he’d been of the cottonmouths he’d seen when he was young. And that deep-buried fear had never gone away.

The distinctive white mouth tissue flashed again and again as the snake struck repeatedly at Nick’s branch. The snake was a big one, too, four feet long.

Its thick body was covered with furious biting ants. It was in agony. And it was angry enough to kill. Fear clawed at Nick’s brain with fingers of fire. Nick kept thrashing at the snake with the branch. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. His branch was too small and light to knock the snake off the tree, but at least the flailing leaves distracted it, kept it from biting at him. He found himself retreating along his limb, backing up until his butt came up against a nest of branches and he could back up no farther. The cottonmouth advanced, half-falling down the tree as it writhed in pain. It gathered itself on Nick’s limb, raised its head, hissed. Furious ants swarmed over it. Nick thrust the branch at it again, and it struck.

The raccoon gave a warning yelp and made a hasty jump for the water. It was as scared of the cottonmouth as Nick was.

For a half-second Nick considered following the raccoon’s example. But the cottonmouth was an aquatic snake, it could swim better than Nick could. If it was angry enough to follow Nick into the water, then it could kill him easily, while he tried to thrash his way through the waterlogged brush below. The cottonmouth writhed closer. Nick batted at the snake with the branch, but the leafy broom was too light to budge it from its perch. He could see his reflection in the snake’s unblinking eyes, and felt his blood run cold. Grab it behind the head, he thought, that was the safe way to handle a snake, but he couldn’t think of a way to grab its head without letting the cottonmouth strike at him first. Nick reversed the branch, thinking perhaps that he could use the sharp broken-off butt end as a dagger. He held it like an icepick in his right hand, eight inches or so from the end, and gave a huff of breath as he stabbed at the snake. The sharp wood skiddered on bark, blunted itself. Leaves waved. The snake reared, hissed. Nick stabbed again, a cry of anger and fear breaking from his lips. The snake struck. There was an instant of terror as Nick realized that the snake was striking too fast for Nick to snatch back his hand.

And then the snake’s jaw clamped down on the branch, an inch below Nick’s little finger. He saw the two poison fangs digging into the smooth bark, saw beads of venom swell up. His heart gave a leap. Now! he thought.

He pulled the branch toward him, dragging the snake toward him by its fangs. The resistance was formidable: it was like pulling on a thick rubber band. But the cottonmouth was unwilling to let go of the branch, and Nick managed to stretch out the snake’s neck until he could pounce with his left hand, grabbing the cottonmouth just behind the head, where it couldn’t turn to bite him. Nick dropped the branch, grabbed the snake halfway down its body with his right hand. The cottonmouth’s glassy reptile eyes gazed into his, expressionless, as Nick tried to lift it so that he could fling it into the water below. But the tail was anchored around the tree limb, and muscles pulsed in Nick’s hands, sinew flexing, testing his strength. The body was so thick that Nick couldn’t quite close his right hand around it; he could feel the muscles working against his grip, trying to pry the fingers apart, and he clamped down, digging fingertips into the scaly skin, tugging at the snake as he tried to pull it from the limb.

Furious ants swarmed over the snake and Nick’s hands, bit them both without mercy. The snake dropped the branch and opened its mouth wide, the mouth tissues blossoming like a deadly white flower. It tried to turn its head to bite Nick in the wrist, but Nick held it fast by the neck and wouldn’t let it double back on itself. Drops of venom welled at the tips of the fangs. Its muscles pulsed, flexed, strained beneath Nick’s fingers. And then its muscles surged, and its tail left the tree limb and tried to coil itself around Nick’s right wrist.

Nick gave a yell of alarm as the snake’s fat body writhed in his hands. He thumped his hand onto the tree limb, scraped the cottonmouth’s tail off his wrist against the bark, then raised the snake in both hands over his head and flung it through the air.

“Yaaaaaahl” he roared, a scream of rage and triumph.

The cottonmouth curled in air, almost turning itself into a knot, and then hit the water. There was a splash, a twist, and suddenly the aquatic snake was swimming, in its element. Its body surged effortlessly in the water, its head carried high, eyes focused…

Eyes focused on Nick.

Nick felt his triumph turn to disbelief and horror. The snake was coming back to the tree. The cottonmouth was coming to kill him.

“Stay out of my tree!” Nick shouted. Heat flushed his skin. “My tree!” He waved a fist. The snake kept coming.

Nick turned, snatched at the branches behind him. He grabbed one of the strongest and seized it, bending it back, fighting it. There was a crack as he tore it free. He stripped twigs and leaves from it, turned it into a club.

The cottonmouth pulsed its way to the tree, its head winding a path through the smaller branches so that the thick surging body could follow.

The first, leafy branch that Nick had dropped was still lying in his lap. He took that branch in his left hand and the new club in the right. He hit the club against the bole of the tree a few times, trying to get a feel for the weapon. He tasted bitter despair on his tongue: the club was far too light to smash the head of the snake.

The hopelessness brought defiance to his lips. “You want a piece of me?” he demanded of the snake. He snarled. “You come and get it!”

The cottonmouth’s weaving head slid around the bole of the tree, its cold, inhuman eyes intent on Nick. The forked tongue flickered from the soft white mouth. Nick smashed at the snake with the club, hit it in the neck. The snake reared back, then dropped its head and surged forward.

Nick smashed with left and right, trying to confuse the snake with the leafy branch and then hammer it with the stick. The cottonmouth coiled protectively when it was struck, but then extended itself again and continued its motion along the tree limb. Nick hammered and hammered. The cottonmouth struck at the club and missed. Nick hammered at it, the hot blood bringing strength to his arm.

“You want a piece of me?” he shouted. “You want this tree?” He smashed the club down on the snake’s neck, pinning it to the tree limb. He snatched out with his left hand and grabbed the cottonmouth by the neck, just behind the head. The snake’s tail whipped around, coiled around his wrist.

“You think I care if you grab me?” Nick demanded. The snake tightened on his arm. Nick held the snake’s head with his left hand while he smashed at it with the club in his right. The cottonmouth’s head darted left and right to the limits that Nick would permit, seeking escape from the blows. Then Nick lunged forward and smashed the snake’s head into the bole of the tree with all of his strength. The snake’s body spasmed on his arm. He smashed again and again.

“You want a piece of me, cottonmouth?” he demanded. “You come and take it!” He smashed the snake’s head against the tree until the snake hung in loose coils from his arm, until Nick’s hand was scraped and bloody and the snake’s forked tongue hung limply from its mouth. Then he wearily uncoiled the snake from his arm, held it over the water, and let it fall.

The Mississippi received it with barely a splash.

“My tree!” Nick shouted. “My damn tree!” His cries echoed in the empty grove. Birds shrieked in answer.

He slapped ants from his hands, from his legs. Snapped off another leafy branch, began to sweep the ants from his limb, from what remained of their nest.

The tree was his, and he was going to keep it.

He touched his shirt pocket, felt Arlette’s necklace.

He would give it to her, see the sparkle in her eyes. He knew that now. Hours passed. The day grew hot, and the ants grew torpid. Perhaps they’d found something to eat, or lost interest after the destruction of their nest. The insects that drove him crazy now were mosquitos, dancing around him in swarms.

Farther out on his limb, the mother opossum rustled its way through leafy branches and squawked at its babies. Every so often it would peer out to see if Nick had left. It always seemed disappointed when he hadn’t.

The water level seemed to be dropping a little. The sodden tops of bushes were more visible. The water had ceased to run with its earlier swiftness, now lay still and dark, its surface reflecting the bright rays of the sun.

After sitting on his limb till his body felt like a giant cramp, Nick decided to climb a little higher and discover what might be seen. He clambered higher, heaving and sweating as he pushed his way through tightly woven branches.

This was really the sort of thing the snake would have done much easier.

The tree began to sway under Nick’s weight. He was panting for breath, and he decided he had climbed enough. He planted his feet carefully and looked around.

Leaves still obscured much of the view. He pressed branches down, tried to clear the sight lines. North and south stretched trees as far as he could see. West he could see an opening, a flat space covered with water, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the river, a field, or a clearing. He turned east, and a chill shivered through his blood. There, across a flooded field, was the shattered Mobil station where Viondi had died. Its white, blue, and red sign still swung above the brown water. The Mobil station was no more than a half-mile away. Nick thought he’d wandered much farther in the dark. He must have been tracking in circles once he got among the trees.

There was no sign of the cop or his car. Or of Viondi. Or of any other human being. He was king of the tree and all he surveyed. He gave a bitter laugh.

The sun was hot on his head.

Nick slapped at a biting ant and decided he might as well climb down. He found it harder to force his way down through the vegetation than it had been to climb up through it. He drove his way between branches, using his weight to force branches aside. He paused as he discovered the opossum below him, heading upward. They stared at each other for a moment, and then the opossum opened its mouth in a snarl, showing a surprising number of very sharp teeth, and then scurried off onto a side limb, its rat-tailed babies still clinging to its fur.

Nick felt like grinning for the first time that day.

He dropped back down to his old limb, then paused a moment to stretch, carefully testing his muscles. The wound on his left arm had stiffened, and the climb had set it bleeding again. Standing in the tree, testing his muscles one by one, he almost missed the kid in the boat. He would have missed him, if he hadn’t seen the white script, Retired and Gone Fishin’, through a gap in the leaves. He knelt on his bough, looking at the boat in surprise. It had passed him in near silence, a big black aluminum boat with a shattered windscreen and no motor. In another few seconds, it would disappear into the flooded grove. A white kid stood in the stern, shoving the boat along with a long pole. His back was turned to Nick, and he clearly hadn’t seen him.

“Hey,” Nick said, and then, louder, “Hey!”

The kid jumped and spun around, and Nick felt a sudden knock at his heart.

The boy’s face and hands were striped with black and red, as if they’d been horribly burned. The man’s voice, coming out of the empty cottonwood grove, nearly scared Jason out of his skin. He turned wildly, almost losing his grip on the pole, and stared out into the trees. He couldn’t see anyone.

“Where are you?” he blurted.

“Over here.” The voice was a bit more gentle. Jason shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of the sound, and he saw a disheveled black man crouched in a tree, a kind of horror in his staring eyes.

“Can you turn that boat around?” the man asked. “And get me out of this tree?” Reluctance tugged at Jason’s heart. “I guess,” he said.

A stranger. An adult. A black man. Any of these would be reason to be wary.

He poled the boat around while he argued with himself. What were the odds that the guy was some kind of criminal or pervert? Here in the middle of a disaster, stuck up a tree in a flood?

It shouldn’t matter, he argued, that the guy was black. It wasn’t that he didn’t like black people, he thought, he got along with the black kids at school just fine, even though they tended to keep to themselves. It was just that he didn’t know who the hell this guy was.

Jason sighed. The stranger was a man needing help in the middle of a disaster. What more did Jason need to know?

As Jason poled the boat closer, the details of the stranger’s appearance grew less encouraging. The man was splashed with mud and, maybe, blood; his clothes were dirty and torn, and his hair was sticking up in weird tufts. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was covered with lumps. Well, Jason thought, the guy’s been chased up a tree, none of that is necessarily his fault. But he found himself poling more warily, watching the treed man as the boat turned a circle and drifted slowly toward the cottonwood.

And the man, Jason saw, was watching him, with a peculiar intent pop-eyed stare that made Jason nervous. And then the man’s expression eased, and he laughed.

“Boy,” he said, “what you got on you?”

Jason looked down at his arms. “Mud,” he said. “I was getting sunburned on the river, so I covered my skin with mud from a mudbank.” The man laughed, and Jason felt self-conscious. “I saw it in a movie,” Jason said.

“I saw your face covered with that stuff, I thought you’d been burned in a fire,” the man said. “Scared the hell out of me. I was afraid I was going to have to get you to a hospital.” Jason smiled. “Sorry.”

“We don’t find any shade, I’ll have to find a mud bank myself.”

It was news to Jason that black people got sunburn—how could you tell?—but he supposed the man knew best.

The bows of the boat floated up beneath the treed man, and he carefully lowered himself onto the foredeck. The boat bobbed under his weight, and Jason took a step to keep his balance. Jason’s passenger walked in a crouch across the foredeck, then dropped into the cockpit.

“Thanks,” he said.

“’S’okay,” Jason said.

The man brushed mud off the passenger seat, then sat. He moved his left arm with care, as if there was an injury. And it looked like blood.

“I’m Nick,” the man said. “Nick Ruford.”

“Jason Adams.”

Nick Ruford nodded. “Glad you got me out of that tree. I was afraid I was going to starve up there.” He licked his lips, looked down at the plastic bottles rolling in the bottom of the boat. “Is that drinking water?”

“It’s from the river. It’s all I’ve got to drink.” He hesitated. “I drank some, and I didn’t get sick.”

“Guess I’ll stay thirsty a little longer. Got any food?”

“No.” Jason pushed with his pole, swung the boat around. The leaves of submerged bushes scratched against the boat’s bottom.

“What’s this stuff?” Indicating the broken boards that Jason had piled in the cockpit.

“Things I picked up out of the river,” Jason said. “To paddle with.” And then he added, “Do you know where we are?”

The stranger seemed surprised at the question. “In Tennessee. Not too far north of Memphis.” That far, Jason thought. That far in one night. It took over an hour to drive a car from Cabells Mound to Memphis.

“You look surprised,” Nick Ruford said. “Where do you come from? Kentucky?”

“Missouri,” Jason said. “Cabells Mound.”

“Where’s that?”

“I must have come sixty miles overnight.”

The stranger looked dubious. “As the crow flies? The river doesn’t move that fast. Not even if it’s in flood.”

Jason looked at him. “It moves that fast now. I went through two stretches of rapid, and moved real fast the rest of the time.”

A new light dawned in Nick Ruford’s eyes. “Rapids, huh,” he said. “Bet you’re glad you’re out of it now.”

“The rapids were scary, yeah.” He remembered that second rapid, swirling close to a bank just as it began to cave in, a hundred feet of Mississippi mud falling into the river at once… the splash had been enough to knock the boat back into midstream, out of danger, but if he’d been there a second earlier or later, the boat would have capsized.

In the morning, when the speed of the river began to slow, he’d found some plastic soft drink bottles floating in the river, and he’d used them to bail. It was slow, waiting for each bottle to fill before emptying it overside, but he had nothing else to do.

Eventually Jason had come aground on the left bank of the river. He was beginning to get sunburned by then, and he’d covered his exposed skin with red mud. He’d found the pole—it was stuck in the crown of a broken levee, just standing there, he didn’t know why—and he’d used it to pole the boat along until he came to a break in the levee big enough to pole the boat through. Which he’d done, hoping he’d find civilization on the other side, but he’d found nothing but wilderness.

Nothing but wilderness, till he found Nick Ruford up a tree.

The stranger licked his lips. “This your boat?” he asked.

Jason shook his head. He didn’t offer any further explanation. He didn’t want to think about Mr. Regan right now. There were a lot of things he didn’t want to think about.

He pushed, felt the pole dig into the Mississippi ooze, pushed the boat ahead. Let the pole fall back into his hands, not grabbing at it.

“How about your parents?” Nick asked.

“Well,” Jason said, “my dad’s in China.” He felt defiance rising in him, looked down at his passenger. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He could feel his jaw muscles tighten. “She died last night.” The stranger held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Sorry,” he said.

“Not your fault.” Cold anger clenched at Jason’s stomach, and he looked up at the sky as he poled the boat forward.

“You know this area?” Jason asked. “Anyplace we can go?”

The stranger shook his head. “I’m from St. Louis. I was just passing through.”

“Well.” Jason shrugged. “Guess we might as well keep on.” Jason kept the boat’s bow pointed south. Insects whined.

The sun lifted toward its zenith, and moist heat smothered the world.

FIFTEEN

The sun woke Charlie, and as he opened his eyes he realized how thirsty he was. He opened the car door and stepped out. His wounded leg was stiff and it ached. The air still reeked of smoke, and the world was lit only dimly by the bloated red sun that sat cloaked on the dark horizon. He needed to get to work, he thought. He needed to be at his desk the second the markets opened. Charlie limped to the house, crossed the listing portico, and then hesitated as he looked through the open door into the interior. He thought of Megan lying inside. He didn’t want to go in. But he needed something to drink, something to eat.

He needed to use a toilet.

He would stay out of the back hall, he decided. He’d just go to the kitchen and get some food, and then use the toilet off the living room, not the one in back.

As he stepped into the front hall, he felt reluctance dragging at his feet. He really didn’t want to go inside. The Moet bottle still sat in the front hall. The champagne bucket lay in a puddle of melted ice in the front room. Charlie’s shoes crunched on broken glass as he went to the telephone, picked up the receiver. Nothing. Still nothing.

He went to the kitchen. The quake had walked the refrigerator into the middle of the kitchen, and its door had been open all night. Some of the kitchen cabinets had fallen, and most of the glassware had jumped onto the floor or counters and shattered.

The cleaning lady was due tomorrow, he remembered. He’d have to leave her a big tip. Charlie found one intact highball glass and went to the sink for a drink. He opened the tap and a third of a glass of water dribbled out. He looked curiously at the tap, then drank the water. He walked to the open refrigerator, and found that it contained two single-serving-size containers of Dannon yogurt, a couple cans of diet drink that Megan had put there, and some duck a l’orange left over from Friday night. The container of milk and a cardboard container of orange juice had tipped over in the quake and poured their contents out onto the floor.

In the door racks he found a small bottle of cocktail onions, anchovies, some low-fat salad dressing, and a couple of green olives floating alone in their jar.

He went to the pantry, which he had converted into a wine rack. Several of the bottles had been pitched from the racks and broken, but most of them were intact.

He shouldn’t drink them, though, he thought. Not the reds. The quake would have shaken up the sediment.

He found a clean spoon and ate one of the containers of yogurt while standing in the kitchen and staring out the shattered window at his swimming pool. Now he knew why the neighbor girl wanted some of his water.

He’d have to remember to throw more chlorine into the pool, to keep it drinkable. He used the toilet, flushed it, and picked his way back to the front hall. He needed to get in his car and get to work. He imagined the legend he would create by walking into the office unshaven, in his shirt sleeves and his torn, bloody slacks. It would show everyone how determined he was, how determined to make money.

But how was he going to get to Tennessee Securities? The garage had collapsed on his car, and he didn’t have the keys to Megan’s BMW, Megan had them…

His mind skittered from the memory of Megan like a cat jumping away from a spray of water. He couldn’t call a cab, because the phones weren’t working. Maybe Charlie could get one of his neighbors to give him a lift.

He looked down by his feet and saw the bottle of Moet. He was still thirsty. He unwrapped the foil, removed the wire, eased the cork from the neck of the bottle.

He went outside and sat on the portico and drank the champagne from the bottle. I am still lord of the jungle, he thought. I guessed right. All I need to do is get to a terminal somewhere, and I can make millions.

He put the half-empty bottle down, and set out to find a car.

“Have you got a Web browser?” asked the man from NASA.

General Jessica Frazetta blinked in the dawn light. “A what?”

“Because the quickest thing we could do,” the man said, “is just put the pictures up on our Web site as soon as we get them. You’ll see them as fast as we do.”

Jessica sighed. “What’s the URL?” she asked.

In fact a Web browser was one of the things she possessed. One of her civilian employees had turned up, around midnight, with a laptop computer and an Iridium cellular modem. As soon as he arrived, his computer had been militarized for the duration of the emergency. Right now Pat was using it, trying to glean useful news off the Net.

Jessica jotted the Web address in her notebook. “Thanks,” she said.

“If you need any pictures in particular, let us know,” the NASA man said.

“All I can tell you right now is that we need pictures of the Mississippi region between Hannibal and Natchez,” Jessica said. “And major tributaries as well, particularly the Missouri, Ohio, and the Arkansas.”

“I’ll tell the boys,” the man said. “Keep looking at our Web page, we’ll put the pictures up there.” Jessica thanked him and closed her cellphone. She turned toward the military camp that was growing around the damaged buildings of the Mississippi Valley Division.

The air rattled to the sound of portable generators. A tent had been pitched everywhere a tree limb or a building wouldn’t fall on it. Mess tent, communications, maps, hospital tent, clerical… A number of the tents were piled with furniture and equipment salvaged from the headquarters building, but which hadn’t been sorted out yet. Communications and data retrieval systems were being kludged together out of gear pulled out of damaged buildings. Ground lines were still out, but at least radio communications had been restored. All that had been required was the return of her communications specialists, who straggled in over the course of the night. And the Old Man had assured her that she’d be getting a mobile communications unit from Fort Bragg as soon as it could be packed onto a helicopter and flown out. Her command was sorting itself out, at least locally. What Jessica lacked was information on which to act elsewhere. Communications were wrecked in precisely those parts of the country she was trying to reach. The St. Louis and Memphis districts of the MVD were still out of communication, though Rock Island had finally reported in around three in the morning, and was loudly claiming that it was not a victim district. Jessica, whose insistence to her own superiors had been no less ardent, was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Still, Rock Island was able to report the situation only in its immediate area. Jessica needed to find out what was happening elsewhere, where the levees had broken, where the floods were spreading. She had thought of satellite maps first thing. But her first call to the National Reconnaissance Office, which handled military satellites, informed her that the NRO would not be of much use. So that each American satellite could cover the entire globe, each had been placed in six-hour polar orbits, fixed in inertial space while the earth turned under it. But the NRO, with its brief to provide data on enemies and rivals of the U.S., had never been interested in satellite maps of North America—if they wanted a map of North America, they’d contact Rand-McNally. So the satellites’ orbits were timed to pass over North America at night, precisely when there was little point in taking pictures. Jessica had been urged to contact the space agency NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which ran the weather satellites, and the privatized company LANDS AT, which sold satellite imagery round the world.

At least Jessica hadn’t been urged to buy Russian photos. She’d probably have to do it with her personal credit card.

It took a lot of effort to get the right person at NOAA. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you,” Jessica was told finally. “But your people at the Pentagon gave me a number that isn’t working.”

“This is my cellphone.” Jessica gave the man her number.

“I wanted to tell you,” the man said, “that as soon as we get the images, we’re going to be putting the latest pictures of the disaster areas up on our Web page. Do you want the URL?” Jessica sighed. “Sure,” she said. “Let me get a pencil.”

“Mr. President,” said the chairman of the Federal Reserve, “it is my sad duty to inform you that we cannot pay for the reconstruction of this nation’s earthquake damage.”

The President felt his weariness fall away in a surge of adrenaline. “I think you had better explain,” he said through clenched teeth. He was very tired of people telling him what he couldn’t do. The chairman adjusted his spectacles. The President had chosen to meet him in the Oval Office, a more dignified venue than the noisy, chaotic Situation Room

“Sir,” the chairman said, “if the reports are true—if half the reports are true—then I regret to say that there is not enough liquidity in the United States to support reconstruction. By which I mean to say—” he added with greater haste, as he saw presidential anger glowing—“by which I mean that this nation cannot pay for it. So London will pay for it, and Tokyo, and Singapore. And the rest of the world, probably.”

“Yes?” the President said.

“American investments and commitments abroad will have to be withdrawn. Dollars will come home to finance reconstruction.” The chairman gazed over the President’s shoulder into the garden, and his nostrils twitched as if hoping to scent a rose. “There will be a lot of volatility in the currency and bond markets,” he said. “Speculators are going to work this all out sooner rather than later. I may have to delay action to let the situation cool. But believe me, sir, that those dollars will come home.”

“Thank you, Sam,” the President said.

“I cautioned you last week,” the chairman went on, “that though indicators were mixed, there might be a trend toward recession.” He gave a heavy sigh. “I must inform you now that the recession is inevitable, that it will be worldwide, and that it will be deep and prolonged. Our investment dollars are a significant prop to the world economy, and we will have to knock that prop out just at the moment that economy has become vulnerable. The United States is the engine that drives the world economy, and now that engine is crippled.”

Worldwide recession, the President thought. Factories closing, workers on the dole, emerging economies plunging back into darkness. And with economic desperation came political instability: riots, fanaticism, tyranny, terror, civil war, mothers bayoneted, and babies starving.

So, the President thought, the rest of the world, as well as the most needy parts of America, were on their own.

“We need a plan, Sam,” the President said. “An economic plan that I can present to Congress when I call them back into emergency session. Because if we don’t have a plan, they’re just going to throw money at the situation, more or less randomly, and much of it will go to waste.” The chairman nodded. “I will work with your people. I believe that in the present emergency, the people will understand that the barriers between my office and the Executive Branch should be relaxed.” The President’s phone buzzed, and he picked up the receiver and listened for a few moments. He said,

“Thank you,” and hung up. He looked across his desk at the chairman.

“The Israeli Defense Forces have just gone on full alert,” he said. “They’re calling up reserves.” The chairman looked thoughtful. “Are they attacking anyone?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Let’s hope they’re just being cautious, Mr. President. But my guess is that mobilization won’t be the last. Other nations may well wonder if we have the ability—or the will—to stand by our security commitments.”

The President gave the chairman a hard look. ” I have the will.” The chairman gave a shrug. “Well. I will try to make certain that you also have the money.”

“There’s leaking around the base of the dam structure. Frankly, I do not like it.” Neither did Jessica Frazetta. Bagnall Dam held all of Lake Ozark at bay, and the thought of that huge lake spilling down its channel was enough to give her shivers.

“I don’t see that we have any choice,” Jessica said. She paced back and forth, cellphone held to her ear as she talked to the civilian engineer whose responsibility included the dam. “We’ve got to release as much water as possible, take the pressure off that dam.”

“Yes, ma’am. But the Osage is already at a high stage, and that’ll mean flooding. When it hits the Missouri, it’ll probably flood all the way up to Jefferson City.”

“At least Jefferson City will have warning,” Jessica said. “Which is more than they’ll have if the dam fails.” She had, at long last, heard about the failure of the Clarence Cannon Dam and the wall of water that had torn its way through the rich Illinois bottom land on its route to the Mississippi. Hundreds of people were missing. Nothing like that was going to happen again, not if she could prevent it.

“Very good, Miss Frazetta. I’ll start dumping all the water I can.”

Jessica rang off. Her ear ached from the many hours she’d spent with her cellphone pressed against it. It was very possible that she’d give herself a cauliflower ear before this was all over. Her dutiful staff had prepared the morning SITREP, a copy of which she carried in her pocket. The Situation Report duly noted everything they knew or did not know, from which flood control structures had failed to how many of their own personnel were injured or missing. The list of “unknowns” was much larger than the list of items of which the staff were certain.

Jessica’s stomach growled. She remembered she hadn’t eaten since the previous day’s lunch. And she hadn’t slept since before that.

She went to the mess tent. The tent echoed to the chatter of a large number of women and children. Many of Jessica’s returning subordinates had straggled onto base complete with their families and a fair selection of their possessions. Their houses and trailers had been wrecked, the district was in chaos, and Jessica could forgive them for figuring that if anyone in this situation was going to have food, shelter, and clothing, it would be the Army.

Jessica hadn’t the heart to turn these refugees away. Besides, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, she could hardly expect her subordinates, almost all of whom were civilians, to give their all for the Army while they were worried sick about their families.

But she had made rules. Everyone works was the first. Adults were to assist Corps personnel in pitching tents, setting up gear, policing the area, and cooking. Older children helped as well, or watched the younger children. The only people excused were those too young to have a job, and those injured in the quake, who were sent to the hospital tent.

Jessica tried not to think about liability issues. Could she be sued if one of her civilians was injured by a falling branch? If one of the children tripped over a tent line and broke a leg?

She put out orders that non-Corps personnel were not to enter the damaged buildings on any of the various ongoing salvage operations. She figured that might limit her liability in at least one direction. The mess tent’s sides were rolled up to provide ventilation, and a few scavenged tables and chairs had been set up. Some young children in one corner were sitting in a circle and playing a game under the direction of an older child. The woman behind the improvised counter—a battered old folding table—looked at Jessica and smiled. “We’ve got oatmeal coming up, General,” she said. “Would you like a cup of coffee while you wait?”

Jessica hesitated. She hadn’t had coffee in eight years. Everyone said it made her too hyper. Hell, she figured, the country needed hyper right now.

“I would absolutely love a cup of joe,” Jessica said. “Black, with two sugars.” When Jessica was handed the white porcelain mug, she held it under her nose and breathed in the fragrance. Her mouth watered.

It tasted as wonderful as she remembered.

“It’s impossible,” said Mrs. Shawbutt, Charlie’s neighbor. She was strangely dressed in a caftan, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and large dark glasses with pale blue lenses. “The roads are too torn up, the bridges are all out—there’s no way you can drive downtown. And besides—” She looked significantly at the column of smoke rising on the horizon. “Downtown’s on fire. The radio is saying people shouldn’t try to leave their homes unless their lives are in danger.”

“I’ve got to get to a phone,” Charlie said. “Or a computer.” Mrs. Shawbutt shook her head. “Phones are out. Even cell-phones, I hear.” She looked at him through her hornrims. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Johns?”

Charlie shrugged. “No water, love. I drank what I could find.”

“You should be careful. You can get dehydrated if you drink alcohol.”

“I’ll get something later.”

He gave his neighbor a wave and walked out into the street. No one was cooperating with his plan to get to work—he’d asked everyone he knew, and they’d all given the same answer. He looked at the Breitling on his wrist, saw that the New York Exchange would open in less than an hour.

“Might as well walk,” Charlie muttered to himself. Surely he would find a cab somewhere. Or, if need be, a bus.

He remembered Mrs. Shawbutt in her big straw hat. “Be careful of the sun,” he reminded himself. He went back to his house to get a cap from the front hall closet. It featured the logo of the St. Louis Cardinals, and it was the cap he wore when he lost at golf to Dearborne.

Charlie put the cap on his head. He buttoned his collar and straightened and tightened his tie. He looked at himself in the hall mirror that, surprisingly, had neither fallen nor cracked. Brushed scuffmarks off his shoes. He was ready for work.

He stepped over the gap between the house and the front portico—have to call his insurance people when he got to his office—and then he looked down at the half-empty bottle of Moet. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the bottle.

The heat of the day was already rising. Charlie could feel sweat gathering under his cap. He started down the street, the bottle swinging at the end of his arm. His stiff leg eased as he walked. He waved at the people he saw, people who had slept in their cars or on their lawns.

He turned right at the corner, drank some champagne, and kept on walking. The huge pillar of smoke loomed right ahead of him.

This street was much the same as his own. All the houses had been damaged; all the chimneys had fallen; two houses had collapsed. One of the houses that still stood had been burnt out. The gutters were full of water—apparently a water main had broken.

Charlie looked ahead, saw something disturbing ahead, slowed. He approached the strange sight with a frown.

Right across his path was a crack in the earth, cutting left and right across the street, over curbs and through yards, and beneath one partially collapsed home. The crack was about three feet wide, and five or six feet down had filled with black, silent water. The ground had dropped three feet on Charlie’s side, or risen on the other, because Charlie faced a little cliff of raw earth topped by broken asphalt. Charlie took a drink of the champagne and looked at the chasm. He paced uncertainly back and forth. It wasn’t that wide, he thought. He could cross it in one jump.

Charlie’s inner ear gave a lurch, and the ground trembled, just a little. Bubbles rose to the surface in the black water at the bottom of the chasm.

Charlie’s heart thudded in his chest. Weakness shivered through his limbs. He took another drink of the champagne.

“I am Lord of the Jungle,” he said. But in his mind all he could see was Megan’s body lying in his bedroom.

Tears burned his eyes. The chasm had cut clean across his world.

He didn’t remember when he turned around and began the walk home. But some time later he found himself standing on the walk outside his house, an empty Moet bottle in his hands. He sat behind the wheel of Megan’s car and picked up the cellphone that was lying on the seat and began to punch in numbers.

No one answered.

Prime Power.

Helicopters circled overhead, judging the correct approach to the helipad that Jessica’s people had chain-sawed and bulldozed across the road from the Post Exchange. Rotors flogged the air, beat at Jessica’s ears. She grinned.

She was in charge of this. It was glorious.

Things were coming together. Once the choppers discharged their cargo, which would include state-of-the-art field communications equipment, she could really take charge of her division.

“Finally got a meteorology report, General.” Her secretary, Nelda, had been working on this task, among others, ever since she’d finally walked on base at ten o’clock that morning in mud-streaked sweat pants and her most sensible shoes.

“Can you summarize?”

“A high-pressure system will start moving through early tomorrow morning. Forecast is cooler and gusty tomorrow, followed by several clear days.”

Jessica nodded. “Good,” she said. There would be a few good days for operations, at least, though she knew that there might be problems later on. A rotating high pressure front moving over the plains would, as it passed, pull a lot of hot, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico in its wake. When this air cooled it would dump a lot of rain on the western plains, which would increase the danger of flood. But there would be at least a few days for the flooded areas to drain first. That was good news.

“Any luck getting ahold of CERI?” Jessica asked.

“Nope. None.” Nelda had to shout over the throbbing of the helicopters. One of the aspects of the Corps’ earthquake plan involved coordination with the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis. CERI had not, however, been answering its phone.

Jessica suspected that the Center for Earthquake Research had been wiped out by earthquake. One of life’s little ironies.

“The city engineer’s office sent someone over to inquire about restoring Vicksburg’s electrical supply.” Jessica shook her head. “We don’t have enough generating capacity to do that.”

“He meant helping to repair the lines. We mostly get our power from that nuclear plant south of here.” Jessica stared at her. “From where?” she said.

Nelda stared back, only now absorbing the horror that Jessica felt rolling through her heart.

“But,” Nelda said, “surely it’s somebody’s job to look after the power plants.” Her eyes widened. “Isn’t it?” she said.

The thing about helicopters was the way gravity kept moving around. G forces went up, down, sideways, and sometimes in circles. The shifts from one state to the next were often very sudden. Jessica loved helicopters. But then she liked roller-coaster rides, too. She sat up front, in the copilot’s seat, where she could get a view of the world zooming past.

The pilot was happy to impress the general with a display of his skills. He skimmed his Bell Kiowa over the WES, banked, put the chopper’s nose down, and headed south. Adrenaline sang happily in Jessica’s veins.

Pity she’d never had time to learn how to fly one of these things.

“Just follow the river,” Jessica said. She watched with interest—this was the best view she’d had since the quake—as the Kiowa Warrior sped over the flat, tree-filled country below Vicksburg’s bluff. At least a third of the trees seem to have fallen. The roads were blocked with fallen timber and cut by crevasses or sudden uplifts. Of the few structures Jessica could see, most were heavily damaged, especially the larger buildings.

She clenched her teeth at the sight of the broken levees, the way the river continued to pour through the gaps. Those were USACE levees, damn it, and Corps levees hadn’t broken since the 1930s. And now when it happened, it was on Jessica’s watch.

She should have covered her ass. All it would have taken was a letter in her file, directed to her superiors, expressing concern about earthquake preparedness. “I was working on it from Day One,” she could have said, “but my superiors didn’t respond in time. And the record supports this.” Still, there was small comfort to be drawn. Jessica saw no sign of massive failure in the levees, no huge mile-long crevasses. The levees didn’t look as if they’d broken all at once; they showed every sign of having been weakened, not destroyed, in the quake. And then river water, with the weight of the whole Mississippi behind it, pushed inexorably into the levees’ weak points, strained the structures, crawled underneath to undermine the levees from below, put more pressure on them until at last they gave way. The flooding wouldn’t have been catastrophically sudden, and Jessica hoped this meant people had a chance to get away from the rising water.

It also meant that once the floods subsided, repair would be that much easier. The pilot’s voice grated on Jessica’s headphones. “There’s your power plant, General.” She looked up and saw the distinctive outline of a cooling tower rising above the trees, the graceful white double curves. But the grace was marred, she saw, part of it had peeled away like the rind of a fruit. Her heart gave a lurch. She wasn’t sure she was ready for this.

The Kiowa sped past the tower, and the pilot banked to give Jessica a view of the plant. Poinsett Landing was a wreck, most of its buildings broken, the river streaming through the wreckage. There was evidence of fire. The big black cube that held the reactor was intact, though—no shattered roof and pillar of murderous radioactive smoke a la Chernobyl, thank God—but the two big buildings leaning against the reactor, which she assumed were control structures, had clearly suffered degrees of damage. The pilot’s voice interrupted Jessica’s thoughts. “This isn’t a nuke plant, is it, General?”

“Yes. This is nuclear.”

“Should we be wearing moon suits? Shall I get us some altitude?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” She hoped.

“Yes, sir.”

Jessica noticed, however, that the Kiowa began to crab slightly away from the reactor complex. A little caution in the pilot’s hands. And then one of the hands pointed.

“Some survivors, General. On that little hill over there.”

The Kiowa rotated in space while maintaining its bank, and Jessica saw a clump of people—waving, jumping up and down, probably screaming their heads off—on a flat grassy hill near the perimeter fence.

“Call your outfit,” Jessica said. “Tell them we need a dustoff.” Larry Hallock let the others run waving and shouting as the Army helicopter roared overhead. He was too tired and hungry and sore to race around like a lunatic, so he just sat on the tailgate of Bill Henry’s camper pickup, cradled his arm, and waited.

The burned man had died in the night, screaming. Some of the injured were nearly comatose. No one had been able to help.

He had expected rescue before now. Someone in the Department of Energy, someone in the power company. He had figured he’d see the first helicopters silhouetted against the red dawn. Instead it had been hours. Things must be worse out there than he’d thought.

And while he waited, he’d seen that there was a current in the flood waters. Up till the morning they had been still, a calm brown lake that ringed the old Indian mound. But then the waters had begun to move. The debris that had been floating atop the water was carried away downstream, and as time passed the debris began moving by faster. Larry had watched to see if the level of the water was declining, if the current meant that the flood was draining away.

But the water level didn’t fall, and the current grew in power. Which meant that Poinsett Landing, the reactor vessel included, now sat on part of the bed of the Mississippi River. There was a flurry of people running to their vehicles, and then cars and trucks began to clear an area on top of the mound. The roar of the chopper increased to painful levels, a jet whine combined with the flogging of the rotors, and Larry felt blasts of wind on his face. The copter—it seemed pretty small for something that could make such a big noise—settled with surprising grace onto the cleared space of the mound.

Larry dropped off the pickup gate and shuffled toward the helicopter, holding his injured arm. His neck and shoulder throbbed. Some of the other people had suggested he’d broken a collarbone, but it was impossible to tell without an X ray.

A door slid open on the side of the helicopter, and an officer jumped out. A woman, Larry saw with some surprise. A short woman. A short woman with a flier’s helmet and Ray-Bans and camouflage fatigues and the stars of a general.

Larry blinked. When the government finally got around to moving, it moved with authority.

“Do you have any injured?” the woman general shouted. “And who is in charge?” Lieutenant Grimsley was a National Guard second lieutenant with washed-out blue eyes and a dusting of acne on his cheeks. “Sheriff,” he told Omar, “I’m supposed to tell you that we’re pulling out.”

“What?” Omar blinked at Grimsley sleepily.

Omar stood out in front of the courthouse, supervising the crews that were chainsawing away the fallen limbs of the lawn’s blackjack oaks. The old trees had taken a beating, and a couple of them were going to have to be cut down.

The Mourning Confederate, looking somberly down from his pillar, had survived without a scratch or a crack. Omar liked to think of it as an omen.

“The President has called up our outfit,” Grimsley said.

“We’re heading north to help restore order in Arkansas.” Grimsley seemed proud of this fact. Omar tried to clear the weariness from his mind. He had caught a couple hours’ sleep toward dawn, but he’d been wakened by an aftershock and the jolt of electricity the shock had put in his veins had kept him from getting back to sleep.

“But what about Spottswood Parish?” Omar asked. “We need you boys here.”

“Sorry, Sheriff. But things here are pretty much under control, and I guess the President figured we’d be more useful up north.”

Faggot President, Omar thought wearily. This was just like that asshole.

“When do you boys pull out?” he asked.

“Soon’s we can load up the trucks with seventy-two hours’ rations.”

“Well.” Omar offered his hand. “Good luck, son.”

They shook hands. “Thanks, Sheriff.”

A chainsaw stuttered as it caught an oakwood knot. Omar looked up, felt sweat trickle down the back of his neck.

He’d done his job, he figured. More than the President had. And voters would remember that come the next election.

Omar figured his career was right on track.

Omar was at the armory when the National Guard pulled out. All those guardsmen were voters—some were even his deputies—and he figured that it would be a good thing to pump a few hands as they loaded up.

The guardsmen were in battle dress and helmets, and they carried their rifles. All except one man, who Omar to his surprise recognized as Micah Knox.

“I’m heading north.” Knox grinned. “Your Guard are giving me a ride.”

“Great,” Omar said.

Knox indicated the heavy duffel bag on his shoulder. “I went by your house and picked up my stuff,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t.”

“Your house is okay, by the way. Your buddy Ozie was there with his trucks and jacks. He said that you and Winona can move back in tonight.”

“Great.” Omar looked at the duffel, at the way it weighed on the kid’s shoulder, and knew that Knox had retrieved his firearms and ammunition.

Well. At least he was taking the guns out of town.

“Hey, Sheriff! Hold still for a picture!”

Omar turned to see Sorrell Ellen of the Spottswood Chronicle pointing a camera. He sensed Knox fade quickly from the frame. Omar stepped in the other direction just as the camera flashed. Omar blinked as purple blooms filled his vision. “Dang,” Sorrell said. “You moved.”

“Why don’t you get a picture of me saying good-bye to one of my deputies?” Omar said.

“That’s good,” Sorrell agreed.

He led Sorrell toward one of the trucks parked on the gravel drive in front of the armory. He saw Micah Knox fading away behind another truck, his heavy duffel bearing down one thin shoulder.

“Do you have any comments on the emergency?” Sorrell asked.

“Just that I’m very proud of the way my department has responded,” Omar said. “We’ve kept order, helped save lives, maintained communications that were vital to the parish.” Sorrell jotted this down. “Several of your deputies are moving out with the Guard, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Aren’t you going to be short-handed?”

Omar left that unanswered as he spotted one of his deputies, Frank Schwinn, in the act of loading gear onto the truck. He and Schwinn paused for the photo, and by that time Sorrell had forgotten about his last question.

Deputies, Omar thought. He was going to need to make some more, and he figured he knew just who to call.

Hell, he was their Kleagle.

SIXTEEN

Jason poled Retired and Gone Fishin’ through the stillness of the trees. His passenger Nick had begun to drowse in one of the front seats. This was all right with Jason. He preferred to be alone with his thoughts. The cottonwoods gave way to pine, and the floods slowly ebbed, bringing the tops of bushes and saplings above the water. Other than Nick, he saw no human being.

Edge Living, Jason thought. He’d hung posters to Edge Living in his room, but he’d never known what Edge Living was: living like a refugee, bereft of food, water, and shelter; lost in a disaster that seemed to have overtaken the whole world.

That was the Edge, all right. And Jason didn’t want it anymore.

Eventually the boat floated up to an unbroken green levee stretching left and right across its path. Dozens of cows, white with black splotches, grazed on the levee’s grassy flanks, which they shared with large refugee flocks of birds. Jason looked in each direction and realized he’d floated into the channel of a small river. Turning right, he thought, would take him back to the Mississippi, and a left turn would take him inland. He poled the boat to the levee and felt the bow thud up its grassy bank. Nick opened his eyes. “What’s happening?” he said.

“Thought I’d go up the levee and look to see which way to go,” Jason said.

“I’ll do it,” Nick said.

Jason was sick of the boat and wanted to go himself, but Nick jumped out of the boat as if he wanted to make all the decisions, and so as Nick walked up the flank of the levee, Jason just sighed and leaned on his pole to keep the boat’s bow pressed firmly on the grass.

“More water on the other side,” Nick reported from the top. He looked inland, took a few more steps to get a better view. “Can’t see much but trees,” he said.

Jason scratched at the mud that coated his arm, sending flakes spiraling to the boat’s deck. Insects hummed about his ears.

And then there was a bellow, and a yell, and Nick came pelting back down the bank. “Jesusjesusjesus!” he panted, and Jason looked in surprise to see an enraged cow topping the levee. The cow paused for a moment, its head swinging back and forth in search of a target, and then it spotted Nick again, lowered its horns, and began to charge down the bank.

“Jesusjesusjesus!”

Nick shoved at the boat’s bow, pushed it into the water, and threw himself headlong across the foredeck. The cow paused partway down the flank of the levee, its forefeet spread in challenge. The boat swung out onto the water.

Jason collapsed in laughter, the pole clattering under his arm. Nick glared at him from the bows.

“God damn it! This isn’t funny!”

Laughter continued to erupt from Jason. The boat spun as it drifted across the flat, shimmering surface of the water.

Nick crawled across the foredeck and dropped into one of the seats. “It isn’t funny,” he insisted. “Bulls are dangerous.”

“That’s not a bull!” Jason laughed. He pointed. “It’s a cow! It’s got that bag thing between its legs!” The boat spun lazily in the water and gave Nick a good look at the cow. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. But cows have horns, too.”

This struck Jason as the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat as he sat on a corner of the stern while the laughter bent him double. Nick glowered for a long moment, then ventured a reluctant smile. “Well,” he said, “I’ve had no luck with wildlife today, that’s for sure.” Jason clutched his aching sides. Dried mud flaked off him like a brown blizzard. He ran out of air and his laughter ran dry. A hiccup straightened him up in surprise, and then he began laughing again. Laughter and hiccups alternated as the boat spiraled down the river. Finally the laughter faded.

“Sorry,” Jason said finally.

Nick looked resentfully at the cow. “I wish I could come back here and turn that cow into steaks.” Jason looked over his shoulder and remembered how hungry he was. He hiccuped. “Guess that’s what the cow was worried about,” he said.

Nick rubbed his eyes. “I think the cow was just crazy. That quake made everything crazy—people, animals, the river…” He shook his head. “Wish I’d kept that snake. Could’ve eaten it.” Jason looked at him. “Snake?”

“Never mind.” Nick sat up straighter, peered over the boat’s bows. “Are those cattails over there? Could you pole us closer?”

Cattails, Jason thought. Snakes. It occurred to him that his passenger could be as crazy as the cow. He hiccuped.

He picked up the pole and trailed one end overboard, like a brake, till the boat’s spinning motion ceased, and then he dug the pole into the creek bottom and propelled it toward the patch of cattails. The tails’ sodden heads were just above the water. Nick hung over the side of the boat and began pulling the cattails up from the bottom of the creek. He threw them flopping over the boat’s little foredeck. Jason watched Nick carefully in case he turned out to be crazy.

“Cattails are edible,” Nick said. “We can fill our stomachs with these.” Jason looked at the slimy plants lying on the foredeck. “You first.”

“Sure.” Nick reached for another fistful of cattail, pulled it from the river bottom. “I’ve eaten cattail plenty of times. When we visited my great-aunt in Mississippi, she’d fix us lots of wild greens. If we had some wild onion and poke-weed, we could have a salad.” He looked red-eyed over his shoulder at Jason.

“Poor folks’ salad,” he said, making his point. “Hold the boat steady, now.” Now it’s my fault I’m not poor, Jason thought. Listen asshole, I’m a lot poorer than you are. Bet you anything.

Jason put his weight on the pole and swung the boat left and right until Nick had pulled up a whole armful of plant matter. Then he poled off while Nick resumed his seat, rinsed off a cattail, and started eating the shoot near the root. “You can eat the soft part, see,” he said.

Jason nursed his hiccups and watched Nick warily. Nick tossed overboard the part of the cattail he wasn’t going to eat, then reached for another.

“We going upstream or down?” Jason asked. “What do you think?” He did not want to go back to the Mississippi. The river had destroyed his home, drowned his friend and probably his mother, had flung him down rapids and tried to kill him. He didn’t want to see that river again.

“If we go inland,” Nick said, “we don’t know where we’re going. We know what’s down the Mississippi. There are bound to be people there who can help us. If we go inland, we could wander around forever and never find anyone in better shape than we are.”

“The Mississippi’s full of rapids,” Jason said. “And we’d have to stick close to the bank because this pole won’t reach too far.”

Nick looked at the cattail in his fist. “I’ve got a daughter downstream, in Arkansas. I’d like to get to her.” Jason looked at him. “You’re not planning on going all the way in this boat, are you?”

“Well,” eating the cattail, “before we decide, maybe we should take stock of what we’ve got.”

“I’ve got a telescope,” Jason said. ” That’ll get us to Arkansas all right.” Nick gnawed on his cattail stalk as he began looking under hatch covers. “What’s this red thing?” he said, looking at the Astroscan.

“That’s my telescope.”

“Really? It’s funny looking.” He opened another hatch, pulled out a heavy metal box, and opened the lid. It was filled with fishing tackle.

“Well, there we go,” Nick said.

Jason looked at the tackle box in surprise. He hadn’t seen it there last night, not in the dark. “No fishing poles,” he said.

“Don’t need ’em. There’s spare line—we can just hang it over the end of the boat and troll.”

“Okay.” Jason felt annoyance creeping round his thoughts. Why was Nick messing around with his boat?

He should have found that stuff.

“So we catch a fish,” Jason said, “how we gonna cook it?”

“Maybe we’ll have sushi.”

“Gaah.” Jason made a face. He wished Nick would just sit down and let him pole. He had done fine before Nick came on board.

Nick grinned. “No, we shouldn’t eat freshwater fish raw. Not unless it’s a choice between that or starvation. We could get flukes that would eat our liver.”

“Get what?”

“Flukes. Little worms.”

“So we don’t get to eat raw fish,” Jason said. “It breaks my heart.” Nick opened more hatches. Water sloshed. “We can keep fish alive in these cages till we’re ready to eat them.”

Another hatch. “Batteries,” Nick mused. “Why batteries?”

“To start the motor? Run lights at night?” Jason wasn’t quite able to keep sarcasm out of his voice. Nick bent over, tracing the cables from the batteries. He looked under the boat’s front casting deck, then gave a grunt. He reached beneath the deck, grunted, pulled something from brackets. What lay in Nick’s hands looked like a little outboard, a tiny motor at one end, a propeller at the other. And an electric cord wrapped in a neat coil and tied.

Nick jumped up on the front deck, connected the motor to a bracket right on the bow. Plugged the cord into an ordinary electric socket sitting flush on the deck. Then turned a switch. There was a kind of a muffled thud, and Jason felt the motion of the boat change. It straightened its course and picked up speed.

“We’ve got a little electric motor, see,” Nick said. “It must be for trolling.” Jason let the pole hang from the end of his arm. “You mean we’ve had power all along?” he said.

“More or less. We shouldn’t use it too much, though, we don’t have any way of recharging the batteries.” Jason felt despair wrap around him like a black cloak. If he’d known the motor was there—if he’d just had the brains to search the boat until he’d found it—he could have got the boat moving last night and saved his mother. Or if he’d accepted any of old Mr. Regan’s offers to take him fishing, he would have known the motor was there, and he could have used it right away.

And his mother would be alive and they would be on their way back to Los Angeles and he wouldn’t be on this stupid boat with a stupid stranger.

“Shit!” he shouted. He raised his pole and threw it as far as he could. The water received it with a splash. Nick looked at him in surprise. “Something wrong?”

Jason threw himself onto one of the cockpit seats. “Nothing,” he said. He put his head in his hands. He was an idiot, he thought. A total fuckdroid. If he’d just known the motor was there… The boat made almost no noise as Nick edged it toward the floating pole. He shut off the electric motor as the pole bumped against the side, and then he reached for it, pulled it in, held the pole dripping in his hands.

“Maybe I’ll pole for a while,” he said. “That okay with you?”

“Sure.” Jason edged away to give him room.

Nick looked at him. “Would you rather go inland, Jason? Is that what you’d rather? Because I’ll go where you want—it’s your boat.” He sounded as if he grudged that fact.

“I don’t care,” Jason said.

“I think it’s safe enough on the big river now,” Nick went on. “We can use the electric motor to get out of trouble.”

“I don’t care,” Jason insisted. The river, he decided, was his fate. It had destroyed his whole existence; if it wanted to take his life as well, along with that of the stupid stranger, then it was welcome to do so. Jason moved forward, slouched in the shotgun seat. “I’m going to take a nap.” He closed his eyes and tried to get comfortable.

He could sense Nick hesitating, on the verge of saying something more, but then came the splash as the pole dipped, and a surge as the boat began to move. Water chimed at the bow. Then there was a series of frantic splashes as Nick tried to adjust the boat’s course, but the boat was traveling too fast for the pole to get a purchase on the bottom, so Nick had to wait for it to slow down before he could pole again.

Jason smiled to himself. The boat was heavy and awkward to move with a pole. It had taken him a long time to work out the proper procedure—give the boat a push, then let the pole hang over the stern and use it like a rudder to keep the boat on the right course until the boat began to run out of momentum. Jason saw no reason why he should instruct Nick in this procedure. Let him discover it on his own. More poling, more splashing. Shuddering and a grinding noise as the side scraped bark from a tree. And what’ll you do, Jason thought at Nick, when the pole gets stuck in the mud?

This had happened to Jason. Suddenly the pole stuck fast, but the boat kept moving out from under him, and as the adrenaline surged through his veins he had to make an instant decision whether to hang onto the pole, or stay in the boat. Fortunately he’d made the right decision and stayed with the boat instead of hanging above the flood atop the pole. And when he did that, when he let go of the pole, it had fallen and clattered into the boat on its own accord. And that’s what had happened every time since. Push, surge. Push, surge. Nick seemed to be getting the hang of it, and faster than Jason had. Insects whined about Jason’s ears. Go bite the cows, he told them mentally. Then he heard an alarmed cry from Nick. The boat swayed. There was a clatter as the pole bounced off the stern, and then muttered curses as Nick picked up the pole. Obviously the pole had got stuck in the mud, and Nick had been forced into the same split-second decision that Jason had faced earlier. Nick had chosen correctly. Jason didn’t know whether he was sorry about that or not. Strange kid, Nick thought. Alone on the river with a bass boat, a telescope, and an attitude. Nick watched Jason’s head slumped down on his chest. The boy was exhausted.

Mother dead and father in China. Nick didn’t know whether to believe it or not. But he wasn’t going to challenge the kid’s story—if it was true, if Jason had just lost his mother in the quake, then Nick wasn’t going to intrude on the kid’s feelings.

His own feelings were screwed up enough, he figured, without his trying to cope with someone else’s. Push, withdraw, steer. Push, withdraw, steer. His wounded arm ached at each thrust of the pole, but the pain eased as the muscle worked at the simple, repetitive task. Nick tried to let the motion relax him, but sometimes he saw the trees tremble in an aftershock, or his memory flashed on Viondi dying, or he saw a thick creeper that reminded him of the water moccasin, and a wave of rage would shake his body like a terrier shaking a rat. He found himself standing on the boat’s afterdeck with his hands clenched around the pole, his jaw muscles working, his eyes glancing left and right for an enemy… He told himself to relax.

And he would relax. He was too exhausted to stay tense every second. But then he would hear echoing in his mind the voice of the crazy cop, Stay away from my family, motherfucker, and next thing he knew he would be panting like a wounded animal desperate for shelter.

Relax, he told himself. Relax. Just push the damn boat. That’s all the situation calls for. He felt something wet run down his left arm. He must have reopened the wound. He kept moving and tried to ignore the sensation.

Gold shimmered on the water’s surface like light on the rippling scales of a snake. He kept the levee on his left. At one point he came across an area where the levee had been washed away for a hundred yards or so. It looked, from the cross-section, as if it were made of little more than sand. And suddenly the trees opened up, and there was the Mississippi, framed by hulking levee banks on either side. The sight took Nick’s breath away, and in an instant he deeply regretted his notion of heading toward the big river instead of inland.

Too late now, he told himself. Got to get to Arlette. And he drove on, to the wide, debris-strewn river that opened up before him.

Jason awoke as the bass boat took the chop of the Mississippi. “Whassup?” he said as the bow grated against a torn, leafy bough.

“We’re in the big river now,” Nick said.

Jason blinked sleepily at the wide expanse of water. “Well,” he said, “I told you it was a mess.” Nick had to agree. The Mississippi was enormous, a mile or more across, a swollen gray mass covered with debris but utterly without life. He couldn’t remember ever looking at the Mississippi below Cairo without seeing traffic—usually there were towboats upstream and down—but now there wasn’t a single boat on the river. The only trace of humanity was wreckage: barges that had come aground here and there, stacks of lumber that had once been parts of buildings, cushions and foam boxes and an entire grain silo—one of the modern all-metal types, with the flattish conical roof—that rolled along the river like a seal with its nose above water.

Navigation lights were half-submerged or toppled. Stone piers and groins, built out into the water to help control the current, had collected colossal amounts of debris and turned into menacing obstacles studded with broken branches and roots as sharp as knives. Buoys bobbed in the water, but Nick had no idea what they could be marking.

Most alarming was the amount of timber. Trees covered the surface of the river, like an entire forest taking a holiday swim. Tangles of timber piled up in drifts on the shore and on hidden reefs. Twisted roots threatened like black fangs. A lot of the timber seemed very old—it looked as if it had lain on the bottom of the river for centuries until the quake had thrown it to the surface. The river might have looked like this two hundred years ago, Nick thought. Before anyone ever tried to tame it.

“Hey!” Jason was pointing ahead, downstream. “Look! Is that a towboat right there?” Nick’s heart leaped at the sight of a boat’s superstructure standing against the treeline. Food! he thought. Safety. A bed. And communication—surely they had a way he could reach Arlette.

“All right!” Jason said. “We’re out of this!” He stood, jumped on the foredeck, began waving his arms and shouting. Nick felt a grin break out on his face. My God, he thought, maybe I can take a shower. Suddenly a shower seemed the most desirable thing in the world.

And then, as he looked at the boat over Jason’s shoulder, he felt his joy begin to fade. That boat didn’t look right.

Jason’s shouts faded. He lowered his arms.

The river brought them toward the towboat. It wasn’t even a boat anymore, it was a wreck come aground on a shoal of debris. It looked as if the river had rolled the boat completely over at least once. The stacks were gone, and the roof of the pilothouse punched down on top of the superstructure as if a giant had sat on it. The boat was wrapped in steel cable and covered with river mud, and timber and debris were piled up on its upstream flank.

Defeat oozed through Nick’s veins. Jason stood staring at the boat, and Nick could see all the vitality go out of his body, the shoulders slumping. “I thought we were rescued,” he said.

“Soon,” Nick said, his voice sounding hollow. “Soon.”

From the river, Jason could see surprisingly little. Above the flooded treeline to the east stood the Chickasaw Bluffs, forested slopes with little habitation. Landslides marred the bluffs, raw earth and rumbled trees. To the west were trees standing in the flood: there was a levee back there somewhere, but it was out of sight.

Jason and Nick managed to keep the boat away from the obstacles without great effort. Nick hung fishing lines from the stern in hopes of catching supper. The sun began to fall away westward. In order to calm the pain of hunger, Jason tried some of Nick’s cattails. They weren’t bad, he decided. And there, suddenly, it was. Memphis. It emerged quite suddenly from behind the tail of a long overgrown island, a sudden panorama that sent relief singing through Jason. Memphis, perched above the river on Chickasaw Bluff Number Four, its glittering stainless steel pyramid in the foreground. A pang touched Jason’s heart as he saw the huge thirty-two-story pyramid. It was the pyramid that his mother had believed would summon cosmic forces to keep them all safe from the destruction that would wreck California.

Whatever cosmic forces were summoned by the pyramid, they certainly hadn’t helped Memphis much. Many of the buildings were mere rubble, and those still standing had all suffered significant damage. Even modern buildings that had withstood the earthquake were blackened with fire. Bright tongues of flame still licked from some of the shattered windows. Pillars of black smoke rose from deep in the city. Northward, a blue-green water tower leaned at a desperate angle. Near the waterfront, grain elevators lay shattered and covered with soot. It looked as if they’d exploded.

Jason’s gaze lifted to the M-shaped span of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, which looked like a giant McDonald’s logo vaulting across the Mississippi from Memphis to Arkansas. Though the towers still stood, the approaches had partly collapsed, and pieces were missing from the main span. A part of the roadway dangled precariously from the span, tons of steel and asphalt that looked as if they were ready to drop into the water at the merest touch.

Stay the hell away from that, Jason thought.

“Let’s get to the shore,” he said. “Let’s get off this boat.”

“Check it out with the scope,” Nick said, “and find us a place to land.” Landing, on examination with the Astroscan, was going to be hard to do. Between the boat and the broken bridge stretched a long line of wreckage scattered the east side of the river. And to Jason’s horrified surprise, he recognized it as belonging to Mud Island—recently renamed Festival Island—the long island park that lay between the Mississippi and Memphis proper. The island where he and his mother had, a few weeks ago, spent a pleasant spring afternoon was now almost entirely covered by gray water.

Emergency sirens sounded over the air. A helicopter throbbed overhead.

The dam that controlled the Wolf River, which ran between Memphis and Mud Island, had broken, and the Mississippi had backed up into the Wolf River channel. The massive stone bulwarks that kept Mud Island secure from the high river were shattered, and Mud Island Park had been swept by river water from one end to the other. The monorail and bridges leading to the island were twisted wrecks; the World War II bomber Memphis Belle lay crushed under its shattered white dome; water drifted through the lower levels of the River Center. Debris had collected along every bit of wreckage, forming jagged driftwood islands. The river foamed along a hedge of wooden fangs.

“We can’t land in that,” Nick said as he inspected the shore with the Astroscan. “We’d get stuck in the wreckage.”

Jason looked at the ominous, shattered span of the DeSoto and suppressed a shiver. “That means going under the bridge.”

“We’d better pick the safest part of the channel, then.”

Which, they determined with the scope, seemed about a third of the way across the river from the east bank. The overhead roadway looked intact at that point, with no dangling slabs or girders. The river was moving sluggishly, and between the electric motor and paddling with pieces of lumber they’d pulled from the river, they managed to position the boat on the approach.

The bridge came closer. Water roared around the piers. The air tasted sharply of smoke. Beyond the DeSoto Bridge, on a broad drive at the river’s edge, flashed the lights of a dozen emergency vehicles. Nick was concentrating on the bridge overhead, eyes narrowed as he scanned the roadway for anything that could fall on them. The hum of the little electric motor was obliterated by the roar of water against the bridge piers. The sound of water against the piers was very loud. Jason trailed his pole over the stern to keep the boat from swinging.

For a long moment Jason looked straight up at the web-work of girders that supported the roadway. His heart throbbed in his chest. “Not today, O Lord,” he heard Nick murmur. And then they were past, out of the shadow of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.

There were more bridges ahead, Jason saw. They should come ashore before they had to risk another bridge. He felt a fresh wind on his cheeks.

“We’re moving faster,” he said. “Do you feel it?”

A pair of loud bangs echoed from the girders above. Nick gave a start, looked forward. “Oh shit,” he said, and stood to grab the telescope, pointing it toward the flashing lights on Riverside Drive. Jason looked at the older man in surprise. Nick’s hands shook as he aimed the Astroscan. There was a wild look in the eye he put to the telescope.

“What’s wrong?” Jason said. He angled the pole to turn the boat toward the eastern shore.

“No!” Nick shouted. “Don’t turn!” His knuckles were taut over the plastic housing of the telescope.

“What’s wrong?” Jason straightened his course again.

Nick didn’t answer. Jason heard him panting for breath as he stared through the scope. “Damn!” Nick stared at Jason, and Jason wanted to take a step backward, away from the violence he saw in Nick’s reddened eyes.

“We’re not landing here,” Nick said. He vaulted onto the front deck, slammed the electric motor’s tiller over to turn the boat toward midstream. Jason stared.

“We’re not going to Memphis?” Jason stammered. “What—?”

“Look for yourself!”

“I—wait.” He pulled in his pole and made his way forward, put his eye to the scope, saw only sky. He readjusted the Astroscan, saw the line of vehicles on the river’s edge, police and an ambulance, uniformed men standing casually in clumps nearby. Whatever emergency had brought them there, the crisis seemed to be over.

Jason looked at Nick. “So?”

“You hear those shots?” Nick said.

Jason was thunderstruck. “Shots? Those were shots?”

Nick jumped into the cockpit, sat crouched down behind the broken windscreen as if to make himself less conspicuous. “Look down near the water,” he said.

Jason put his eye to the scope again. The cops still stood and were just standing in groups. They certainly didn’t look as if they were being shot at, or had just shot somebody. He panned the scope closer to the water, searched among the wreckage of the shore, and his heart jumped into his throat. There were bodies there. Two men, their bodies dragged just clear of the water. Both men were black.

“You sure they’re shot?” Jason asked.

“You heard the shots, right?”

“I heard—” He hesitated. “You sure those were shots?” Those men could have drowned, he wanted to say, they could be off a boat, maybe the police are just hauling them out of the water, but the words froze in his throat at the sight of Nick’s look, at the intensity that made Jason shiver.

“I’ve heard a lot of shots lately,” Nick said. “I should know what they sound like.”

“I—” The words stopped up in Jason’s mouth again. Nick was crazy, he thought. Nick was a criminal. Maybe he’d escaped from a prison or a chain gang or something.

The Mississippi tugged them with increasing force. The river was growing narrower, and the water had to run faster as a result. Jason looked in alarm at the bridge ahead—no, he saw, not just one bridge, but three of them very close together. None of them seemed to be in very good shape. Fallen spans were plain to see. He didn’t want to get anywhere near them.

“Listen,” Jason said finally. “They’re police, okay? There are ambulances there—medics. They can get you fixed up.” He pointed at the three broken bridges clustered just downstream. “Just look at the bridges!” he shouted.

Nick’s mouth was set in a firm line. The cables on his neck stood out. “Do you own this boat?” he demanded. “I know I don’t. That means that this boat is loot, and we are looters. In emergencies they shoot looters.” He looked at the flashing lights on the shore, his face hard as stone. “I’m not going to get shot.”

“But—” Jason’s mind whirled. “What—we’re not going to attack them. We’re—” Nick looked at him again, red-rimmed eyes searching Jason from head to foot. “Maybe you’d be okay,” he said. “You’re young, you’re white. But it’s open season on niggers out there, and I’m not going to float right up to them and get my ass shot.”

Jason’s blood turned hot. His heart churned in his chest. He gave a swift glance to the shore, bit his lip as he tried to decide whether he should swim for it. There was at least a third of a mile of water between him and the shore, and the water was full of debris—he’d have to dodge entire trees, with their roots and branches, and other wreckage as well. If he got tangled, there’d be no one to rescue him. Nick’s strong hand clamped on his wrist. “Don’t think it,” he said. “Don’t jump.” Fear shot through Jason as he realized that Nick had read his thoughts. Jason tried to snatch his arm back, but Nick’s adult grip was like a trap of spring steel that had closed around his wrist.

“Stop it,” Nick said. His voice was deep and hard.

Terror burned hot in Jason. He tugged again, shouted “Let me go!”

“Sit down!”

“Let me go! I’m not your kid!”

Nick’s steel grip forced Jason down, down into the seat next to Nick. Nick’s eyes blazed. Jason saw the sweat that gleamed on Nick’s forehead, the scratches and insect bites that marred his skin, the blood that flushed the eyewhites.

“You sit,” Nick said. “You sit right here.” His voice was fierce in its intensity.

“You’re kidnapping me! You can’t do this!”

“Just sit!” Nick leaned closer to Jason and hissed, “I’m not gonna die for you!” The words froze Jason to his seat. A chill ran up his spine. His mother was dead, he knew, because of his ignorance, because he didn’t know how to operate the boat and save her. So maybe he didn’t know anything about this situation, maybe Nick knew better than he did what was safe and what wasn’t. He stopped struggling, turned away. Felt despair clutch at his throat. What did it matter if Nick was crazy? It was only what Jason deserved. “I don’t care,” he managed to say. “Do what you want.” Nick held onto his wrist for another few burning seconds, and then Jason felt the grip relax. The wind whirled through Jason’s hair as the river sped faster. He didn’t care. Let Nick be in charge, if that’s what he wanted.

Flotsam ground against the boat’s hull. Nick pulled the electric motor out of the water to keep it from being wrecked in a collision. Knifelike roots threatened, then were swept away. The bridges’ broken spans, piled on the bottom of the river, had attracted other debris. There were now islands beneath the spans, brandishing roots and branches and covered with foam, and the river had been compressed into thundering narrow streams, rapids almost.

And then a shadow passed overhead, and Jason’s heart lurched. He looked up to see that they were already passing beneath the three bridges, and moving on a current of white foam. For a moment of paralyzing terror he looked up at a dangling set of railroad tracks, at a boxcar hanging from a stalled train as if about to launch itself down the tracks into Jason’s lap. burlington northern, he read on the car, and then it was gone.

Jason sat up with a jerk. The boat bounced in the chop. Spray splashed Jason’s face. Nick stood up behind the useless steering wheel, the pole in his hand.

Another shadow flashed overhead, and then the bridges were behind them. To Jason’s surprise the speed and the chop only increased. The boat slewed sideways, and a lot of water came aboard. Nick poled frantically to get the boat pointed downstream again.

“Could use a little help here, Jason,” he said.

Fuck you, Jason thought, but he stood anyway and looked for a piece of lumber to help steer. Then he looked ahead and felt his heart lurch to a stop.

Ahead was a vista of white water and fire-blackened iron.

The Harbor of Memphis was the second-largest inland port in America, after New Orleans. More than ten million tons of cargo moved through its facilities every year. The terrain on which it was built was largely artificial, created when the Memphis Harbor Project built a causeway and dike connecting the mainland to the 32,000-acre Presidents Island just south of the old nineteenth-century Harahan Railroad Bridge. The slack water below the causeway became Memphis’s principal harbor, lined from one end to the other with the evidence of the city’s booming trade: Memphis Milling, Petroleum Fuel and Terminal Company, Archer-Daniels-Midland Grain Company and Riverport, Helm Fertilizer Company, Ashland Chemical, Marathon Oil, Memphis Marine, Chemtech Industries, Memphis Molasses, MAPCO Petroleum, Riceland Foods, Vulcan Chemicals. All the boats and barges that serviced all this commerce. And amid all this, under the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Navy’s Surface Warfare Center. M1 swept through this collection of industry with an efficiency the Surface Warfare Center could only envy. The causeway was torn, the dike destroyed. The river poured through the wreckage, through the oil and gasoline pouring from torn tanks, through the chemical stew that spilled from terminal facilities and from capsized barges. Oceans of diesel fuel mixed with tons of spilled nitrate fertilizer, creating the explosive combination known to terrorist truck-bombers throughout the world.

Of course it caught fire. It was impossible that it would not. One spark, one little flame, one arc of electricity, one overheated exhaust pipe… no human agency could have prevented the catastrophe that followed.

And so the Harbor of Memphis burned long into the night, explosions flaring bright at the base of a towering 10,000-foot-high mushroom of black smoke. Grain silos flamed like broken rockets on shattered launch pads. Boats and barges were transformed into gutted hulks. Steel melted like wax in the heat. Aluminum burned like old newspaper. And through it all poured the Mississippi, spreading the flaming waters far downstream.

The fires were mostly out now, the fuel burned up. All that was left was wreckage, the blackened girders, broken concrete, shattered buildings, and razed boats caught on the black waterswept shore of the Island of the Dead.

Nick Ruford looked at the white water ahead of the boat, felt spray touch his face. His heart hammered against his ribs. “My God,” he muttered, and clutched the steering pole more tightly.

“Get a paddle!” he shouted, but Jason was already in motion, grabbing one of the broken-off pieces of lumber he’d propped in the cockpit. Jason crawled onto the foredeck, ready to fend off any of the fire-blackened structures that were pitching closer with each heave of the river. The air reeked of chemicals and burning.

Nick stroked with the pole, tried to keep the boat in mid-channel, but a current seized the boat regardless of his efforts and whirled it toward Presidents Island. He and Jason frantically beat at the water, trying to drive the boat away from obstructions. There was a grinding cry of metal as the boat dragged itself across a submerged obstacle, and the boat lurched, pivoting on whatever had caught it. Nick staggered, felt himself hang over the edge for a perilous instant, one arm windmilling for balance… the boat lurched the other way, and Nick stumbled toward safety. The world spun giddily around him as the bass boat whirled in the current, and he sank to his knees on the afterdeck in a more stable position. Jason was paddling furiously, trying to check the boat’s spin. Nick tried to assist, dipping the steering pole into the water as a brake. When the boat stabilized, it was heading stern-first down the channel, and Nick had to turn around to see what was coming.

The prow of a barge loomed up in their path, a wall of fire-blackened iron.

Nick gave a shout and raised his pole to fend the barge off like a knight raising his lance at a joust. The impact almost threw him back into the cockpit. The stern of Retired and Gone Fishin’ slammed into the barge with a clang of metal, and the boat swung broadside to the current, pinned against the iron wall of the barge. The blackened iron loomed over their heads. Whatever had burned the barge had burned hot, Nick saw; it had left melted steel droplets frozen on the hull like candle wax. Spray filled the air. The boat was pinned against the barge, unable to move. White water surged close to the gunwale on the upstream side. Nick looked upstream, saw a tree whirling in the current, roots flashing in the air like steel blades. If it’s caught in the same current we are, Nick thought, it’ll come right at us and squash us against the barge like bugs.

“Jason! Do like this!” He pressed his hands to the barge’s bow, then pushed out with his legs, tried to prop himself like a bridge between the bass boat and the barge. “We walk it out!” he said. “See?” Jason imitated him, sprawling against the barge wall to drive the boat back with his feet. The steel was still hot to the touch, and its rough surface tore Nick’s palms. He and Jason began walking the boat off the barge’s prow, the bass boat moving in lurches as their palms marched like unsteady feet across the flat bow of the barge. Nick looked over his shoulder, saw the tree swooping closer.

“Move!” he shouted. The boat shifted under him and he almost fell, almost pitched head-first into the foaming gap between the bass boat and the barge. He caught himself at the last instant, his heart like a fist in his throat.

The boat thrust its nose out in the current, and with a heave of his arms Nick flung the barge away from him. The bass boat pitched in sudden motion, and Nick staggered and dropped to one knee for balance. The blackened side of the barge swept past. Behind him, Nick heard thunder as the tree crashed like a battering ram into the bows of the barge.

Nick had no time to feel relief. A line of pipes loomed in front of him, and he reached for the pole to fend them off. “Left!” he shouted. “Turn us left!”

The pipes swept past before he could make more than a few strokes with the pole. He had no idea whether the paddling helped or not. The air stank of diesel fuel. Ruptured metal tanks, flame-scorched, loomed above the port. Three towboats, burned to the water line, lay in the heaving water like corpses rolling in the tide. Another pipe swept past, its broken end gushing flame and a stain of black smoke. The boat tried to swing broadside the current. Nick struck the water to keep the boat stern-foremost. Then the boat began to whirl dizzily as it was caught in a sudden eddy, and Nick could only drop to hands and knees and try to hang on. There was a crash as the boat struck floating debris, and then Retired and Gone Fishin’ rebounded, spinning in the opposite direction—Nick’s stomach lurched—

then there was a brassy metallic shriek as the boat struck its starboard side against a pier stanchion. The starboard side heaved up, and Nick clutched the gunwale as the boat tried to dump him out. Foaming water poured over the port gunwale, filling the cockpit and driving the port side farther into the water. Nick looked at Jason huddled in the water at the bottom of the cockpit, the boy’s eyes wide as he gasped for air amid the foam. Jason’s weight was driving the port side farther into the water. In another moment the boat would capsize.

“Up!” Nick shouted. “Get on the high side!” His feet scrabbled on the deck as he tried to heave himself up the starboard side, where his weight would help to stabilize the craft. Jason stared at him from amid the flying foam, and then he stood and climbed up the nearly vertical deck, his feet bracing against the cockpit seats as he threw his weight onto the high side of the boat.

Nick pulled himself up over the gunwale—Jason scrambled beside him—and then Nick threw a leg over the side of the bass boat as he tried to shift his weight still further. Retired and Gone Fishin’ trembled for a long heartbeat on the brink of oblivion. And then the weight of its occupants told, and with a cry of metal the starboard side fell into the water and the boat spun free of the obstruction. Nick had been ready for this, and threw himself back inboard as soon as he felt the boat shift under him. But Jason was unprepared—Nick heard a sudden cry—and he looked up to see Jason pitch almost head-first into the white water, and he reached out a hand and closed it around the boy’s flailing wrist. Jason snapped back to the boat with a wrench that Nick could only hope had not dislocated the boy’s arm. Jason stared up at Nick in shock, his eyes dilated black with terror. Jason’s free hand clamped on the gunwale. The boat spun around Jason’s weight as if it were an anchor. Jason gave a heave, a wrench, and tried to haul himself inboard. Nick tried to get his free hand on the boy’s collar and failed. Jason strained, a gasp of pain fighting its way past his teeth, and then his hand slipped from the slick metal gunwale and he fell back into the water.

Nick sprawled across the afterdeck gasping for air, still hanging onto Jason by the one wrist. Do this right, he told himself. Do this right or die with the boy right now. It was you got him into this. Nick rose to his knees, grabbed Jason under one armpit, then the other. The world spun around him.

“Kick!” he commanded, and heaved. Jason gave a cry and flailed the water with his feet. Pain shot through Nick’s wounded arm as he tried to pull the boy aboard the boat by main strength. Strength failed. Nick gasped in air as pain shrieked through his limbs, and then he let Jason fall back into the water.

He blinked foam from his eyes and tried to think. It wasn’t the right angle, he thought, he was pulling with the wrong muscles. Feet were stronger than arms. He needed to use his feet.

He looked up and saw a blackened metal pier swirling closer. Sharp driftwood daggers brandished in air. With cold horror Nick realized that if he didn’t get Jason back into Retired and Gone Fishin’ he would be impaled on the driftwood spines by the weight of the bass boat.

Nick gave a yell and lurched as he got his right foot under him. Then the left. “Now kick!” he screamed, and as Jason thrashed with his feet Nick lunged backward with every muscle in his body, and pulled Jason from the foaming water to land on top of him.

Jason gasped for breath, his arms floundering. “Hang on,” Nick told him, and then there was a wrenching crash as the boat piled into the pier, as wooden spears came lunging over the boat. And then the boat bounded away from the pier, whirling into safer water. Nick rolled Jason off him and clutched for something to steer with.

The nightmare journey had only begun.

It took half an hour to clear the five-mile-long port channel. There was no time for Jason or Nick to absorb the colossal scope of the damage—there was scarcely time to react at all as the river tried to run them against piers or pipes, burned-out towboats, or whole rafts of barges tangled in steel cable. Nick fended off one obstacle after another, lunging with his stick, sobbing with weariness. All he could see of the port were glimpses caught in the moments between frantic activity: the silhouette of a broken grain tower against the horizon; a blackened crater, half-filled with water, that marked an explosion. In the back of his throat lodged the reek of burning, the reek of chemicals, the reek of hot metal. He hoped that none of it was the reek of burned flesh.

Nick lunged, pushed off, poled, paddled. Water foamed over the jagged steel that lined the waterway. When they passed the port and entered the Tennessee Chute that dumped them back into the main channel, they gave up trying to control their direction and just hung on for dear life. Waves poured over them as they clutched the gunwale of their spinning boat.

They never noticed, as the white water lessened and they found themselves on the calmer surface of the Mississippi, that they had just passed the broken, burned, flooded, and abandoned remains of the Memphis District headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the organization entrusted with the control of water for this part of the Mississippi.

You had to say one thing for the man, Jessica thought: he was tough. Just a few moments after one of the paramedics had set his broken collarbone, given him some aspirin, equipped him with a sling made from a dish towel, and handed him a breakfast MRE, a Meal Ready to Eat, Larry Hallock was back at the helipad with some of his crew, ready to be flown back to Poinsett Landing to make a proper survey of the damage to the nuclear power station. He was flying in a big Sikorsky, with an amphibious hull that could float him anywhere he needed to go.

All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on the way to his own family, so Jessica didn’t even have to detail one of her own.

“Good luck,” she said, there being little else she could offer.

A crewman took Larry’s good arm and helped him into the chopper. Jessica stepped back and waved as the Sikorsky lifted from the grassy pad.

Her office, minus walls and her collection of diplomas, had been recreated in one corner of the headquarters tent. The scent of old canvas and fresh grass was invigorating. The tent’s sides were rolled up for light and ventilation, and from Jessica’s corner she had an excellent view of the bustling techs setting up her state-of-the-art satellite communications rig.

Working for an organization with the resources of the Defense Department was sometimes perfectly awesome.

“Jess?” It was Pat, with the portable computer in hand. “I’ve got a selection of those photos from NASA and NOAA.”

“Set the ’puter down here.”

Once Jessica saw the pictures, she knew why she hadn’t heard from Memphis or St. Louis. The rubble that was St. Louis was practically an island, the Missouri flooding toward it from the north and west, the Mississippi from the east. Much of Memphis was covered by a cloud of smoke, and what she could see through the cloud looked like rubble. She looked at the photos from the Harbor of Memphis, and she heard her breath hiss from between her teeth.

“God damn,” she whispered to herself. “I was afraid of this.” Natural disasters do not just have a single result. There was a whole chain of consequences: earthquakes cause fires, fires cause deaths, broken levees cause floods, floods cause evacuations. And industry, destroyed by earthquake, flood, or fire, had levels of consequence all its own. Jessica feared she was going to have to call the President soon and advise him to do something she knew very well he would not want to do. She didn’t want to have to do that: powerful people had been known in the past to execute the messengers who told them about problems they didn’t want to know about. What Jessica badly wanted was a choice. She had a feeling the situation wasn’t going to give her one. But she would give it all the opportunity she could. She would lay on a helicopter flight for tomorrow morning, and do the research with her own eyes and mind. And then, if necessary, she would call the President and give him his orders.

SEVENTEEN

The second helicopter thundered into sight just as Larry Hallock was returning from his inspection of the Poinsett Landing station. Larry didn’t pay it much attention. He was returning in a rubber raft to the big Sea Stallion helicopter that had brought him out here, which sat on the water and had to keep its rotor turning to maintain its position against the current. Even though Larry was just a passenger in the rubber boat, the chop raised on the water by the downblast from the Sikorsky’s six huge titanium-edged composite rotor blades was enough to keep his head down, and his mind firmly on keeping his seat in the raft.

Besides, he assumed the second helicopter was another military outfit.

It was after two crewmen, careful to avoid his damaged left arm, helped him into the Sikorsky by its crew that one of them said, “We have a radio call for you, sir. From the other helicopter.” Larry made his way forward, and one of the crewmen handed him a headset. “Go ahead and talk, sir,” he said—shouted, rather—as Larry put the earphones over his ears.

“Larry Hallock here,” Larry said. With his right hand, the one he could use freely, he pressed the right foam pads over his ear so as to hear the reply over the thunder of the Sea Stallion’s rotor.

“Larry? This is Emil Braun. Are we ever glad to finally get ahold of you!” Larry only vaguely remembered Emil Braun, who worked for the power company that owned the Poinsett Landing station, but the relief that soared through him at the sound of the voice was still profound.

He wasn’t alone anymore. He didn’t have to carry the burden of what he knew by himself.

“We’ve been trying to get ahold of someone since the quake last night!” Emil Braun said. “But no phone answered. No radio. We couldn’t get a vehicle anywhere near the plant. And it was hell finding a helicopter, believe me! Our own chopper was down for maintenance, and ten minutes after the quake, you damn betcha that every civilian chopper in the country had been chartered by someone!” Larry eased himself onto a fold-down seat. He found Emil’s troubles in chartering aircraft to be at the least remote, not to say quaint.

“We’ve got problems here, Emil,” he said.

“I can see that. Can you follow me to corporate HQ in Jackson and give everyone a briefing?” Larry paused while a crewman competently and efficiently strapped him into his seat for takeoff.

“I think the Navy will want their helicopter back, Emil,” he said finally. “From here I have to fly to Vicksburg to brief the Corps of Engineers,” he said finally. “Why don’t you follow me, and I’ll brief you both at the same time?”

“The Corps of Engineers?” Emil repeated. Larry understood Emil’s uncertainty: the Corps of Engineers weren’t exactly in the electric company’s chain of command.

“We’re going to need their help, Emil,” Larry said as the Sea Stallion’s huge rotor increased its speed and began to move the big Sikorsky forward over the brown water. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

Bail, splash. Bail, splash. Sweat ran into Jason’s eyes. Retired and Gone Fishin’ had survived the Tennessee Chute and had floated into a far more gentle part of the river. There were signs of burning on both flanks of the river, and the treeline was full of wrecked boats and barges that had come spinning down the chute from the port of Memphis, but the current was easy, and the cottonwoods on the western side cast long shadows on the sunset-tinted water.

The air reeked of dead fish. There were hundreds of them within sight, pale bellies uppermost. Something had poisoned them.

Nick, having lost his appetite for fish, had pulled in the fishing lines he’d been trailing astern. The cockpit had almost filled with river water, and now Jason’s job, and Nick’s, was to bail. Bail, splash. Bail, splash. Jason’s arm ached as he lifted the plastic milk jug filled with water and tossed the Mississippi back over the side where it belonged.

At least it was going faster than the first time he’d had to bail out the boat, that morning. Jason then had held his motley assortment of containers under the water, waited for them to fill, after which he poured them out. Nick had shown him a better way, one so simple that Jason wondered why he hadn’t thought of it. Nick tore off the tops of the plastic jugs and bottles, so that he and Jason could scoop them full in one motion, then throw the water over the side.

Simple, but one of those simple things that Jason hadn’t known or thought of. If he’d just known, if someone had shown him the trick, he could have taken it from there.

If he’d known about the boat’s little electric motor, his mother might—no, would—still be alive. He didn’t know enough to live through all this, he thought. He didn’t know enough to help anyone. In fact, he thought, he knew just enough to get himself killed. Maybe he should just throw himself in the river before he killed someone else.

“Hey, look.” Nick pointed downriver, where lights gleamed against the darkening sky. Jason straightened as he threw water overboard, and saw a towboat—intact, upright, apparently unharmed, sitting motionless on the river with its bow pointed downstream. His heart gave a faint throb at the sight. It was too weary and discouraged to express anything more.

Nick displayed a more active interest. He dropped his bailing jug and turned on the electric motor, then steered for the towboat, half a mile away.

As he neared the towboat, Jason gave up his bailing and sat wearily on the gunwale. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. Stars glimmered faintly in the darkening sky. There were navigation lights glowing on the boat’s mast, but Jason saw no other lights on board. It was only when he got very close to the boat that he realized it was aground on a bar in only a few inches of water, and its entire long tow of barges with it. It was as if the river had dropped out from beneath the boat and its barges and left them intact, still ranked in formation, on the mud.

Debris was stranded on the bar as well, though not as much as Jason might have expected. The main current of the river was elsewhere, and carried most of the wreckage with it. Dead fish, though, were everywhere, lying in the shallows in schools. Jason figured he’d never want to eat fish again.

Retired and Gone Fishin’ avoided the debris and came gently aground on the bar about twenty yards off the stern of the tow boat. Nick shut off the electric motor, stood, and waved his pole at the towboat.

“Hey! Ahoy!”

It was the first time, Jason thought, he’d ever actually heard anyone say “ahoy.”

“Ahoy the towboat! Anyone aboard?”

The towboat answered only with silence. Nick shrugged, then bent to pull off his already-waterlogged shoes. “Let’s pull the boat over the bar,” he said, and jumped into the water. Jason pulled off his sneaks and socks and dropped over the opposite side of the bass boat, then was surprised at the near-liquid mud that sucked him in nearly to his knees. Without the weight of its two passengers, Retired and Gone Fishin’ floated free. Pulling one foot after another from the suck of the mud, Jason and Nick walked the boat up to the stern of the towboat, which Jason saw was named Michele S.

The towboat was slab-sided, with a tall, squared-off super-structure. The pilothouse stood four decks above a raftlike hull that barely seemed tall enough for someone inside to stand upright. It hardly seemed possible that such a top-heavy design could travel anywhere without falling over. There were ropes dangling over the side, and Nick used one to tie off the bass boat. While Jason pulled free of the mud and went straight up one of the ropes, Nick climbed first into the bass boat, then jumped from there to the rail of the towboat. Jason found himself smiling at the way Nick was breathing hard after just the little climb to the towboat’s lowest deck.

They stood on the boat while mud and water dripped onto the steel deck. Nick caught his breath and ahoy’d again. The only sound was the water river rushing past the stern.

“Look,” Jason said, and pointed. There were davits overhead, on the end of the superstructure, that had once held a—would it be lifeboat, intended for lifesaving? A boat, any-way. And the boat was just as clearly gone.

“Wonder why they left,” Nick panted. “You’d think they would be safer here.” There were doors leading into the superstructure from the main deck, and Nick opened one about halfway down the superstructure. He groped inside for a switch and found it. Light flickered on, revealed a narrow steel corridor.

“At least their batteries seem to have a good charge,” Nick said. He ventured in, bare feet slapping on the deck. Jason followed, and felt a sudden glorious rush of relief, finding himself safe. Indoors in a place unlikely to fall down, a place that had electricity, that probably had beds, toilets, water… and, he realized, food.

His dormant hunger woke at this thought, a hunger that clawed and bit at his belly from within. Jason had never been so hungry in his life. “Can we find the kitchen?” he asked. “The galley? Whatever it’s called?”

“That’s just what I planned,” Nick said.

They headed forward through the crew quarters. There were sleeping accommodations for six, but only four of the beds seem to have been used. Forward was a tiny toilet and a shower, then a room the width of the superstructure with a dining table. Jason’s mouth watered.

The galley was right ahead, past some stairs. Jason went straight to the huge metal refrigerator door and opened it. Gallons of milk and juice sat on racks. He reached for one.

“Careful, there,” Nick said. “The refrigeration might not be on.” It wasn’t, but the milk was still cool. Jason tore off the cap and tipped his head back. He took one deep swallow after another from the jug. The cool sweet milk flowed down his throat. He had never tasted anything so glorious. Runnels of milk ran down his cheeks, splashed down his shirt. He didn’t stop drinking until his lungs ran out of air, and then he just took a gasping breath and drank some more. Eventually Jason had to gasp for air again. Then he had to cough, and cough again, and when he bent down to clear his throat, he found that his cheeks were hot, and there were tears in his eyes. And then he became aware of Nick watching him, and Jason slapped the cap on the milk jug and turned away. Tears blurred his vision, and he stumbled against a table. Sobs clawed at his throat like razors, and his limbs had turned to water. He stood there, leaning against the metal table, and let the grief come keening out. Nick put his arms around Jason and thought, Oh God, I don’t need this. This isn’t my boy.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Take it easy, okay? We’re safe.” Jason turned to him, buried his face against Nick’s shoulder. The sounds he made were like the whimpers of a dog caught in barbed wire, a pain so fundamental, so primal, that it caused the hairs to rise on the back of Nick’s neck. Damn, Nick thought, damn. This is not my kid.

“It’s okay, Jase,” Nick said. “It’s not your fault. Just take it easy.” They stood that way for several minutes, Jason’s cries raining down on Nick’s heart, and then Jason turned away and sat slumped at the table, his face a swollen misery.

“You all right?” Nick asked. A stupid question, but Jason nodded anyway. Give him some privacy now, Nick thought.

So Nick turned to the refrigerator and took out cold cuts, cheese, bread, and pickles. He made some sandwiches, put them on a plate, and put them in front of Jason. He took one of the sandwiches himself, and while he ate he made a thorough search through the refrigerator.

The cook of the Michelle S. was very organized. Meals had been arranged well ahead of time, though not cooked. There were at least four days’ meals prepared, but the most inviting seemed to be the four thick sirloins waiting in a stack, along with vegetables and a sack of new potatoes. Nick wondered if the boat’s crew were all fat as Santa Claus.

The gas stove lit when Nick tried it. He cut up potatoes and onions and set them to fry in a skillet, and put a pot of water on the stove for boiling vegetables. He looked at Jason, still slumped in his chair, and the boy’s pure misery made him want to offer comfort, but he didn’t know what comfort he had in him. Sorry your mother’s dead, kid. Too bad about your dad being in China and all. It didn’t seem adequate.

Nick turned back to the stove. He stirred the potatoes, slathered butter over the steaks, and put them under the broiler. And then he went to explore the Michelle S.

He climbed, first, to the pilothouse. From behind the wheel he could see the river stretching ahead in the darkness, the square island of the barge tow sitting before the bows, black against the shimmering river. In the darkness Nick couldn’t see what kind of barges made up the tow.

He turned on the lights in the pilothouse and looked for a logbook or other indication of why Michelle S. had been abandoned. If there was a logbook, the crew had taken it with them when they left. He looked for a moment at the radio equipment and wondered about calling for help. But he didn’t know how to use the radio, and it looked complicated, so he decided that maybe he would try it later, after he had time to find a manual or instructions of some sort.

Besides, he thought, anyone in a position to give help would probably be giving help to people needing it worse than he and Jason did.

He froze as a tremor rose up through the deck. Adrenaline clattered through his nerves. The broad shimmering river broke up into leaping silver waves.

And then the tremor faded, and the river stilled, but Nick’s pulse continued to hammer in his ears. He dragged in a breath. The aftershock is over, he told himself.

He touched the necklace in his shirt pocket. Arlette, he thought, I am coming to you. But still his knees felt watery when he went down the companionway to the galley. He stirred the potatoes, put frozen peas in the boiling water, turned over the steaks. Then he went down, to the engine space, where the towboat’s powerful turbines bulked under the low ceiling, and the air smelled pleasantly of machine oil. Nick looked for the engine and electric system controls, and he found them. He started a generator to keep the batteries charged, the lights glowing, and to keep the refrigerator and the freezers working. He made sure that the water heater was on, and that there was water pressure for bathing and running the dishwasher.

He was much better at this sort of thing than at radios.

Then he returned to the galley and found Jason gobbling a sandwich. The boy looked at him through eyes swollen by sorrow and tried to grin.

“Smells good,” he said.

“How do you like your steak?” said Nick.

Larry cupped his hand for the two orange ibuprofen tablets that the army corpsman was shaking into his palm. He slapped the tablets into his mouth, picked up a cup of water, and swallowed them. Nervous eyes watched him from around the table set in Major General Jessica Frazetta’s command tent. The table was covered with maps, many of them with pencil marks annotating breached dams, broken levees, shattered locks, flooded land, and the tracks of the rescue flights that were trying to pluck survivors from the chaos.

Larry put down his cup of water. “First, the good news,” he said. “The reactor and containment structure is in good shape. Relatively speaking.”

“The reactor can be restarted?” Emil Braun said hopefully. He was a bespectacled, potbellied man who did not look at all comfortable in the bright yellow jumpsuit he’d put on for his helicopter ride. He was looking for a happy ending, Larry could see, a way the company could restart Poinsett Landing and not lose the billions of dollars they’d invested in the plant, but Larry didn’t have a happy ending to give him. Larry licked his lips. “That reactor’s not going to be restarted whether it’s intact or not,” he said. “As I will tell you in a minute.”

“But—” Emil said.

“One thing at a time, please,” Larry said, more sharply than he intended. Emil almost visibly bottled up his objection behind his plump cheeks.

Larry looked down at the sling that held his left arm. “My busted shoulder kept me from getting into the access penetration—” He looked at General Jessica. “That’s a sort of an airlock built into the containment structure. It’s the only one we could use, because the other access points were all under water.”

Jessica nodded. “I understand. Go on, please.”

Larry looked at Wilbur, who sat on his right. “Wilbur here went into the containment structure. We got all the readings we could by flashlight, with portable instruments. Everything looks nominal. There may be damage to the reactor core, but if so there was no release into the environment.” Larry could see tension fading from the people around the table. No massive clouds of radiation drifting over the South, no Chernobyl on the Mississippi.

Larry felt a series of jolts, as if someone was repeatedly kicking his chair from behind. Before he could turn around to look for who was doing the kicking, he realized that an aftershock was going on. His heart leaped. He looked up, saw nothing but tent canvas over his head. Nothing dangerous was about to fall on him, so he decided to stay right where he was.

Kick-kick-kick-kick-kick. Emil bolted from the table, ran into the field outside. No one else moved. The aftershock faded. The general looked at Larry.

“You were saying, Mr. Hallock? No radiation released?”

“Not from the reactor, no,” Larry said, and a wary look crossed Jessica’s face.

“Go on, please,” she said.

Larry looked up, saw Emil returning, an embarrassed smile on his face. Larry turned back to Jessica.

“I don’t know what people here know about reactors,” Larry said, “so I’ll start with the basics, okay?” The general nodded. “Poinsett Landing is a boiling water reactor, which means that steam from the reactor is piped directly to the turbine, instead of going through a closed-loop thermal exchange system as in a high-pressure reactor. You follow?”

“Yes. Please continue.”

“What that means is that steam from the reactor going straight into the turbine is then cooled by the turbine condensors, then recirculated to the reactor. So when the generator house was destroyed, there was a release of steam into the environment, and there was a certain amount of radiation in that steam. Not in the water, you understand, but in any impurities that may have been in the water. But since we use demineralized water in the reactor, there weren’t very many impurities to begin with, and the radiation release wouldn’t have been large. It may be of concern to anyone at the plant at the time of the release, but there is no real danger to anyone now.”

“Very good,” Jessica said, and Larry detected a well-concealed curiosity in her eyes. She knew that Larry had been at the plant when the steam was released, knew that the radiation was “of concern” to him. She knew that his health was compromised, and that he’d just brushed over the matter, and she wanted to know what it meant to him, how he was handling it.

Larry wanted to know these things himself. He hadn’t had time to think about any of this as it related to himself, hadn’t had time to feel much of anything. He’d been too busy. One thing at a time. He’d deal with it when he had the opportunity.

Emil, who had returned to his seat, looked relieved at Larry’s statement. Fewer liability problems for the company, Larry deduced.

“The real problems,” Larry said, “are two, and the two interact in such a way as to make any solution a real mess. First, the stored fuel.” He looked at Frazetta. “There’s over thirty years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel at Poinsett Landing. In fact we ran out of space for the spent fuel entirely at one point, but one of my colleagues came up with a new way of racking the fuel elements that increased capacity.

“Now, the spent fuel assemblies are stored vertically in racks under the water in the auxiliary building. The assemblies are in neutron-absorbing borated racks to assure that there is no chance of achieving critical mass and starting a nuclear reaction. And they’re subjected to active cooling—water is circulated through the building to remove any waste heat.”

“How hot are these fuel assemblies?” Jessica interrupted. “They’re spent fuel, right?”

“When fuel assemblies first come out of the reactor, they’re very hot, very hot indeed. It takes years for them to cool to the point where they can be safely handled. Now, the good news is that most of the fuel assemblies in the auxiliary building are very old, and if you need to, you can probably just have a couple strong men pick them up and carry them someplace else. But the bad news is that the plant underwent refueling over the last several weeks, and there are almost three hundred hot fuel assemblies sitting in the auxiliary building right now—with active cooling down, and the water level diminished due to leakage from the storage pond.”

The look that Emil gave him was one of pure horror. “Are you sure?”

“I knew about the leaks last night,” Larry said, “but I couldn’t get on the catwalks to find out how fast the water was falling. Well, it fell pretty fast—this afternoon I could detect a lot of radiation coming out of that building just by flying over it in the helicopter.”

Emil turned pale. Larry looked at the row of concerned faces that gazed at him from across the table.

“Here’s what I believe happened,” he said. “The auxiliary building lost active cooling, and lost enough water through its leaks to uncover the spent fuel. The hot fuel assemblies cooked—in fact they probably melted. There’s no chain reaction—not enough fuel for that—but those hot fuel assemblies are cooking up gasses like iodine and xenon and various kinds of noble gasses. In the meantime some dissolved fuel, with radioactive cesium iodide content, has probably leaked into the Mississippi.”

“So there’s a cloud…” one of the Army officers said slowly “… of radioactive material… floating out over the countryside.”

“A smallish cloud,” Larry qualified. “This isn’t Chernobyl. This isn’t a meltdown, this is some nasty hot metal that’s spilled and is putting out byproducts. This earthquake has probably killed a thousand times more people than will ever fall ill from this accident.”

Emil put his head in his hands. “It isn’t Chernobyl now,” he said. “But by the time the press gets done with it, it will be.”

“Better tell HQ to get their public relations people online,” Larry said.

“Twenty years of liability suits,” Emil said. “That’s what we’re talking about here.” General Jessica brought the conversation back to its proper theme. “What can be done, Mr. Hallock?” she asked.

“That brings me to the second problem, General,” Larry said. “Which is that the Mississippi has shifted its course eastward, and that the power station is now smack in the middle of the river.” There was a long moment of silence.

“Are you sure?” Jessica asked finally. “It isn’t just that the country is flooded?”

“I think that the level of the ground fell during the quake,” Larry said, “and the river flowed right into it. Current’s pretty brisk, too.” He nodded at Jessica. “The river’s your department, General Frazetta. You’d be in a better position to judge than me, but I reckon you’ll find I’m right.” He looked at the others. “And the foundation of the reactor complex is not entirely secure. When the ground dropped, it didn’t drop evenly; there’s a perceptible list to the containment building and control structure. So—if you want the worst case—the action of the river might furthermore undermine the concrete pad the reactor’s sitting on, and a reactor full of nuclear fuel goes skimming down the Mississippi like a hockey puck on ice.”

Emil winced at this image. “I don’t think,” he said, “that’s very likely to happen.”

“Probably not,” Larry agreed. Ache throbbed through his injured shoulder. He wanted this meeting over, and himself in bed. He took another sip of water.

“Here’s what needs to be done,” he said. “The reactor is fine as it is—we can just leave it undisturbed for ten years or so, give it time to cool off, then remove the fuel and turn the containment structure into a museum or a bird sanctuary or whatever you like. What needs to be done is to stabilize the foundation, and the way to do that is to build a big solid island around it. An island of stone or concrete or brick, twenty acres maybe, with a solid breakwater on the north end to keep the river from undermining it. I’ll defer to the general—” nodding at Jessica “—as to the best way to accomplish this.”

“That will take some thinking,” she said.

“That leaves the problem of the spent fuel,” Larry said. “What we need to do is fill that holding pond now, which will cool things off enough so that we can start other repairs. Demineralized water would be best.” Poinsett Landing, he knew, had once possessed a facility for creating as much distilled water as they could ever need, but that had been destroyed along with the plant’s other most useful facilities, like the beautiful, extensive machine shops that could have made any tool, appliance, or structure they would ever have needed during the course of the repair.

Larry looked at Jessica again. “If you can’t ship about, oh, thirty tons of distilled water to Poinsett Landing to pump into that holding pond, I’d pump in river water. The impurities in the water will get hot, and some of that will leak out into the river, but that’s better than what’s happening now.” Jessica frowned as she considered the problem. “Could we use a fireboat? Just hose water in there?” Larry nodded. “That’s what I figured. Bring one up from Baton Rouge or New Orleans.” He turned to the others. “That will buy us time. Time to survey the pond and discover the extent of the damage, to repair the leaks in the holding pond, clear the ruined roof and catwalks out of our way, and to work out a plan to remove the spent fuel. The actual removal will need to be done remotely, with machines or robots. There’s a machine already in the building that would do the job, if it’s undamaged and if we can get power to it.”

Larry closed his eyes. Weariness sighed through his mind like wind across a distant prairie. He shook his head, then stood.

“Well, that’s it,” he said. “I’d be obliged, General, if you could give me a ride home.” Jessica looked startled. “Very well,” she said after a moment’s pause. “If that’s what you want, Mr. Hallock. You seem to have got it all worked out.”

Larry scratched his whiskered face. “It’s just one thing after another. It’s not like I didn’t have plenty of time to think, sitting on that Indian mound all night.”

“Larry,” Emil said, “I’ve got to take you to Jackson. You’ve got to brief people at the company.” Larry looked at him. ” You do that. I’ve told you the situation and what we need. You provide it, and we’ll be fine.”

“But Larry—”

“I haven’t slept in two days,” Larry said. “I’m pushing fifty. I have a busted collarbone, and I’m in pain. I haven’t seen or talked to my wife or my kids since the accident. I’m going home, I’m going to kiss my wife, and I’m going to collapse into bed and sleep till morning.” He gave Emil a glare. “You got a problem with that, Emil?”

Emil made a last attempt. “What if we need to talk to you?”

“Is that a cellphone you’ve got there?”

Emil looked at the device peeking out of his jumpsuit pocket. “Um,” he said, “yeah.”

“Give it to me. Someone needs to say howdy, they can call me on your phone.” He stuffed the phone into his pocket and left the tent.

He’d done his job, he figured, and more. He’d come up with a plan. Let the others work out the details. They gorged on steak, potatoes, peas. It was the best meal Nick ever had in his life. Then, because they were still hungry, Nick cooked another steak and they split it.

He looked at the boy opposite him. Jason had made some attempt to clean himself up—he’d washed in the sink and tried to scrub off the mud he’d used to paint his face and arms, though not very successfully. His hair hung in dirty strands down his forehead, there was grime caked into his knuckles and streaked on his arms, his clothes were stained with mud and river water. His eyes were red, and in spite of the mud he’d slathered over himself, he’d managed to get a good case of sunburn. Jason looked like a refugee from six months of war, and Nick supposed that he didn’t look any better. Nick looked at the boy, who was shoveling food into his mouth before he’d finished chewing the last forkful, and sipped thoughtfully at his own glass of milk. “Save room for ice cream,” he said. Jason looked up at him. “No problem,” he said.

“I’ve got the water heater going,” Nick said. “We should see what the crew has left us in the way of soap and shampoo, and shower while we can.” He rubbed his chin. “I should shave. And there are probably toothbrushes around. And sunburn ointment. And some clothes that should fit us.”

“Okay,” Jason mumbled past a mouthful of steak.

“I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything,” Nick said, “but we should bathe and brush our teeth whenever we can. It keeps up morale. Keeps us from giving up.”

Jason gave him a curious look. “Morale?” he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. “You’re worried about our morale? Are you in the Army or something?”

“I was raised in the Army. But I was never in the service myself.”

“Army brat?”

“My dad was a general,” Nick said. “I learned some things about survival from him and, ah, from the military culture, you know. And I was in the Boy Scouts, too.” He shook his head. “If I can remember all that stuff. It was years ago.”

A wary look entered Jason’s eyes. “So what do you do now?”

Nick saw the look—it was one he knew all too well—and felt surprise roll through his mind. The boy thought he was crazy, or a criminal.

Well. Nick had preferred to run a deadly rapid in an unpowered boat to asking help from the cops. There was a wound on his arm. And—his mind a little grimmer now—Nick was black, and the kid’s only contact with black people was probably watching pimps and gangsters on TV. What else was Jason to think?

“I’m an engineer,” Nick said. “Got laid off from McDonnell in St. Louis five months ago.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting an engineering job now. Not with so many things needing to be put back together.”

Jason’s wariness lessened somewhat, but Nick could see that the boy was still a bit on guard. But exhaustion was falling fast on Nick, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with Jason’s suspicions now. Nick stood. “I’m going to shower and shave,” he said. “You think you could put the dirty dishes in the washer? If the crew comes back, I don’t want them to find out we’ve made work for them.”

“Sure.” Jason, his stomach full, seemed content enough.

Nick went into the crew’s little cabins and dug through some of the lockers in search of clothes that would fit him. Photos of the crew’s families looked down at him from the walls. He looked at pictures of smiling families, of kids and spouses and parents, and wondered if those families would ever meet again, if there would always be one or more missing.

He found some clothes that fit fairly well, a disposable razor, some shaving cream, a comb, a towel. In a locker he found a first-aid kit with sterile bandages and disinfectant. In the shower he found shampoo and soap.

He stayed in the little shower a long time, enjoying the hot water, the clean scent of the soap, the pounding droplets that relaxed the muscles of his shoulders and neck. He cleaned the dried blood from the wound on his arm, winced at the sting. The wound itself seemed to be scabbed and, so far as he could tell, healing. At least it wasn’t hot, or oozing pus. He slathered on the disinfectant and bandaged the wound.

Then he shaved and splashed on the Mermen’s Skin Bracer he found on the sink. The sharp, clean scent stung up a memory. His father had used Skin Bracer. At the remembrance, sadness briefly clouded his eyes.

In the mirror he looked better than the refugee he’d seen a few minutes ago, but he still looked as if he’d been worked over with a baseball bat. He didn’t look much like a general’s son, that was for sure. He found Jason in the galley, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s chocolate sauce. The dinner things were gone, and Nick presumed Jason had put them away.

The boy knew how to do a few things, anyway.

“Don’t you ever stop eating?” Nick said.

Jason looked at him. “I didn’t fill up on cattails, the way you did.” Damn, Nick thought. Ask a question, get a zinger. What was with this kid?

“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said. “We can stay on this boat awhile, I guess, maybe till someone takes us off. The people who own this boat are going to come back before too long, I imagine. But in case something happens, we should have some emergency supplies ready to put in that bass boat. Canned food, fresh water.”

Jason looked up from his bowl of ice cream. “If there’s an emergency,” he asked, “wouldn’t we be safer here?”

“What if the water rises, and this boat goes floating onto some rocks, or into the trees? What if a snag punches a hole in the hull?”

Jason scraped the bowl with his spoon. “Okay,” he said. “I guess you’ve got a point.”

“I’ll put it together. You might as well take a shower. See if you can find yourself some clothes.” Nick assembled his emergency food in plastic garbage bags. There were jugs of fresh water right on the shelf. He threw in a container of flour, another of sugar, another of salt. Matches and a skillet. Soap, scissors, sun block, a sewing kit he found in one of the rooms, a bag of disposable razors, and a mirror—for signaling, as the Boy Scout manual might say. He smiled at the memory. He stowed everything aft on the deck, where Retired and Gone Fishin’ was tied. Then, since he remembered seeing a long extension cord, he plugged it in, ran it over the side, and plugged in the bass boat’s battery recharger.

If another catastrophe occurred, he thought, the boat’s little electric motor could carry them away. At all of maybe three miles per hour. Maybe he should study the engine controls, find out if he could operate the towboat single-handed.

He could feel exhaustion floating through his mind like fog. Stress, a wound, and a night spent in a tree had caught up with him. He would find one of the unused beds and turn in.

In the morning, he thought, he would figure out how to work the radio. Maybe he could make a radiophone call, or whatever they were called, directly to Arlette, surprise her as she was eating breakfast.

In the morning, he thought. First thing.

He found an unused bed, dropped his clothes to the deck, slid between fresh crisp sheets. Before he could turn off the light there was a gentle knock on the door.

“Yes?”

Jason stuck his head in. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night, Jason.”

“And thanks.” Jason’s words came slowly. “Thanks for pulling me out of the water. When I went in. You know.”

“Sure, Jason. You’re welcome.”

Jason nodded, drew back his head, closed the door behind him.

Weird kid, Nick thought as he turned off the light. Weird kid.

Jason woke with a cry of terror bottled up in his throat. He gasped for air and stared wildly into the night. His heart throbbed in his chest like a diesel.

He listened to the stillness for a moment and tried to decide what it was that had awakened him. An aftershock? A cry for help?

Broken fragments of his dream rattled in his head. He couldn’t feel anything but a sense of alarm. Something must be wrong. He swung his legs out of bed, opened the cabin door, and padded down the hall to the crew’s dining area. He opened a door and stepped out onto the narrow steel deck. A cool spring night floated up around him. Frogs and crickets called to one another in the midst of the silence. The river glimmered like a thread of quicksilver in the moonlight. A distant navigation beacon blinked downriver, marking a channel that probably no longer existed. It was the only sign of humanity in the entire magnificent desolation of the Mississippi.

Nothing had happened, Jason realized. It had been a bad dream, that was all.

He made his way back to his cabin, imagining that it would take forever to fall back to sleep. Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that slumber reclaimed him with ease.

Jason woke to feel gooseflesh on his arms. The weather had cooled during the night, and the sheet he’d used for a cover was not enough to keep him warm.

He blinked open gummy eyes and looked at his watch. 8:13. He smelled bacon. His stomach rumbled. Time to get up.

Jason pulled on some of the clean clothes he’d found in one of the crewmen’s lockers—they were too big, but he could roll up the legs of the jeans, and if the sleeves of the shirt hung down past his elbows, it would just help to protect him from the sun.

He strapped on a pair of sandals that he’d found—the other footwear was too large—then made his way forward. He found Nick sitting at the dinner table, looking through a stack of manuals. Dirty dishes were piled up in front of him.

“Smells good,” Jason said.

Nick looked up from his manuals, his chin propped on one fist. Shaved, cleaned, in clean clothing, Nick looked a lot less like an escaped felon than he had the previous day. Maybe, Jason conceded, he really was an engineer.

“Bacon,” Nick said. “Eggs. English muffin. Want some?”

“Sure.”

“Want coffee and orange juice with that?”

“Juice, sure. I don’t drink coffee.”

Nick stood, stretched, yawned. “Young people don’t need coffee in the morning,” he said. Jason frowned down at the manuals, tried to read them upside-down. “What are you reading?” he said.

“I’m going to try to work the radio. Maybe I can get a message to my family.” He looked at Jason. “Your family, too, maybe.”

“My dad’s in China.”

“I can’t get China with that radio, I suppose, but I can get someone to try to pass a message to him. I know that the Red Cross does that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know where he is, exactly.” Jason tried to remember his father’s itinerary. Would he still be in Shanghai? Or was he in Guangzhong by now? He hadn’t paid his father’s schedule much attention since he found out he wasn’t going himself.

Nick looked at him. “Any other family here in the States?”

Jason thought for a moment. Aunt Lucy lived in Cabells Mound, and he had watched Cabells Mound burn. Even if she survived, her home probably had not. Also she was elderly and wouldn’t be able to look after him. There was another elderly aunt in upstate New York, but he hadn’t seen her in years.

“My dad’s the best bet,” he said.

“Well,” Nick shrugged, “I’ll try. How would you like your eggs?”

“Scrambled.”

Thoughts of his family left Jason downcast. When Nick went into the galley, Jason decided he didn’t want to hang around waiting and being depressed, so he stepped out onto the deck and was surprised to discover that Michelle S. was now high and dry on an island. The river had dropped to a lower stage since the middle of the night, and the mud reef on which the towboat had grounded was now above the level of the water, a muddy plain that stretched several hundred feet in all directions. The island had caught a lot of debris, and its upstream flank was walled with driftwood, logs, and with what looked like a green-roofed metal storage shed, deposited on its side with a door hanging open. The whole island was covered with dead fish. Flocks of crows and water birds were feasting on the corpses. Their croaks and calls were almost deafening.

The day was gray and cooler than yesterday, for which Jason was grateful. A wind made singing sounds as it gusted over the superstructure.

Jason made his way forward to the blunt bow. The tow stretched out before him, fifteen long barges laid out three abreast, all lashed together with steel wire held taut by big ratchets. The nearest barges were domed with pale green metal, and a complex network of pipes ran fore and aft along their length. There was a short mast on the middle barge, with a red flag and a light on top.

Jason jumped up on the prow, balanced for a precarious moment, and then jumped across to the nearest barge. Metal rang under his feet as he landed. The wind gusted toward him, bringing a sharp chemical smell.

He sneezed.

There were a pair of huge blue rubber gloves lying on the barge near his feet. Why blue? he wondered. He wandered forward along the green roof of the barge. More blue gloves were scattered here and there. A gust of wind ruffled his hair. He sneezed again.

He jumped easily to the next barge in line. He wondered if it would be possible to skate on the barges, roll along the smooth metal tops and hop over the piping. Do it fancy, land fakie and jump the next pipe going backward. It would be easy enough to leap from one barge to the next.

Pity that the pipes were mostly horizontal. Otherwise he could ride them as he’d ridden the tower rail in Cabells Mound.

The next gust of wind brought a strong chemical sting to his nostrils. What was in these barges?

He looked up, saw the short mast planted on the barge in front of him. The mast’s red flag, he saw, was metal, so it would always stay rigid whether there was wind or not. The flag had lettering on it. Jason jumped onto the barge—the chemical smell was stronger now—and approached the flag.

A chill finger touched Jason’s neck. Now he knew why Michelle S. had been abandoned by its crew. The gusting wind backed around to the southeast, and the chemical smell blew strong at him. Fumes raked the back of Jason’s throat. He ran to the side of the barge and peered over the side, into the gap between this barge and the next.

A foul chemical lake lay beneath the barge.

One or more of the barges had broken open during the quake, or when the tow went aground, and had been leaking its cargo ever since. Until this morning the river had carried the stuff away, whatever it was, but now the river had dropped and the noxious mess was pooling on the surface of the tow’s little mud island.

Jason whirled, looked again at the red flag through eyes that stung in the chemical reek.

The barges’ cargo had to be explosive. Otherwise the barge wouldn’t be flying the red danger flag. Otherwise the crew wouldn’t have abandoned ship.

Horror ran through Jason’s veins as he thought of his breakfast bacon sizzling in a skillet over a blue propane flame.

He scrambled aft, the southeast gusts blowing the chemical smell past him. He cleared the gap between barges without breaking stride, then leaped from the barge onto the Michelle S. in one bound. He dodged around the superstructure and dived into the first door.

He heard the sizzling sound of bacon. Never had he found an ordinary, homely sound so terrifying. Jason dashed into the galley, past a surprised Nick, and turned off the stove burners. The blue flames fluttered and vanished with a whuff. Nick stared at Jason’s terrified expression.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“We’re going to blow up!” Jason shouted.

“What—?”

Words exploded through Jason’s gasps for breath. “Barges leaking! Chemicals! That’s why the crew ran away!”

Horrified comprehension snapped into Nick’s eyes. “What chemicals?” he asked.

“Who cares?” Jason cried. “Just go outside and smell.” While Nick went out to investigate, Jason ran aft to where Retired and Gone Fishin’ sat on the mud aft of the towboat. He untied the line securing the bass boat to the stern, and flung it over the side. He lowered himself over the rail, felt the mud squelch to his ankles as he landed. Nearby birds broke for the sky, a fleeing black cloud. Jason slogged to the bows of the bass boat and yanked away the extension cord that was recharging the boat’s batteries. Acrid fumes drifted over him in waves. Nick appeared on the deck above. “Catch,” he said, and swung out a plastic garbage bag filled with emergency supplies.

Three more bags followed. Jason tossed each into the bass boat. Then Nick rolled over the towboat’s side, tried to lower himself to the mud on the rope, and lost his grip. He tumbled helplessly into the soft ooze. Jason jerked his head away as mud sprayed over him.

“Shit!” Nick pulled himself free of the sucking mud and staggered to his feet. Dragging the heavy aluminum boat over the mud flat was a nightmare. Getting traction in the soft mud was nearly impossible, and Nick and Jason often fell. Both were soon covered with ooze. Black birds swarmed around them and mocked them with their calls. Jason gasped for breath as sweat tracked mud over his face. His arms, legs, and back ached, and his brain reeled from chemical fumes. Finally the bass boat slid into the brown water. Jason and Nick flung themselves aboard. The boat spun lazily as the current caught it. Jason crawled forward to the bow, dropped the trolling motor over the side, and started it, heading directly across the current to get as far away from the towboat as he could. The wind blew fresh air over the boat, and Jason sucked it down gratefully.

Retired and Gone Fishin’ made its way down the river, drifted around a bend. Jason and Nick lay gasping on the fore and afterdecks. Michelle S. disappeared behind a screen of trees.

“God damn, God damn,” Nick repeated. “And we had clean clothes an’ shit.” Jason sat up, turned down the speed of the trolling motor, and tried to wipe mud from his face. Then a perfect sphere of fire rose from beyond the trees, and burst like a bubble over Michelle S. and its barges.

EIGHTEEN

The black pillar of smoke that marked the burning Michelle S. slowly fell astern. The river was slow and lazy: having spread itself wide beyond its banks, it seemed intent on staying awhile. The surface was less crowded with debris than it had been the previous day: much of the wreckage and timber had caught in the cottonwood and willow tangle that grew in the flood plain between the levees and the river. But there was still enough flotsam in the water to be dangerous, and Jason and Nick kept a watchful eye. When he had scavenged food and other useful supplies from the towboat, Nick had equipped the bass boat with a pair of proper boat hooks, which made it much easier to fend off wreckage.

Jason’s breakfast consisted of some canned pineapple rings from Nick’s emergency cache. He tilted his head back, drank off the sweet syrup, and tossed the empty can over the side. The river received it with a dull splash.

The river was his fate, Jason thought as he watched the can pace the bass boat on its way downstream. He kept being thrown up on the shore, but then the river would take him again. He was beginning to develop a superstition about it.

Nick, he saw, sat on the stern deck, his hands dangling over his knees. The older man looked once again like a refugee, borrowed clothes soaked or splashed with mud, face and hair spattered, the newly acquired sandals ruined.

Edge Living, Jason thought. This was real Edge Living—no resources, no help from outside, and every second on the brink of extinction. There were people, he thought, out in the Third World he supposed, who lived their whole lives this way. What he had thought was Edge Living, the kind he’d celebrated on his posters, was a sick joke compared to the real thing.

Jason managed a grin. “So how’s our morale now, General?”

Nick looked up, gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t imagine it can get much lower,” he said. He looked at the emergency supplies, then began to stow the cans and jars in the boat’s cooler compartments.

“So what’s the plan?” Jason asked.

Nick shrugged. “Find a place that doesn’t blow up?” he offered, then sighed. “I wish I’d contacted my family when I had the chance,” he said. “They’re gonna be worried. They knew I was driving down to Toussaint.”

“You have a daughter, you said? In Arkansas someplace?”

“Yeah.” Nick’s hand went to his shirt pocket, then fell away. “She’s having a birthday tomorrow—today, I mean.” Discouragement lined his mud-streaked face. “Guess I won’t be there.”

“Is she at school, or what?”

Nick looked down at his work as he answered. “She’s with her momma. We’re divorced.” Sadness drifted through Jason at the word, at the timbre of failure he heard in Nick’s voice. It suggested that the divorce hadn’t been Nick’s idea.

Jason nodded. “I know divorce, all right. And birthdays. That telescope we’re using—that was a birthday present from my dad. But I think his new wife picked it out for him.”

Nick nodded. “Divorce is hard on the kids. I always been thankful my parents had a good marriage.” He reached into his pocket, took out a box covered in muddy velveteen. “Here’s what I got for Arlette.” He opened the box. Jason leaned close and saw gold glowing bright, the glitter of diamonds and rubies. Some kind of flower thing. “That’s pretty,” he said.

Nick had probably picked out the necklace and earrings himself, too. Jason could tell by the pride in his face.

Nick closed the box and returned it carefully to his pocket. “I wanted to give it to her today,” he said.

“Well.” Jason glanced around at the river, the dense ranks of trees that lined the channel down which they traveled. “We’re heading in the right direction.”

Nick rubbed his face, brushed at the drying mud. “They’re worried for me. I know they are.” Jason felt an urge to be supportive. “We’ll get there,” he said.

“I just wish I’d used the radio last night. But I was so tired…”

“We’ll find another radio. Or a telephone. Or something.”

Nick shook his head. “I wanted to call her at breakfast. I wanted to get her before she went to school.” It didn’t seem like much, talk to his daughter before school. But it was very clear that Nick had counted on speaking to Arlette, and now that he hadn’t, he was so downcast that he couldn’t seem to get beyond his failure.

With something like a mental shock, Jason found himself wondering if his own father had been through similar agonies. His parents’ divorce had always seemed something they had chosen to inflict on him, yet another example of the random cruelty that adults always imposed on their children. That his parents might have been in pain themselves was a new and surprising thought.

“Fend off, there,” Nick said.

Jason snatched up a boat hook and pushed away a large chunk of frame building, a shed or chicken house, that threatened to run aboard the bass boat. His shoulders flamed with sunburn as he shoved the building away. Once the boat was out of danger, Jason put down the boat hook and sat again on the foredeck. He was surprised to see Nick watching him with sober eyes.

“Yes?” Jason said.

“You did a good thing back there,” Nick said. “You may have saved our lives.” Jason looked at Nick in surprise. He felt a flush mounting in his skin. He wasn’t used to adults finding reason to praise him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“A lot of people might not have figured it out. You knew how to put two and two together.” He looked down the river. “We’ll be okay if we just keep our eyes open.”

Jason nodded and felt awkward. He really didn’t know what to do when a grownup told him he was smart. It wasn’t as if it had ever happened before.

Nick brushed at his face again, knocking flakes of mud to the deck. He looked around at the smears of Mississippi ooze that covered the boat and its passengers. “Maybe we better try to clean up,” he said.

“Wash off some of this mud. Clean up the boat.”

“Okay.”

“And then put on some sunscreen. I found some in the towboat.”

“We’re going to need to fend off first.”

That frame building had come back, floating again toward the bass boat as if intent on climbing into the cockpit. Jason stood and picked up the boat hook. Nick’s praise made him feel stronger, more capable. Fired with purpose.

He leaned into the boat hook and drove the wreckage away.

The morning’s SITREP had a lot fewer unknowns on it. Information was starting to flow into Mississippi Valley Division headquarters. Most of the information was bad, but even bad news was better than waiting in suspense for the next unanticipated horror.

In addition to gathering information, Jessica had largely assembled her Joint Division Team, which would coordinate civil works projects and disaster relief throughout her assigned area. She’d appointed the JDT’s Chief of Staff, Subordinate Command Liaison, the Chief of Operations, the Staff Engineer, the Counsel, Contracting Officer, the Chief of Public Affairs—who would coordinate press briefings from a tent reserved for the purpose, provided of course that the press could ever find their way here through the disaster area.

As called for in the plan, Jessica had even appointed an official Economist. Rather more useful in the current situation was the Clerical Specialist, who was now assembling out of stores the inventory necessary for the JDT’s operation. The necessary inventory included Facsimile Machine (auto feed, programmable, plain paper); Binder Clips, large; Binder Clips, small; Correction Fluid, white; Forms, Tasking; and Rubber Bands, assorted sizes.

Jessica was pleased to observe a Pot, Coffee on the list. Before this emergency was over she planned to make a significant dent in the inventory’s Cups, foam, 8 oz.

Morning birdsong—the throb of helicopters—floated into her command tent, as it had been doing since before dawn. Jessica finished her second cup of breakfast coffee and threw the Cup, foam, into the trash. She rose from behind her desk and sought out her husband.

Pat was in the communications tent, helping the techs with their Computers (Database for mission tracking). “Hey, runner!” she said.

Pat was gazing into the innards of a three-year-old—and therefore rather antique—IBM, and trying to fit a modem card into the slot. He looked up. “Ma’am?” he said.

“Tell Colonel Davidovitch that I’ll be TDY for a few hours, okay?”

“Now?” he said.

“Yes,” Jessica said. “Orders generally mean now unless otherwise stated.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He returned the modem card to its bubble wrap. “You know,” he said, “Jeb Stuart had someone on his staff just to play the banjo.”

“If I need a banjo player, you’ll be the first one I’ll call.”

An aftershock bounced the ground as Jessica made her way to the helipad, one vertical jounce after another. Jessica weaved slightly as she walked and tried not to twist an ankle. She had seen to the recovery of MVD headquarters, which was now capable of surviving without her for a few hours. Her new Helicopter (Transportation, for use of) waited for her. She wanted to make a personal inspection of her division.

And if things were as bad as she expected, she’d have to call her commander-in-chief and tell him what he needed to do.

“Sugar bear,” said Sheryl, “I think it’s time to put up my Apocalypse.” Frankland paused, his hand poised with the razor to shave the dimple on his receding chin. He had tried to make certain that men remained shaved, and that everyone wash their face and hands before meals. Good for morale, he’d thought.

“Yes,” he said, “yes. I’ll help you in a minute.”

After he finished shaving, he helped Sheryl carry her linen scrolls from her workroom to the church. Frankland got Hilkiah and some of the others to drive wooden stakes into the ground, and Sheryl unrolled her opus and stapled the scrolls to the tall wooden stakes so that they formed a long, fabric wall, with occasional gaps so as not to provide a continuous surface that the wind could more easily damage. Frankland was awestruck. There was the Apocalypse in all its glory, blazing in the brightest color: John of Patmos cowered before the Son of Man. Seven golden candlesticks burned in the darkness; seven angels held seven vials; four beasts each with six wings clustered about the Throne; four Horsemen rode across a petrified world; a red dragon with seven heads and seven crowns; a woman unfurled the wings of an eagle; a scarlet woman on a scarlet beast; Babylon laid in ruins; the City of God descending to the earth in a glory of light. All in the most astounding detail, down to the leering tongue of the Beast and the malevolent glitter in its eyes.

It was magnificent. More beautiful, Frankland thought, than the Whatchamacallit Chapel in Rome. People were wandering up to look at it. Pointing, and marveling. Sheryl’s face glowed with pride.

“I’m so proud of you, sweetie pie!” Frankland said. “It’s the most gorgeous thing I ever saw.”

“It’s what we should all expect,” Sheryl said. “It’s what everyone will need to know in order to survive the next seven years.”

“You should take the rest of the day off, sweetie pie,” Frankland said. “Just stay here with it and be like, you know, a tour guide. Explain to the people what they’re looking at.”

“I’ll do that.”

Frankland gave her a big kiss, right there in public.

The Apocalypse glowed around him, on its wide linen walls.

There it was on the water, like a giant wedding cake built against the left bank of the Mississippi. Tier upon tier of white lace, twin stacks topped by elaborate gold crowns, an enormous stern wheel with its blades painted vermilion.

Nick gave a nervous laugh as the giant boat grew nearer. “That’s the weirdest thing I ever saw. Right in the middle of all this wilderness.”

lucky magnolia casino, said the scarlet letters on the side, in some old-timey script. Jason looked at Nick over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “want to play some slots?”

“We must be in Mississippi,” Nick said. “Everyone from Tennessee comes down here to spend their money.” The last time he’d driven Highway 61 south of Memphis, it seemed as if there had been dozens of casinos, each with its own stoplight on the highway, as if every driver in Mississippi was forced to halt in honor of the money flowing toward the state from the north.

When Nick had been a kid, driving to Mississippi to visit his grandparents, there had been nothing on that road but wilderness, cotton fields, and desolation. Now the wilderness was overflowing with gold. Nick gave it some thought. “Casinos have restaurants,” he said. “We could get more supplies. And we could prepare the food properly in the kitchen.”

“It would be nice not to sleep on the boat tonight,” Jason added. “I did it once, and that was enough.”

“Right,” Nick said. “Let’s give it a try.”

Jason crawled over the foredeck and started the trolling motor. As they came closer, they saw the casino had suffered earthquake damage. Some of the white gingerbread had fallen, and it looked as if the inshore stack would have toppled if it hadn’t been held in place by cables. Several windows were cracked or broken.

The casino loomed over them. It looked as huge as an aircraft carrier.

“Hook on,” Nick called, and he and Jason each reached out with a boathook and snagged the rail. They brought the bass boat alongside and tied it to a fluted pillar that supported the deck above. Jason gauged his movement, then jumped to the casino boat and legged over the rail. Nick followed more cautiously. He peered through a window into the darkened interior. “Here’s a restaurant,” he said.

“There’s got to be a kitchen next door.”

The first door was locked, but the second opened to a corridor that led into the restaurant. A stack of menus lay spilled near the entrance. The restaurant featured green faux leather booths and brass torchieres, their gleam dimmed by the gray light outside. At one end of the room, the remains of a buffet supper sat beneath swarms of flies at a cold steam table. There were plates and glasses on the white linen tablecloths where meals had been interrupted by the catastrophe.

“Here’s the kitchen,” Nick said. He walked past a waitresses’ station and pushed through a swinging door.

The kitchen was cold and dark, lit only by a single cracked window. A row of burgers, grease and cheese congealed, waited on a counter for a waiter to pick them up. The flies hadn’t got through the swinging door to find them.

The freezers and refrigerators were huge, with brushed steel doors. Nick opened one of the refrigerators and eyed its contents.

“We better stay away from anything that could spoil,” he said. “The power’s been off too long.” Jason wandered over to the range, turned the control for a burner. There was a hiss of gas, and the repeated clicking of an igniter, but nothing lit. “We can cook,” he said, “but I think this needs to be lit with a match.”

Nick opened a freezer, pulled out packages of meats that were still frozen. “We got chicken, beef, fish, sausage… how about pork chops?”

“They all sound great to me,” Jason said. Ever since their interrupted breakfast, he’d eaten only from cans. He opened a tap in the sink, felt his heart lighten at the pouring water. “We’ve got water, anyway,” he said.

The tap water reminded him of an errand of nature. He turned off the tap. “I’m going to see if I can find a toilet,” he said.

“You like broccoli?” Nick said, hefting a package.

Jason shrugged. Vegetables were all one to him. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ll see you in a minute.” He left the restaurant and padded along a thick carpet in an inner corridor, then walked down a ramp into a huge semicircular food court. Burger King, he saw in the dim light, Pizza Loco, Ragin’ Cajun, Baskin-Robbins. Plastic tables and chairs lay scattered where the earthquake had thrown them. It’s like a mall, he thought.

Somewhere near the food, he thought, there had to be a toilet. He found it, did his business, then discovered there was enough water pressure in the sink to manage some washing. He cleaned his face and neck and arms and looked at his hair in the mirror, glued into thick strands by mud and sweat. He wished there was a shower so that he could wash his hair.

Maybe, after dinner, he’d come back and try washing his hair with hand soap. It would make it stick out funny, but it was better than wearing mud for mousse.

Jason stepped out into the food court again and paused for a moment. Beyond were the gaming tables, slots and video poker machines standing in silent ranks.

He wondered if any of the gamblers had left their money behind when the earthquake hit. The thought seemed worthy of exploration. He walked into the huge central room, fingers idly exploring the coin trays of the machines as he passed. He didn’t find any money.

The blackjack tables had spilled cards and spilled chairs, but not a single spilled coin or token. Dice lay on the craps tables, and drinks sat waiting for gamblers to return, but there was nothing on any of the tables resembling currency. Jason concluded that the casino employees had done a very thorough cleanup before they abandoned ship.

Jason hopped up to one of the big roulette wheels and gave it a spin. It moved with silent ease. Two ivory balls sat waiting in a slot by Jason’s hand, and he picked one up and hefted it. He’d never seen roulette except in the movies, and he tried to remember how the croupier had thrown the ball into play. He tossed it with a flick of his wrist, but the ball bounced right down onto the spinning wheel, caromed across, bounded back, and jumped straight into one of the slots on the wheel. Not very professional. They should use a plunger and spring, Jason thought, like in pinball. There was a loud crash, the sound of breaking glass, and Jason gave a guilty start and looked up wildly. He wondered if Nick had broken something, and then he heard a loud whoop echo through the cavernous room, and he knew that he and Nick were not alone on the Lucky Magnolia. High-pitched laughter followed the whoop, and then the laughter was joined by a deeper voice. There were at least two other people aboard.

Without knowing why, Jason ducked behind the roulette table. He decided it was because he hadn’t quite liked the sound of those laughs.

He wondered what he should do. Tell Nick, perhaps. But tell him what? That there were people aboard who laughed funny?

There was another crash. Jason felt his heart give a lurch. Cackling laughter filled the air, and then Jason heard footsteps. He hunched down behind the table.

“I’m getting tired of popcorn and peanuts,” a man said.

“We shoulda brought Janine to cook for us.”

“We shoulda brought a woman for each of us,” said another voice. “They’d give us all the food and lovin’ we want, allowing as how we’re both going to be so rich.”

In the dim light Jason saw two men leave one of the darkened rooms off the main room. The sign above the door, he saw, said Paddlewheel Saloon. The two headed aft, boots crunching on broken glass. Heart in his mouth, Jason ghosted after them, keeping low. He smelled cigar smoke. Tables and ranks of slot machines helped screen him from the interlopers. As he passed the Paddlewheel Saloon Jason saw that the bar’s colorful art nouveau window had been smashed by some well-aimed beer bottles. These were the crashes he’d heard.

Talking in loud voices of matters clear only to them, the two men walked aft to the tellers’ cages, then walked behind the screen. Jason paused and wondered whether to slip back to Nick, or try to find out first what the two intruders were doing.

He thought about what might happen if Nick came looking for him, and his mouth went dry. Then he heard a series of metal banging sounds, like a hammer ringing on an anvil.

He slipped toward the last teller’s cage on the left, close by the wall. Trying not to breathe, he peered through the teller’s window and saw the two men at work.

The younger of the two men wore a T-shirt and jeans. Lank hair straggled out from behind his battered baseball cap, which he wore with the bill pointed aft. The older man revealed a substantial belly between his T-shirt and the blue jeans that were belted low on his hips. His burly arms were covered in tattoos, and a short cigar was clamped between his teeth. Spectacles glittered beneath the bill of his baseball cap. Each took a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels as they rummaged through canvas bags filled with tools. The two were working on opening the casino safe, trying to chisel and pry open its door. They had gotten a chisel between the door and its frame, and were striving to widen the gap.

“Gaw-damn!” the older one said. “They built this sucker good, didn’t they?”

“Fill the boat with fifty-dollar chips,” said the younger one. “Good as cash any day.” Boat, Jason thought. They had come in a boat.

“Lend a hand here, Junior.” Junior, it appeared, was the older one. The two leaned on a pry bar for a moment, grunting, boots scrabbling for traction on the tile. Muscles stood out on forearms, in necks. The door didn’t move. The two relaxed.

“Gaw-damn,” breathed Junior. He bent to root in his tool bag.

The younger man laughed. “How many casinos do you reckon we can find this side of Helena?” he asked. “Ten? Fifteen? All with cash, checks, and fifty-dollar chips?” He gave a little hop of sheer enthusiasm. “Jesus shit howdy!” he said. “We’re going to have to buy a Chevy Suburban just to haul it all around.”

“We aren’t going to be able to afford a third-hand Yugo,” Junior said, “if you don’t help me bust this safe.”

Boat, Jason thought again. They have a boat.

It had to be on the starboard side of the Lucky Magnolia. He and Nick had tied up to the port side and hadn’t seen another boat there.

He crept to the starboard side, keeping crouched down below the ranks of poker machines, then slid along the side. The main entrance wasn’t hard to find: it was huge, a twenty-foot-tall glass alcove set into the side of the riverboat, leading to a ramp and white plastic tunnel that clearly led to the shore. Two sets of glass doors blocked the entrance, but one door in each set had been smashed open. More confirmation, if any were needed, that this was the way to the intruders’ boat. The area in front of the alcove was wide open, and light coming in through the glass walls lit it well. Jason waited until he heard the ring of hammers on metal again, then ran for daylight, fast as his feet could carry him. His sandals grated on broken glass and then he was in the tunnel, sprinting down the ramp into fresh air and freedom.

The tunnel opened onto a wide pontoon pier against which the gambling boat was moored. The pier was held against the levee by steel cables, and connected with a foot ramp that led to the levee’s crown. A row of flags snapped overhead in the cool breeze. Jason looked wildly for a boat, and had no trouble finding it at all.

It was moored bow and stern to the upstream side of the pier. It was longer than the bass boat, maybe twenty feet, with a windscreen and cockpit and a white canvas top. A big hundred-fifty-horsepower Evinrude outboard was fixed to the stern, which was filled with big translucent plastic fuel jugs, each aglow with amber fuel. The motor was tilted forward to keep the prop out of the debris-filled water. Triumph sang in Jason’s blood as he gazed at the boat. He untied the stern line, then took the bow line in hand and walked the boat to the edge of the pier, where the Lucky Magnolia lay against huge rubber fenders intended to preserve its paint. Jason jumped from the pier to the gambling boat, clung for a precarious moment to the outside of the rail, then hopped the rail onto the Magnolia’s deck, the motorboat’s bow line still in hand.

He walked the boat forward, passing the line around the fluted white iron pillars that supported the deck above, then walked clean around the bow to the port side, where he moored the boat next to Retired and Gone Fishin’.

He felt a warm satisfaction as he contemplated his handiwork for a minute, then spent at least five seconds thinking of ways to steal the intruders’ tools while he was at it. But then he decided he’d better tell Nick there were thieves on board, before Nick decided to call him in for dinner or to use the toilet. Jason slipped back into the Lucky Magnolia, careful to close the door quietly behind him, then made his way through the restaurant to the kitchen. Nick was still cooking, oblivious to everything that had occurred to Jason since he left the kitchen. The smell of pork chops sizzling in the pan made Jason’s mouth water, and for a lightheaded instant he considered eating his meal before telling Nick about the two men trying to break into the safe.

Nick looked up at him, grinned. “You like coffee gravy?” he said. “Give you energy for the rest of the day.”

“Nick,” Jason said, “there are people on the boat.”

Nick seemed pleased. “They belong to the casino? Or did they drift up like us?”

“They’re thieves,” Jason said, and Nick’s grin vanished in an instant. “They’re drunk, and they’re breaking into the safe,” Jason went on. “They’re going to steal the money here, then rob every casino on the river.” Nick’s eyes never left Jason’s face as he reached to turn the flame off underneath the pan. “We’d better get back to our boat,” he said.

“Let’s put the food on a plate and take it with us,” Jason said.

Nick walked to him, grabbed him by his shoulders, and turned him around. “March on outta here,” he said, “and don’t make any noise.”

Just for that, Jason thought, I don’t tell you about how I stole their boat. Nick was so wary, skulking through the restaurant with such theatrical care, that Jason wanted to laugh. When they got into the corridor outside, the sound of banging and hammering on the safe could be heard clearly. Nick raised a finger to his lips—Jason wanted to laugh again—and then they slipped outside to where they had left the bass boat.

Jason went ahead so that he could see Nick’s face when Nick realized what Jason had done. Nick stepped out, intent only on the bass boat, and then slowed, puzzlement plain on his face as his eyes moved to the larger boat. He stopped, one hand on the line that tied the bass boat to the Magnolia, and then a conclusion seemed to pass across his face. He turned to Jason, his eyes suspicious.

“This is their boat?”

“Yeah!” Jason laughed. “I took it!”

Nick’s eyes narrowed. “You took their boat? You stole it?”

Jason was surprised by the suspicion in Nick’s tone.

Defiance bubbled up in him. “Yeah!” he said. “I stole it! They’re here to take money, and I took their boat! What’s wrong with that?”

Nick looked thoughtfully from Jason to the stolen boat and back, then stepped close to Jason, put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re sure those men are thieves?” he asked. “You didn’t just take their boat and then make up a story about their being robbers?”

Jason jerked away. “No way!” he said. “They’re here to steal!” Nick looked thoughtful, then cast a glance back over his shoulder at the door. “Oh, sure!” Jason scorned.

“Go ask them! Junior and his redneck buddy’ll be happy to see you!” He waved his arms. “You heard them hammering on the safe! You figure they’ll just say howdy and offer you some of their Jack Daniels?” Nick turned back to Jason, and his look softened. “I believe you,” he said. “We’d better leave.” Jason’s heart leaped. He jumped for the new speedboat, and dropped into the white vinyl seat behind the wheel. “Hey,” he said, “we’ve got push-button starting! Let’s blast outta here!”

“No!” Nick said sharply, and then lowered his voice. “They might have guns. We don’t want to make any noise. Let’s just drift away, then start the motor once we’re clear.”

Nick used one of the mooring lines to tie the bass boat’s bow to their new boat, and then he untied them from the Lucky Magnolia and pushed the boats into the current.

Nick crawled beneath the canvas cover to the seat next to Jason’s in the cockpit. Jason, heart beating, watched as they slowly slipped past the huge gambling boat. His eyes strained at the windows for a glimpse of Junior or his friend.

Nothing. The Magnolia fell astern. He laughed, then turned to Nick. “Start the engine?” he said.

“I guess it’s time.” Nick made his way to the stern and tilted the Evinrude’s propeller into the water. Jason pressed the start button.

Nothing happened.

Jason tried again and again, and then realized that there was an ignition lock, like the lock on a car, on the console. Junior or his buddy doubtless had the key.

Jason’s heart sank. He’d gone to the trouble and risk of stealing the boat, and now it might as well be a raft.

“No problem,” Nick said, when Jason told him of the trouble. Nick hopped back to the bass boat, got some tools out of one of the storage lockers, then returned and ducked under the console. “Move your feet, okay?” he said—Jason did—and then Jason heard him work with the electronics for a moment.

“Give it a try now,” Nick said.

Jason pressed the button, the starter whined, and the engine coughed. Jason gave a laugh. He let up on the button and the engine died. He tried again, and the engine again refused to start.

“Give it some choke,” Nick said as he clawed his way out from beneath the console. Jason looked for a button labeled choke, found it, and pushed it. Then he tried to start the engine again, and again the engine died.

“Let’s see what you’re doing,” Nick said as he settled into the seat next to Jason. Jason showed him. Nick reached over and pulled the choke button. “Pull it out, not in,” he said. And the engine started.

Still need the grownups, Jason thought as he pushed the throttle forward. Damn it. But his heart leaped as the engine roared, as the boat began to speed through the sluggish water. He turned to Nick and grinned. “Where did you say your daughter lives?” he said. “Bet we can get there in a couple days.”

Nick was looking over his shoulder at the bass boat bumping along behind. “Once we get out of sight of the casino,” he said, “we should cut back our speed, save fuel. Maybe tie up or drift at night so we don’t run into anything.”

“Fine,” Jason said. “Whatever.”

And then laughed, because the boat was his and now so was the river.

Larry Hallock stood in the pilothouse of the fireboat as it eased its way toward the Poinsett Landing plant. The boat moved slowly, feeling its way through the ruined facility so that it wouldn’t go aground on some half-ruined obstacle.

He could see the fire crew standing ready by their water cannon. They were in full firefighting togs, helmets, capes, faces masked, breathing from respirators. They had to be suffering from the Mississippi heat.

Which Larry knew firsthand, because he was suited himself. Not, thank God, in a complete radiation suit, one that looked like what the astronauts wore on the moon, but in something that was bad enough. He was in anti-C clothing—the C stood for Contamination—which consisted of heavy overalls, boots, gloves, skullcap, and a gas masklike respirator to keep him from breathing in any airborne contamination. The boots and gloves had been duct-taped to the overalls to make certain that no contaminated particulates got into his clothing. If any of the portable radiation detectors on the boat showed that he’d been contaminated, he’d be able to throw away the suit and walk away free.

But he was hot, even in the shade of the pilothouse. The respirator was claustrophobic. Sweat kept dripping from his forehead onto the inside lenses of his spectacles, and he’d wished he’d remembered to put on a sweatband before he donned the gear.

Larry wasn’t alone in his misery. Accompanying him on the boat were separate teams from the power company and from the Department of Energy, all in their own anti-C apparel. The fantail of the boat looked like an astronauts’ convention.

Helicopters thundered overhead. A nuclear accident was just the sort of thing to really concentrate the government’s attention as well as the attention of the media, which with its usual efficiency was in the process of blowing the incident into mass panic. Larry figured that more people were going to die of heart attacks and strokes while listening to the television coverage than would ever die of radiation exposure.

The depth sounder made ticking noises as the boat edged closer to the auxiliary building. The helmsman fired the stern thrusters briefly to nudge the back end of the boat around, then paused, the boat hovering alongside the long, buff-colored flank of the storage building, its engines providing just enough thrust to hover in the current. The depth sounder reported fourteen feet of swift-moving water under the keel.

“I believe, sir,” the captain said, in soft, deferential Southern tones, “that we may commence.” Larry had spent the night in his own bed, in his quake-damaged home. His wife Helen had survived the quake without so much as a scratch, but the house had not been so lucky. Most of the shingles had fallen from the roof. The rear porch had become detached and moved about five feet into the yard. All the windows had broken, and all the shelves had fallen.

Helen had coped perfectly well with his absence, however. The fallen books and smashed crockery had been cleared up, and the shelves set up again, this time fixed firmly to wall studs with anchor bolts. Nothing was going to fall again unless it took the entire wall with it. Larry was thankful that he’d married a practical girl who knew how to use his tools.

That morning, on his way to his rendezvous with the fireboat, Larry had flown over the Poinsett Landing plant and surveyed the collapsed roof of the auxiliary building, looking for places to rain water into the holding pond. He’d taken a number of Polaroid photographs from the air, and he reached into an envelope for these and blinked at them past the smeared lenses of his spectacles. He made his way out of the pilothouse, then told the captains of each of the water cannons where to direct their attack. Pumps began to throb. Valves were turned.

And brown Mississippi water began to flow from the nozzles of the water cannon. It took most of the day before Larry’s radiation detectors suggested that the great reservoir of the holding pond had at last been filled, and the spent fuel’s furious heat temporarily quenched. At this point Larry thankfully got out of his anti-C gear; the teams of inspectors left the boat to enter the auxiliary building to analyze the damage and dump large amounts of radiation-absorbing boric acid into the cooling water. Larry himself was spared this duty, both because of his injury and because all the access routes to the building lay under water and would have to be entered by people using scuba equipment. Operation Island, as General Frazetta had dubbed it, was getting under way.

NINETEEN

Nick was eating his breakfast—Campbell’s Chunky Beef, straight from the can—when they motored free of trees and wreckage, and there was the bridge dead ahead, the span between its three great towers glittering like a spider web in the morning sun. Mouth full of soup, he nudged Jason, but Jason had already seen it.

The boy turned to him with a grin. “All right!” he said. “We’re rescued!” Don’t be too sure, Nick thought, though his heart grew lighter for all his caution. Jason looked down at his can of food. “Creamed corn,” he said. “Couldn’t you find something in the pantry that doesn’t suck?”

Nick looked in their bag of supplies. “Want some olives?” he said.

After escaping from the Lucky Magnolia, they had motored south till nightfall, then cut the engine so as not to run onto debris. Morning found them out of the main channel and somewhere in the flood plain, surrounded by tall trees, with a bluff hard by the west bank. Or perhaps this was the main channel now. It was impossible to tell.

They started the Evinrude and motored carefully southward through the trees, the engine turning at low revs to keep the boat away from obstacles. A brisk wind blew through the trees overhead, but at the water’s surface the air was almost still. Jason steered while Nick prepared their unappetizing breakfast.

“Hey look!” Jason said, excited. “Look! It’s a city!”

Through his own rising excitement, Nick paged through mental road maps. A town on the west bank, built up on a bluff, with a highway bridge crossing the Mississippi.

“Helena,” he said. “That’s Arkansas over there.”

He could see towboats and rafts of barges moored along the waterfront. Maybe one of them would let him use their radio, he thought.

Jason put his bowl of half-eaten creamed corn on the gunwale. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand,” he said, and reached for the throttle.

As they neared Helena, Nick saw the place had suffered in the quake. Parts of the bluff had spilled downward into the lower town, and all of the buildings he could see over the town’s big floodwall were damaged. Some of the older brick buildings had collapsed. From the marks of soot, it looked as if other buildings had burned.

“That way!” Nick said, pointing, as a lagoon opened up on the right. He saw piers, masts, small boats. Jason turned the wheel and the boat heeled as it roared for the marina entrance. The moored pleasure boats, rising on the flood, had suffered little damage, though some, parked on dry land in trailers, had been knocked over, and sat now half-full of water. Jason cut the throttle as he entered the lagoon, and the speedboat slid over glassy water. Silence enveloped them. Nick could hear wire halyards rattling in the wind against aluminum sailboat masts, the cawing of the flocks of crows that massed overhead, the hiss of water under the keel. There were no sounds of traffic, no footsteps, no sounds of voices. Beyond its floodwall, Helena was strangely silent.

There were buildings close in sight, though. Nick could see what appeared to be a regular residential neighborhood between the bluff and the big half-collapsed warehouses near the marina. Nothing moved there. Nothing moved anywhere. Nick wondered if the town had been evacuated.

“No point in mooring here,” he said. “Flood’s cut us off from town.” The bass boat bobbing behind on the end of its tether, American Dream idled past the Terminal & Warehouse Co., moved along Helena’s floodwall until it found a gap, a gate torn open by the quake—the river must have poured through here, Nick thought, though now the waters were gentle enough—and then Jason steered the speedboat through the wall into the town beyond. Frame buildings rose on either side, many of them leaning, knocked off their foundations. The boat’s muttering exhaust echoed strangely from houses and trees. Crows gazed down at them from peaked rooftops, from black windows that had lost their glass.

“Man, this is weird,” Jason said. “Where is everybody?”

“Maybe they all went up the bluff to get away from flood.”

“I didn’t see anyone moving up there.” Jason looked thoughtful. “Maybe we can scrounge supplies out of some of those houses. Shall we check it out?”

Nick thought about it, decided he had no real moral objection to this course of action. The food was doing no good where it was. “Find a house that won’t fall down on us,” he said. Jason motored up to a two-story frame structure with a broad portico. The building’s gabled design suggested it had been built before World War II, perhaps well before that. Jason nudged the boat’s bow right up to the porch. Nick pulled up his trouser legs above his knees, jumped into the flood, moored the boat by its bow to one of the white pillars. Goose flesh crept over his skin at the touch of the cold water. Water washed back and forth through the screen door. The front door with its knocker stood open, and broken windows gaped. Nick opened the screen and ventured inside.

“Hello?” he said. “Anyone here?”

There was a rustling sound on the second floor, but no voice answered. Nick stood in a living room flooded to a depth of two feet or so, with a high-water mark on the flowered blue wallpaper twelve or so inches above the current level. Plastic articles, papers, and paperback books floated in the water. White lace curtains trailed in the current. A steep carpeted stair led to the floor above. Jason sloshed into the room. “Guess we’re not going to do much cooking here, huh?”

“Maybe we should have gone up to one of the towboats. They’re bound to have a watch on board.”

“We’ll try that next. But if we bring the towboat some food, they’re more likely to help us out.” Jason sloshed toward the kitchen, then gave a yelp as he banged his shins on a submerged coffee table. As if in answer to Jason’s cry, Nick heard the rustling sound again on the floor above. He waded to the bottom of the stair. “Hello?” he called.

More rustling. Crows cawed.

“Maybe someone’s hurt up there,” Nick said. “Maybe they can’t call for help.”

“Might as well look,” Jason called from the kitchen. “The pantry’s empty. Maybe the food’s upstairs.” Nick put his hand on the newel post, then took two cautious steps upward. All he needed was to get shot as an intruder by some half-senile old lady. “He was black,” she’d say. “I knew he only wanted a white woman!”

“Anyone up there?” Nick called. “We’ve come to help.”

And then he added, “Me and the boy!” to let whoever it was know that he was okay, harmless, he had a kid with him.

“Me and the geek engineer,” he heard Jason mutter behind him. Nick concluded that Jason didn’t like being called “boy” any more than Nick did.

Nick climbed the stairs and stood at the end of the upstairs hall with water streaming down his legs. He heard rustling and flapping sounds, but by now he thought he could identify them.

“I think they’re just birds,” he said, and looked through the first doorway. There was a mad rushing of wings, a cawing of panicked birds smashing into walls as they tried to escape through the shattered window. Nick’s blood turned cold. He took a shaky step rearward, turned away, took Jason by the shoulders.

“Don’t look,” he said, talking loud over the flutter of wings. “Go back to the boat.” Jason looked up at him resentfully, and his mouth opened for a wisecrack, but something in Nick’s tone must have got through to him, because he turned in silence and began walking down the stair. Nick’s pulse fluttered in his throat. There was a tremor in his knees. Then, slowly, he turned and looked into the room again.

A young black couple, he saw, and their baby. They looked as if they’d survived the earthquake but died afterward, in some kind of fit. Their mouths were open and their hands were bloody claws. The man’s fingernails had gouged tracks in the cheerful blue checks of the wallpaper. The woman had died with her baby in her arms. A bottle of formula lay where it had fallen in the middle of a throw rug. The crows had got to their eyes. Despite the dark blood-flecked hollows in their faces, they seemed to have died with peaceful expressions on their faces. They had fought for life while the fit first came, but then died quietly, resignedly, when the time came.

Nick realized he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out. Softly he turned from the room, and closed the door behind him.

He found two more corpses. An older child, a boy, lying dead in his Air Jordans beneath a portrait of Jesus. He looked as if he had torn at his own throat in an attempt to breathe, though he, too, had relaxed at the end, had died with a strange soft air of tranquility. In another room was an older woman, probably the mother of one of the young couple, who had crawled under her bed to die.

The crows had gotten to them, whole flocks of them. Unless Nick wanted to find some lumber and plank over the broken windows, there was no way to keep them out.

He closed the door and walked in silence down the hall, then down the stair. Jason waited silently in the boat. Nick sloshed through the water to the portico, then unmoored the speedboat and pulled himself up on the foredeck.

Jason looked at him questioningly as the boat drifted away from the portico. “They were dead,” Nick said. “The whole family.” He licked his lips. “It looked as if they were poisoned or something.” Apprehension twitched around Jason’s eyes. “Glad we didn’t take their food,” he said.

“It may not have been the food,” Nick said, and looked at the flocks of crows that circled overhead and perched on all the roofpeaks.

Jason seemed surprised. “What, then?”

Nick rubbed his chin, feeling the unshaven bristle scratching his palm. “I don’t know yet. I want to look in another house.”

In the next house Nick explored, the scene was even worse. The entire family had died in one upstairs room, clawing at each other as if they had been taken by a homicidal fit. There were a lot of children, at least half a dozen, but Nick didn’t want to count.

When he came back to the boat, Nick couldn’t speak, he just waved Jason to go back the way they had come. Jason motored back toward the gap in the floodwall and passed slowly through the open gate.

“Shall we try one of the towboats?” Jason asked.

Nick nodded. But, as they motored along the riverfront, Nick looked ahead to see the crows atop a shrunken mound of clothing on the afterdeck of the nearest boat, and he felt the hair on his neck stand on end.

“No,” he said. “No. Get back in the river. As far across as we can go. And don’t steer anywhere where you don’t see birds flying.”

Jason looked at him wildly. “Why? What is it?”

Nick licked his lips. “Gas. A cloud of gas killed all those people when the flood trapped them in their houses.”

Nick saw Jason turn pale beneath his sunburn. ” What kind of gas?” he demanded. Nick searched his mind, shook his head. “There must be a dozen things that could do something like this. Chlorine gas. Arsine. Hydrogen cyanide. One damn barge is all it takes. We’ve got to hope it’s dispersed, that we haven’t been breathing it.”

Jason’s eyes widened. He raised a hand to his throat, and for a moment Nick saw an echo on Jason’s face of the horror that must have come to Helena, the realization that they had been poisoned and were going to die.

As soon as they were clear of the land, Jason opened the throttle and the speedboat roared east across the river. There they followed a series of bird flights south, past the silent city on the bluff. Past the broken houses, the silent boats and barges. Past a double row of gasoline storage tanks that had burned and died, past the flooded casting field, past the shattered, abandoned Arkansas Power & Light plant. Past the circling, calling flocks of carrion crows that feasted on the city’s eyeless dead. Helena died by phosgene gas. Two common chemicals, sulfuric acid and carbon tetrachloride, were mixed in the broken warehouse of a chemical company, and in sufficient quantities to generate a cloud large enough, by nightfall on the day of the quake, to cover the entire town below the bluff. The gas is colorless, and the characteristic scent of musty hay was not thought alarming by those who had already survived a major earthquake, and who were busy rescuing neighbors and taking shelter from a flood. Phosgene is fatal in small quantities, and often takes an hour or two to do its work: by the time its victims felt any symptoms, they had suffered enough exposure to assure their own fate. Phosgene attacks the lungs, specifically the capillaries. The victims choked and gagged as their lungs filled with fluid, and then, as the characteristic euphoria of oxygen starvation took them, died in a strange, contented bliss.

A few survivors staggered or drove up the bluff to alert the town to what was happening. Helena, West Helena, and nearby communities were evacuated and cordoned off, but with communications so disrupted, and the roads so badly torn, the evacuation order in effect commanded the citizens to march into the wilderness and attempt to survive there for an indeterminate period. Thousands of people wandered lost in woods and fields for days, afraid to return home for fear of being poisoned. Ironically, by the time the evacuation got under way, the danger had largely passed. Unlike mustard gas, Lewisite, or some nerve agents, phosgene does not persist in the environment. But Helena’s surviving civil authorities were in shock from M1 and easily panicked; they had no way of identifying the gas or assessing the danger; they gave the orders and hoped for the best.

Days later, half-starved families were still staggering out of the countryside. On the second morning after the quake, Charlie took a bucket of water from his swimming pool and used it to flush his toilet. Then he threw some chlorine in the pool to keep it drinkable—he didn’t know how much to use, he had a company who normally took care of this job, he just guessed. Then he looked in his refrigerator.

All that remained was Friday night’s canard a I’orange in its foam container, and a can of Megan’s diet drink, and the anchovies. He took the diet drink from the shelf and opened it. Vanilla. He hated vanilla.

He drank it anyway, and then ate the anchovies, which made a horrid contrast with the vanilla drink. Possibly, he thought, he should get some more food.

But the nearest supermarket was on the other side of the chasm in the street, and he couldn’t cross the chasm. He just couldn’t. His heart staggered at the thought of it.

And then he remembered the little grocery store. It was maybe a mile away in the other direction. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. There seemed to be something wrong with the way he was putting things together.

Had to get a grip, he thought. He was Lord of the Jungle.

Charlie made sure his wallet was in his pocket, and then he put on his St. Louis Cardinals cap and began his walk.

No chasms blocked Charlie’s way, though broad cracks ran across the road here and there. The neighborhood had been tidied somewhat: some of the fallen trees had been cut up and hauled out of the road, some of the broken glass swept up. Charlie heard the constant sound of chainsaws. There was almost no traffic. Charlie saw only a few trucks moving, carrying supplies apparently, and a flatbed truck with a bulldozer on it. He saw no official vehicles at all, no police, no fire trucks, no National Guard.

As he left his prosperous Germantown neighborhood, he saw clumps of ill-kempt people standing on street corners, people who watched him in silence. Children and babies were everywhere, the children unbathed, the babies crying.

The store shared a little strip mall with a furniture store and a place that sold office supplies. All the windows were gone: the office supply store was boarded up, but the furniture store was wide open. As Charlie walked past the furniture store he saw people inside, apparently living there, sleeping in the bedroom displays. Two unshaven, shirtless men in baseball caps carried a chest of drawers across the parking lot. It didn’t appear to Charlie that they were employees.

The windows of the convenience store were gone, but a rusty old Dodge van had been parked along the side of the store, blocking most of the broken windows. The broken glass had been swept into the gutter. Charlie saw figures moving in the darkened interior, and he heard a radio blaring, so he stepped in. The inside was still a wreck. The quake had knocked practically everything off the shelves, and items hadn’t been replaced, just swept into crude piles.

new polisy, said a sign just inside the door, cash only. The sign was written in black felt marker on the back of another placard.

“If you came for milk,” said the man behind the counter, “we ran out yesterday.”

“No,” Charlie said. “Not milk.”

“Beer’s gone, too,” the man said.

The man was a white man in his fifties who wore a baseball cap and a dirty white T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved since before the quake, and he carried a long pump shotgun propped on one hip. cigarettes, said another sign over his head, $10 pack, marlboros $12.

The man was a profiteer, clear enough. Charlie wasn’t bothered. It wasn’t anything more than what he, Charlie, planned to do. Besides, he could buy and sell the whole store.

Behind him was a battery-powered radio on which quake victims were being interviewed. “It was a true miracle that I lived through it,” a man said. “A true miracle.” All the canned goods had been piled in one area of the store, littel cans $7, the sign said, BIG cans $20. The cans were all sizes, and it was difficult to say which of the medium-sized ones were big, and which were little.

“You want some flour?” the man said. “I got a little left, but not much. And some cornmeal. Sugar’s gone.”

“Flour?” Charlie said. “No.” He wouldn’t know what to do with it, had never baked anything in his life.

“My baby’s buried in there somewhere,” a woman on the radio sobbed. “We’re praying for a miracle.” A door opened in the back of the store and a young man came in. He had long stringy hair to his shoulders and wore a baseball cap and a large revolver prominently strapped to his hip. He looked at Charlie. “C’n I help you?” he asked.

“Canned goods,” Charlie said, “and something to drink.”

“You want a bag?” the young man said.

Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Vienna sausages. Heinz baked beans. Spam. It was all dreadful, but Charlie filled his sack with it. When he could get real food again, he could give the extra canned stuff to the cleaning lady.

“It was a miracle that my father survived,” said a man on the radio. Charlie put two plastic bottles of mineral water in another sack, then walked to the counter and gave the man his Visa card. The man looked at it with contempt.

“Can’t take this,” he said, showing long yellow teeth. “Cash only.” He pointed. “See the sign?”

“The card’s good, mate,” Charlie said. “It’s platinum.”

“Ain’t no way to call to prove that. Phone’s down.”

Charlie sighed, pulled out his Amex card, his MasterCard, his Eurocard, a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of credit all told. “They’re all good,” he said. “I can prove they belong to me.”

“Cash,” the man said, “only.”

Charlie eyed him. “Right, then,” he said. “Tell you what. Charge an extra hundred dollars to the total.” The man thought about it for at least a half-second. Then shook his head. “Cash,” he said. “Radio says the economy’s gone crazy. I don’t know them banks are still around.”

“Of course they’re around!” Waving a card. “This is Chase Manhattan Bank.” Waving another. “This is American Express!”

“You got a problem here, pop?” the young man said. He stood behind Charlie and to one side, hand placed casually on the butt of his revolver.

“Cash,” the older man said. “None of your funny foreign money, neither.” There was a sadistic glint in his eye: he was enjoying this, humiliating one of the rich he’d served all his life. I’m working class, too!

Charlie wanted to say. But he knew it was pointless: Americans didn’t know one British accent from another, thought everyone was a lord.

“Charge me double, then,” Charlie said.

The man took the plastic bag of canned goods in one hand, moved it out of Charlie’s reach. “You got cash or not?”

“I thank God,” said a woman on the radio, “for the miracle that saved us.” Charlie reached into his pocket, took out his money clip. It held a ten, two singles, some change. The older man reached into Charlie’s bag and took out a can of Vienna sausage. “This and one of the bottles, eleven dollars.”

Charlie gave him eleven dollars. The man added it to a thick roll he produced from his pocket. Charlie looked in anger at the single dollar remaining.

“Sell you a lottery ticket for that?” the older man asked, and laughed. The laughter followed Charlie out of the store.

Charlie Johns paced back and forth before the chasm in the road. His heart thudded in his chest. “King of the Jungle,” he whispered to himself.

He needed to get out of here. He had eaten all the Vienna sausages at once, and they’d served only to make him more hungry.

He had a car, he thought, Megan’s BMW. He could just drive away, drive till he found some place that would take his credit cards or his checks. Someplace sane, where the phones worked. But he didn’t have the keys to Megan’s car, he realized.

Megan had them. And Megan was dead and in the back of the house and lying under the tub dead in the part of the house where Megan was dead… His mind whirled. He felt the need to sit down, and he found the curb and sat.

The keys, he thought, were probably in her handbag. And her handbag was lying in the room somewhere. He might be able to find it without even looking at Megan. Charlie rose from the curb, swayed, and walked back to his house. He felt he required fortification, so he went to the kitchen first, to the wine rack, and opened a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. He drank half of it from the neck—good things in wine, he thought, real nutrition there.

The wine’s flush prickled along his skin. With his stomach almost empty, the alcohol hit him quickly. Get to the bedroom fast, he thought. Grab the handbag. Run.

In his haste Charlie stumbled over the water heater that sprawled in the back hall and almost went to his knees. He wrenched himself upright and kept on going, his shoes squelching on the wet carpet. Floorboards sagged under his weight. Don’t look, he thought. He lurched to the door and stepped into the master bedroom.

“Oh God,” he said, and closed his eyes. He turned and lurched blindly for the door. He ran into the door frame and felt a cracking blow to his head. He staggered through the door and down the hall, and then he fell across the water heater and vomited up his Vienna sausages and red wine. Because there were flies now, a black cloud of them, and maggots, so many maggots that they crowded on each other and leaped a foot in the air and fell with the sound of soft rain. Charlie staggered to the kitchen and his bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape, and he rinsed his mouth with the wine and then gagged and went to his knees as his stomach convulsed.

He went out of the house to the BMW and lay down across the two front seats. He still had the wine bottle clutched in his hands.

He could still detect Megan’s scent hovering in the car.

After a while, he took another drink of wine.

“Remember to bring in the food! All the food!” Brother Frankland called after the little convoy he was sending down into the Arkansas Delta. “Bring all the survivors, but bring as much food as you can!” The trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles crunched gravel as they rolled out of the church parking lot and onto the highway. Frankland’s people—conspicuous in their official-looking white armbands—were doing a good job of bringing in survivors from isolated farms, along with as many supplies as could be scrounged from wrecked buildings or dug out of collapsed cellars. It turned out that Frankland would need as much food as his scavengers could provide.

They’d managed to plunder the Piggly Wiggly, though, of everything edible that had survived the quake. The sheriff’s department hadn’t interfered, being told that the people in the white armbands were relief workers, and Piggly Wiggly management were somewhere else. Sheryl was salting down as much of the meat as hadn’t gone directly into the stewpot, and storing the flour in plastic garbage barrels, along with bay leaves to discourage the weevils from eating more than their fair share.

Not that weevils weren’t a good source of protein in themselves.

Protein was also available in the local catfish farms. Since the catfish farmers couldn’t get their fish to market, Frankland reasoned, they might as well donate their harvest. But he hadn’t spoken to any of them other than his parishioner Joe Johnson, who was willing to contribute his income for his soul’s sake. The food issue aside, things were going well. By now, the second day following the quake, the Church of the End Times had turned into a regular encampment, encompassing half the ten acres that comprised Frankland’s property. Tents marched in disciplined rows. Latrines had been dug and screened with canvas or plastic sheets that crackled in the brisk wind. Reverend Garb had brought in his own parishioners to help out, and now there were black hands working alongside the white in getting the camp ready.

It was laid out like an army camp. The Army of the Lord.

Hilkiah was out on the fields planting a series of poles in the ground—planting them deep in quick-setting concrete, so that they’d stay upright during any future tremors. Then he’d string them with loudspeakers, so that everyone, throughout the growing compound, could have the benefit of the Good News simultaneously being broadcast on the radio station. Frankland, Dr. Calhoun, and the Reverend Garb took turns broadcasting, varying their message between urging refugees to make their way to town, asking listeners to donate supplies, and lengthy sermons on the End Times.

Near the church, a portable drilling rig—one Frankland had bought fifth-hand years ago—was putting in a new well. The quake had sheared the pipes from Frankland’s two old wells, but he’d been prepared for that, and his cisterns would be sufficient till they could get new wells dug. Things were much better organized here than in town. Rails Bluff had long since run out of emergency supplies, personnel, food, and fresh water. All Sheriff Gorton could do when refugees straggled in was to advise them to continue up Highway 417 to the Reverend Frankland’s place. He was sending them in shuttles on Dr. Calhoun’s bus, along with as many of Rails Bluff’s own inhabitants as he could persuade to go.

Communication was nonexistent: the telephone exchange had been destroyed, ground lines were down, radios in the sheriff’s cars didn’t carry far enough to reach anywhere else, cellular phone relays were all gone. It was probably a blessing, Frankland thought—he could do his work here without worrying about corruption and evil broadcast from the outside, but he still felt sorry for those worried about loved ones they could not reach.

“Brother Frankland?”

Frankland turned at the sound of Garb’s voice. “Brother Garb?” he smiled.

“Heaven-o,” said Garb.

“Beg pardon?”

Garb gave a shy smile. “Heaven-o. It’s a way of saying ‘hello,’ except it leaves out the ‘hell.’ It always bothered me that there was hell in hello.”

Frankland nodded in admiration. “Heaven-o! That’s great!” he said. “Did you think of that?”

“No, I heard that there was this county in Texas that voted to replace hello with heaven-o, and I thought it was a pretty good idea.”

“Maybe we should make it official here in the camp.”

“I’d be very pleased if we could.” Garb adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “I’ve just been speaking to that last bus-load of refugees that came up from town,” he said. “Half of them are from below the bluff, down in the Delta.”

Frankland nodded. “They can hear our message in the Delta? That’s good.” Garb shook his head. “No, they didn’t hear you. They came here because it was the only place they could go. The levees broke, and everyone in the Delta was flooded out.”

Frankland shook his head. All those rich farmers growing cotton and soya in the Arkansas Delta, living off the fat of the land while their neighbors, and their neglected brethren in Rails Bluff, stayed poor. Now the rich farmers were refugees, and Rails Bluff their only hope.

“God bless them,” Frankland said. That Wal-Mart superstore, he thought, must be flooded out, too.

“The ones who got out were those who live close to the bluff,” Garb went on, “or who owned boats that could get them through the flooding. There must be many more people down there who have been stranded.” Garb looked up at Frankland. “I was thinking that we should organize rescue groups with boats, just as we’ve done with jeeps and trucks. Go out there into the flooded country, bring people in.” Frankland put a hand on Garb’s shoulder. “Brother Garb, that’s a brilliant idea. Bless you.” Garb smiled. “Thank you . I can ask some of the refugees to serve as guides, because they know the country. And of course they already have boats.”

“Put our own people in the boats as well, make sure the thing’s done right.”

“Reliable people.”

“Exactly.” Frankland nodded.

It was glorious to have so many people here on his wave-length.

“I will organize it, if you like,” Garb said.

“Thank you, Brother Garb.” He hesitated. “Don’t forget the Wal-Mart. Tools, supplies, food.”

“Guns and ammunition.”

“Amen,” said Frankland.

There was the sound of a horn blaring from the highway, and Frankland looked up to see a pickup truck rolling in from the east. The driver waved a hand from his window as he turned into the church parking lot. Frankland could see another man in the bed of the truck. He and Garb trotted up to the truck as it ground to a halt on the gravel.

The driver hopped out. Frankland recognized him as the sixteen-year-old son of one of his parishioners, a scavenger who had been sent out east with some others. “We’ve got a casualty,” the boy said. “We pulled him out of a wrecked car at the bottom of the Rails River Bridge. He must have been on the bridge when it collapsed.”

“He’s been down there for two days?” Garb said, impressed.

“He was about to drown when we pulled him out. The river’s rising.” The boy walked around the pickup and let down the tailgate. “It was a heck of a job getting him up the riverbank,” he said. “We need a stretcher or something to get him to the infirmary.”

“We don’t have any stretchers,” Garb said, “but I’ll get a canvas cot.” Garb hustled away. Frankland looked into the bed of the truck and felt a rush of cold surprise. Father Guillaume Robitaille. Personal emissary from the Prince of Darkness to Rails Bluff. The priest was pale where he wasn’t sunburned, and crusted with his own blood. His nose was mashed over most of his face, his eyes were black, his front teeth had been knocked out. He looked at the world without comprehension, from rolling, half-slitted eyes. He shivered and trembled and made little whining noises.

Frankland gave silent thanks to the Lord, who had put the great Roman Enemy in his power.

“We’ll take Father Robitaille to my house,” he said. “I want to look after him personally.” He looked down at the priest.

“Heaven-o, Father,” he said. “Heaven-o.”

“Sweet Lord, look at that,” Sheryl said. Frankland nodded.

Father Robitaille trembled and whimpered in their bed. They had given him water, though he’d thrown most of it back up, and they’d tried to feed him, but he hadn’t been hungry, or maybe just hadn’t recognized his meal as food. He seemed pretty far gone.

He was safe enough in Frankland’s house, though. Like his church and broadcast center, it was steel-framed and set firmly on its foundation. It featured steel walls, steel window frames, steel doors and door frames.

Frankland hadn’t intended it that way, but when he was putting the building up, he realized it wouldn’t make a bad jail.

Or a drunk tank.

“When I was growing up in Little Rock,” Frankland said, “there was a little ol’ Catholic church between where I lived and where I went to school. And my folks told me that when I walked to school, I should be sure to cross the street when I got to the Catholic church, and walk on the other side, so that the Devil wouldn’t jump out of the church and get me. And most of the other kids in the neighborhood had been told the same thing, so practically everyone crossed the street to keep clear of the Catholics.” He chuckled. “Some of the braver kids would sneak up to the church, knock on the door, and run. Dare the Devil to come out and chase them.”

Sheryl nodded. “Your parents knew what they were talking about,” he said.

“Yep.” Frankland grinned. “When I was a child, I didn’t understand that it was just a, a what-d’you-call-it, a metaphor. There wasn’t a literal Devil in there, not the kind with horns and tail—well, I guess there wasn’t, I never looked. But my folks were right that if you went to the Catholic church, the Devil would get you in his clutches.” He laughed. “You know, I’ve never been in a Catholic church to this day. Not even just to look around.”

“Me neither,” said Sheryl.

“Ba ba,” Robitaille muttered through his broken teeth.

Frankland looked down at him. “Look at the Devil now.”

“Hah,” Robitaille said. His eyes came open, seemed to focus on Frankland. “Hah. Help.” Frankland leaned closer. “Yes. We’re here for you.”

“Help.”

“We’re here to save you,” Frankland said. Which wasn’t the same thing as help, not exactly.

“Ta,” Robitaille said. “Ta. Trink.”

“He wants a drink,” Sheryl said.

Frankland poured a glass of water from the pitcher and held it to Robitaille’s lips. Robitaille raised a hand to the glass and gulped eagerly at the water, and then his whole body gave a violent shudder, and he turned away, retching. Water spilled from his lips.

“Cochonl” he shouted. “Qui es-tu? Un espece defou?”

“He doesn’t want a drink, teddy bear,” Sheryl said. “He wants a drink.”

“Donne-moi un verrel Un verrel”

Frankland straightened. “Well. Water’s what he gets.” He looked down at Robitaille. “Water’s what we’ve got! It’s all we’ve got!”

Robitaille began to cry. Fat tears fell from his blackened eyes. “Je vais mourirl Donne-moi un verrel Je vais mourir si je ne trouve pas un verre.”

“What’s that language?” Frankland asked. “Latin, like the pope talks?”

“I guess.”

Frankland refilled the glass, put the glass on the table within the reach of Robitaille’s arms.

“I’m gonna let him calm down,” he said. “Then maybe the two of us can have a real chat.” He and Sheryl left the room, and nodded to the guard that Frankland had put on the door. One of the older men in their church, a tough farmer who wasn’t about to let a drunk priest sway him from his duty.

“Look after him,” Frankland iaid. “Give him anything he wants except alcohol—and I’m afraid that’s all he’s going to want.”

“Where would I find alcohol, Brother Frankland?” The farmer grinned.

“Somebody might have snuck some alcohol in.”

“Well, I’ll keep on the lookout.”

“I appreciate it, friend,” Frankland said.

Frankland made his way down the hall, past the extra furniture and breakable items they’d taken from the bedroom before they put Robitaille in the bed.

And then Robitaille, behind the steel door, began to scream, hoarse wails that prickled the hair on Frankland’s arms.

“Dang,” the farmer said. “That don’t even sound human.”

Frankland thought about that for the next hour or so, and then he decided it was a question to which he’d better find out the answer.

Jessica’s stomach gave a pleasant rollercoaster lurch as her helicopter circled the Gateway Arch. The ruins of St. Louis were spread out below her. The blackened devastation of yesterday morning’s propane explosion, where the fire chief and a couple dozen of his men were martyred, was plain to see. There was a circular crater in the center of the area, filled with water from the River Des Peres. Smoke rose from persistent fires. The morning’s brisk southwest wind was whipping up flames that had died down the day before.

Still, there were parts of St. Louis that were more or less intact, standing like hollow-eyed sentinels above the rubble that surrounded them. The earthquake had laid entire districts in ruin, but spared others. It was like a game of survival roulette: if you put your chips, your house and family, in the right area, you could come through with some broken windows and fallen shingles, while other people’s chips were swept off the board. The only problem was that no one knew which neighborhoods would be spared until after the game began, and by then it was too late for most of the players. The riverfront was a wreck. And the Chain of Rocks Canal in Illinois, through which river traffic bypassed the rapids that infested the river north of St. Louis, was now unusable. The canal’s banks had caved in, and so had the sides of the newly built Lock No. 27.

The grounds of the National Expansion Memorial were covered either with tents or helicopters. MARS

had moved in force: the Memorial held a battalion of paratroopers from Fort Bragg and a thousand rescue workers from all over the world, all in addition to the refugees who had poured out of the ruined city. Other city parks were also filling up with rescuers and refugees. Airlift Command was having a hard time just keeping them fed, particularly as there were few surviving runways big enough to carry heavy fixed-wing transports. Even the tough and reliable C130s were having a hard time finding places to land. Almost everything had to be flown in by helicopter, and choppers were fragile craft that required a lot of down time for maintenance.

Jessica sympathized with Airlift Command. They were trained to supply a mere army. This was an entire population.

During the Second World War, the United States had at its peak supported 15,000,000 soldiers, but that was after years of military buildup. Now there were millions of homeless refugees on American soil and the government was being asked to take care of them overnight, and with the heart ripped out of the country’s infrastructure.

“Take me down over the river,” Jessica said.

Her pilot gave a redneck grin. “You want to go under the bridges, or over?” For a moment she was tempted, and then she decided she would feel truly ridiculous if, during the greatest adventure of her life, she was killed by a falling railway tie. “Better go over,” she said. Jessica’s stomach sank into a single location as the Kiowa Warrior settled into a smooth dive. G’s tautened her grin.

She was going to have to learn how to fly one of these, that was clear. This was just too much fun. The river was fast and carried tons of debris. Once they got south of the bluffs at Cape Girardeau, Swampeast Missouri spread out before them like a shimmering inland lake. There were a pair of waterfalls at Island No. 8, though the Mississippi was busy reducing them. Jessica asked the pilot to make a detour to Sikeston, west of the river, to look at the power plant. The Sikeston Power Plant had been built directly on an earthquake fissure that was clearly visible from the top of its smokestack. At the time when the plant was built, no one realized this was an earthquake feature. But even after the fissure had been properly identified, land atop it had been acquired for a housing subdivision. Neither the power plant, the smokestack, nor the subdivision had survived M1. Brown water washed through the wreckage.

The next power plant south had been built at New Madrid, not exactly the best choice under the circumstances. It and the town were a flooded ruin. So was Cabells Mound. The river had cut the New Madrid bend and the bend at Uncle Chowder.

Jessica took a professional interest in the area south of New Madrid designated the New Madrid Floodway. The levee east of the floodway had been built with plugs atop the levee that could be removed in the event of dangerously high water, allowing the floodway to fill with water until the water reached a backup levee built five or so miles behind the river. This was to enable deliberate inundation so as to take pressure off other critical areas of the river.

Removing the plugs hadn’t been necessary, not with the earthquake tearing away chunks of the levee. To that extent the New Madrid Floodway functioned as intended.

Unfortunately this hadn’t helped populated areas, not with every levee in the district broken, including the backup levee behind the floodway. Everyplace that could flood had flooded. But because the flood was every place, it wasn’t as bad as it could get in any one place. Once the water had a chance to spread out, it achieved a kind of uniform depth over the whole region. It was a lake, but the lake was fairly shallow.

Jessica had hopes for the levees farther south. Before the Swampeast drained—and judging from the extent of the flooding, draining should take some time—it should be possible to reinforce and repair most of the levees south of the Arkansas River. She had hopes of keeping the major cities dry from Greenville south. This would entail pouring all these billions of gallons of water back into their proper channel south of the Arkansas. She thought this was possible.

“Refugees to starboard, General,” the pilot said.

There were about a dozen of them, at least two families. They were trapped, with their automobiles, on top of a flooded two-lane rural roadway. They had probably been there for two days. They were standing on top of their flooded vehicles, jumping up and down and waving their arms. Probably screaming their heads off, too.

Jessica’s Bell Kiowa light helicopter was far too small to carry the refugees away, even if they dangled from the skids.

“Circle them and let them know they’ve been seen,” Jessica said. “I’ll contact the jarheads and call for a dustoff.”

The helicopter rescue units operating in this part of the Mississippi Valley had been deployed by the Navy and Marines into a naval air station north of Memphis. Big Sikorsky Sea Stallions, able to carry over three dozen refugees and capable of floating on their amphibious hulls, were picking up people in isolated locales and delivering them to refugee centers well away from the earthquake zones, where they could be fed and housed without straining the capabilities of Airlift Command. While Jessica’s pilot banked into a turn over the stranded people, Jessica contacted the Navy, who informed her that there was a Sea Stallion flying on a search pattern over the Swampeast just a few minutes away. Jessica kept the Kiowa circling to mark the refugees’ position. When the big Marine Sikorsky arrowed in from the northwest, Jessica resumed her tour of the Mississippi, crossing the river to look at what remained of Memphis.

The Memphis Pyramid, she saw, was sitting in a lake. The old nineteenth-century Pinch District, surrounding the pyramid, was little but rubble, each building looking like a little crumbled brick pyramid paying homage to their huge silver neighbor. Mud Island was MIA. Beale Street, home of the blues, had been obliterated.

The random pattern of destruction that marked St. Louis, some parts destroyed and others standing, was not present here in Memphis. Here, the earthquake had spared nothing.

The Kiowa hovered at low altitude over the Harbor of Memphis while Jessica studied the wreckage, absorbing the company names on wrecked facilities, on ruptured storage tanks and half-submerged barges. Helm Fertilizer, she read. Ashland Chemical. Vulcan Chemicals. Chemtech Industries. Marathon Oil.

Even from the Kiowa, floating a hundred feet over the burned harbor, she could smell the chemical soup below.

She hovered for a sad moment over the wreckage of the Corps of Engineers’ Memphis District headquarters. Eight of her own people, she knew now, had died there when the harbor turned to a holocaust.

Below Memphis was a burning towboat and barge tow that had just caught fire. A chemical slick oozed downriver from the burning barges.

Everywhere there were wrecked barges, burned grain elevators, suspicious stains on the water. There were dozens of oil and gas pipelines, Jessica knew, that ran across the bottom of the river. Who knew how many had ruptured?

At Helena, Jessica buzzed the wrecked chemical plant. South of Helena was the Union 76 Oil Company facility at Delta Revetment, the Port of Rosedale, the storage tanks of the Bunge Corporation and the waste discharge of the Potlatch Corporation at De Soto Landing in Arkansas, the port terminal and tank storage at Arkansas City. The Port of Greenville, snug in a slackwater horseshoe bend created by the Corps of Engineers, was choked with the spilled residue of its commerce: Farmkist Fertilizer, Cooper-Gilder Chemical, Warren Petroleum, and more than a dozen barge and shipping firms. It was a miracle that the port hadn’t gone up in flames like the Harbor of Memphis. The town was evacuated until its port either blew up or was declared safe. Madison Parish, in Louisiana, featured a large complex of oil and chemical storage facilities.

And in Vicksburg, Jessica’s headquarters, the port was choked with marine commerce, from Phoenix Rice Oil at the northern end to Mississippi Power and Light at the south, by way of the Ergon Refinery, Citgo Petroleum, and Neill Butane.

By the time the Kiowa spiraled to its landing in Vicksburg, Jessica knew what she had to do.

“Heaven-o,” Frankland said, and Robitaille began to scream.

“He cries in pain when you speak the name of heaven,” Dr. Calhoun said, and frowned at the man writhing on the bed.

The stench in the room was appalling. Sweat, urine, vomit. Frankland steeled himself against it.

“Donne-moi un verrel Au nom de Dieu, un verre!”

The three pastors looked down at the priest, each holding a well-worn Bible. “He just keeps talking that Latin,” Frankland said. “I figure the Devil speaks Latin like the Pope.”

“That’s French,” Calhoun said. “He’s from Cajun country, remember.” Frankland looked at Calhoun dubiously, then decided the precise language didn’t matter anyway. “Well,” he said to Caihoun, “you’re the college boy.”

“Pour quo etes-vous la? Qu’est-ce que vousfaites? Des diables!”

“Did you hear that?” Garb said. “He said devil, I think.” Calhoun stepped closer to the bed, passing a hand nervously over his bald head, and then straightened and spoke in a loud, commanding voice. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What is your name? I demand this in the name of the Lord!”

“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”

The English words sprayed between Robitaille’s broken teeth. He shrank from his three visitors, backing across the stained sheets to the far wall.

“Why don’t you want us to touch you?” Garb said. “Why do you try to hide from the name of the Lord?”

“Vows voulez que je meurs!”

Calhoun adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Why don’t you try touching him with the Bible?” Calhoun nodded. “Good idea, Brother Garb.” He stepped forward and tried to press his Bible to Robitaille’s head. Robitaille gave a cry and tried to bat the Bible away with his hands.

“C’est le singe! Le grand singe!”

Calhoun pulled Robitaille’s hands away and firmly pressed the Bible to Robitaille’s forehead. Robitaille shrieked, seized Calhoun’s wrists. For a moment there was a frantic struggle.

“Get away! C’est le singe!”

Calhoun pulled back. Robitaille gasped for breath, eyes rolling wildly in his face as he tried to back himself into the headboard. Calhoun turned to the others, his face grave.

“Well,” he said, “I guess that settles it.” He looked at Frankland. “Brother Frankland, praise Jesus for letting you see this.”

“Thank you, Dr. Calhoun,” Frankland said in relief. He had needed his colleagues to assure him that his diagnosis was correct, that this was not merely a case of the DTs. They had all worked with alcoholics, they had all worked with people going through withdrawal. But this one was, clearly, different. Now all could agree that Father Robitaille had been possessed by an evil spirit, presumably a demon flown up from Hell.

The Devil could get you if you went into a Catholic church, Frankland thought. In Robitaille’s case, it wasn’t a what-d’you-call-it metaphor, it was a genuine devil. It had led Robitaille into false worship, into alcoholism and probably other sinful behaviors. It cursed and gibbered in foreign tongues and shrank from the Bible and the name of the Lord.

Garb bit his lip. “The question is, how do we get rid of it?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Well,” Frankland said, “our Lord cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene, and a legion’s worth of devils out of the two possessed men. And he gave this power to his disciples.” Calhoun passed a nervous hand over his bald head. “But how’s it done, exactly?” None of them had ever had direct experience with demons before. In preparation for this moment, each had looked into his Bible and discovered that there were no actual directions for casting out spirits.

“Well,” Calhoun said, “in Mark, our Lord says, ‘Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.’” Frankland considered this. “Shall we try it?”

They faced Robitaille and chanted the phrase in unison. They tried it several times. Robitaille only whimpered and muttered as he cast terrified looks around the room.

“There’s got to be more to it than this,” Frankland said.

“We don’t dare let a demon spy on us,” Garb said. “What we’re doing here is too crucial.” Frankland looked at Robitaille again. He had curled up around a pillow, and was crying. “What can we use to help us?” Frankland asked.

“The Lord’s name,” Garb said.

“The Lord’s Word,” said Calhoun, brandishing his Bible.

“The Lord’s…” Frankland stumbled. “Prayer?” he finished.

“All three,” Calhoun said firmly.

They worked on Robitaille for an hour, with vigor and persistence and pure-hearted dedication, but it didn’t seem to help.

It took some time to get a hold of the President. Jessica kept getting the brushoff from various aides and assistants. She didn’t want to think about how many leaps in the chain of command she was making by placing this call.

“It is a decision that only the President can make,” she kept repeating. “I must speak to him personally.” Jessica was told that the President was speaking to the press about the tragedy while taking a boat ride past the flooded Memphis Pyramid. Let it not be said, she thought, that he was ever at a loss for photo opportunities. Jessica wished she’d stayed in Memphis and dropped in on the President while he was making his tour.

“Listen,” Jessica said, “the President appointed me to this job, in person, just a few weeks ago. The last thing the press wants to hear is that I resigned because the President would not speak to me on a matter of vital national interest.”

She wagged her eyebrows at her husband, Pat, who sat across her desk with a highly impressed look on his face. He didn’t very often have the opportunity to see her turn into Major General Frazetta, the Fire-Eating Army Engineer. She covered the mouthpiece of her phone.

“What’s for lunch?” she asked.

“Mystery meat on a bun,” Pat said. “Macaroni and cheese. Mixed veg. I haven’t had these kinds of meals since high school.”

“That’s because you never experienced the joy of national service. A few years in the Army would have taught you to appreciate chicken a la king and chipped beef on toast.”

“If today’s army were sensible—like that of Jeb Stuart—I would have served.” Jessica grinned. “Could you get me some lunch?”

“You bet.”

“Make mine with extra mystery meat, will you?”

Pat nodded and was off. Jessica returned to her phone and her war with the Executive Department. In due time she heard the velvet tones of her boss. “Jessica,” he said, “where are you?” Ninety minutes, she noted. Damn. She had clout. This was a good thing to know.

“I’m in Vicksburg, Mr. President,” Jessica said. “At my headquarters.”

“I’m told you needed to speak to me. What can I do for you?”

“A couple things, Mr. President. First, you’d make my job a little easier if you asked Congress to move along my appointment as President of the Mississippi Valley Commission.”

“Okay,” the President said. “I can do that.”

An undertone of impatience had crept into the President’s soothing tenor. Jessica had only asked about the MVC appointment by way of delaying her real request, which took a certain amount of nerve.

“But what I really need you to do, sir, is this,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I need you to order the evacuation of the entire Mississippi Valley from St. Louis south to the Gulf of Mexico.” Pat returned with Jessica’s second cup of coffee, and she sipped it gratefully. “I didn’t hear all of that,” he said, “but it sounded as if you wanted to evacuate every city on the Mississippi. New Orleans and everyplace.”

Jessica nodded. “I do.”

“But New Orleans isn’t flooded. And there’s no danger from quake down there—” Pat looked at her. “Is there?”

Jessica shook her head. “Don’t think so, no.”

“So the levees are safe? They’ll hold?”

“Probably they’ll hold. I’ll do my damndest to make sure they do. But that’s not my problem—the problem is that all those cities, and every little town in between, get their water from the river. And the river isn’t just a river, it’s the biggest sewer in North America. With this many refugees, you’re going to see every disease you can think of going into the river. Cholera, typhus, typhoid. Any industry you can name sits on the river bank. Petroleum, fertilizers, flammable chemicals, raw sewage. Nuclear power, even.”

Pat looked at her. “You’re going to have to evacuate those cities… because of pollution?” She looked up at him. “I presume the big cities can chlorinate their water enough to keep out the diseases, but I doubt the small towns have even that capacity. And even the cities can’t handle the other stuff. Heavy metals. Nitrate fertilizer. Chlorinated chemicals. Pesticides, petroleum products. Phosphates, ammoniated compounds. Plastics. Toluene, benzene, fuel oils. Polychlorinated biphenyls, from places that haven’t phased them out. Corrosives. Hexavalent chromium—” she shook her head “—now that’s a nightmare. And on top of all that, we’ve maybe got nuclear isotopes from that plant downriver.”

“Jesus,” Pat said.

“Enough to keep every Hazardous Materials team in the country busy for twenty years,” Jessica said. Pat’s eyes were wide. “So what did the President say?”

Jessica’s helmet felt very heavy. “He said he’d talk to his people and get back to me. But what can he do?” She shook her head. “I don’t know how many millions of people live on the Lower Mississippi, but we don’t have the capacity to ship fresh water to them every day, especially when there’s an all-out emergency just up the river.”

“How long is it going to be before people come back?”

Jessica leaned back in her chair, looked morosely at her crowded desk. “The river will clean itself. It does that. But it will take months.” She looked at her husband sadly. “Months if we’re lucky. And that means months with the entire middle of the country out of commission, living on handouts in refugee centers.”

TWENTY

The President gazed at the solemn faces that ringed the conference table in his hotel in Louisville. “What I need, people,” he said, “is for somebody here to tell me that General Frazetta is crazy. Wacko. Out of her mind.”

The others looked uneasily at the table, at their papers, at each other. “It can’t be done, sir,” offered the Senate’s Minority Leader. “We can’t evacuate the whole Mississippi Valley. And in the middle of an emergency like this one? That’s insane.”

The President looked at Lipinsky. “Boris?” he said.

Lipinsky drew his bushy brows together. “I fear, Mr. President,” he said, “that General Frazetta may have just presented us with our only sane course of action.”

The President felt the others take a breath. “Well, people,” he said. “Well.”

“But we lack data, sir,” Lipinsky said. “I will order my HAZMAT teams to test the water immediately and continually.”

The President had flown to the Midwest shortly after word came that south St. Louis had blown up, and taken with him select members of his administration and the congressional leadership of both parties. If his nation’s cities were going to explode, he was going to be on the scene. And so he had visited St. Louis and Memphis; the Vice President and First Lady had gone to Chicago and Springfield, respectively; and tomorrow, after the military made absolutely certain it was safe, he would visit the graveyard of Helena.

And of course he had made a point of being seen. Not for crudely political reasons—though those played a part—but because the news of his activities could bring people hope. He was still cynical enough, however, to tell the First Lady and the Vice President that after he had to return to Washington, they were “to remain on PCD”—Permanent Compassion Duty, visiting every refugee center, hospital, and relief effort in the emergency zone; feeling the public’s pain, preferably on television and in prime time.

“We will need time to prepare an evacuation on this scale, sir,” said the supported CINC. “And most of our transport is already committed to bringing personnel and materiel to the devastated zones. The recommitment alone will take days.”

“I need you to begin the logistical planning now,” the President said, “before Boris’s teams assess the danger.” Fortunately, he thought, the areas we need to evacuate are the areas south of the quake zone where the transportation infrastructure is still largely intact.

“This is crazy!” the Minority Leader proclaimed. “That means shutting down industry and commerce throughout the middle third of the country.”

“General Frazetta,” the President said, “suggested that vital industry and ports like New Orleans could be kept open. We could ship in enough fresh water to do that.”

“We can’t, Mr. President!” the Minority Leader proclaimed. “The disruption will be—” Words failed him.

The President looked at him. “Are you prepared to go on television and tell the American people that it is their duty to our economy to poison themselves and their children by drinking contaminated water?” He leaned forward, looked at the man. “I’d like to see you do that, I really would.” The Minority Leader fell into glowering silence.

The President leaned back in his chair. “I’m not going to authorize any action right away,” he said. “But I want plans made, just in case Boris’s HAZMAT teams find out that we need to move a lot of people, and fast.”

“Des bestioles! Des bestioles dans le bouffe!”

“Out,” Dr. Calhoun cried, “unrighteous one, Spawn of the Pit! Leave this man in peace!”

“II y a des bestioles partout!”

“I command you in Jesus’ name!”

“Ayaaah! Des bestioles! Des centaines! Des bestioles dans le bouffe!”

“Out!” Frankland shouted, and brandished his Bible. Father Robitaille gasped for air, then let out a howl. Despite the persistence of the exorcisms, and the unexpected flair shown by Dr. Calhoun for the work—Frankland had to admit that “Out, unrighteous one, Spawn of the Pit” was pretty darn good—Robitaille’s demon seemed content to remain in residence.

The room stank of spilled food and vomit, soiled bedding and unwashed humanity. Robitaille hadn’t kept any food down, and he’d just flung his latest meal to the floor without even trying to taste it. Just a sip of water brought on the dry heaves. And despite this lack of nourishment, he still demonstrated surprising power and mobility. Sometimes it required the weight and strength of all three exorcists to keep him on his bed.

“Des bestioles! Des bestioles!”

“Out! Out!”

“Des bestioles! Des bestioles!”

“Out!”

Frankland felt himself flagging. Robitaille was wearing all of them out. If this went on much longer, the smell alone would gas the three exorcists to death.

He summoned his resolution. It was the demon, he thought, or him.

Wearily, he wondered if “Desbestioles” was the demon’s name.

“Out, Desbestioles, out!” he shouted. “In Jesus’ name!”

But it didn’t seem to help.

After Nick and Jason fled from the dead city of Helena, the bodies began to rise. Apparently the corpses had been there all along, rolling along the bottom of the river, but now they’d decayed to the point where they came to the surface. They were bloated, horrible dough-figures, facial features submerged in swollen flesh, splayed fingers fat as sausages. Nick told Jason not to look, and Jason did not give him any resistance. Nick kept his gaze away from the corpses himself.

He didn’t want to look down at a body and recognize Viondi.

More than a dozen of these macabre figures appeared in just a few hours, and it was as if the boat somehow attracted them. The bodies kept closing with the boat as if trying to invite themselves on board. Finally Nick decided to keep the motor going all the time, at low speed so as to conserve fuel, so that he could maneuver clear.

“River won’t let us go,” he heard Jason mutter. Jason crouched on the foredeck, rubbing his forearms. Nick closed his eyes and saw Arlette with the water crawling up to her chin. He snapped his eyes open. There were other corpses in the river: a surprising number of birds, wings stiffened in startled attitudes of half-flight. Whole flocks of them floated like feathery rafts, or spun in whirlpools. They weren’t just water birds, but land birds like crows and hawks. Nick even saw a bald eagle.

“I’m glad we didn’t catch any fish the other day,” he said.

“Yes?”

Nick indicated a nearby raft of floating birds. “Remember all those dead fish the other day? I bet these birds ate them.”

Jason looked at the birds and swallowed hard. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see what you mean.” Nick thought of Arlette, of Manon. All the things that could befall them.

No chemical plants in Toussaint, at least. Whatever happened to Helena wouldn’t happen there. And surely there couldn’t be severe quake damage that far into Arkansas. Surely the bodies weren’t rising on the bayou that flowed past Arlette’s home.

Surely, Nick told himself. Surely that was the case. But he didn’t know, and in the absence of knowledge his mind filled with fantasies, fantasies of Arlette trapped in the cellar as it collapsed, or caught in a burning building, or swept away by flood.

He needed to know.

Jason stood in the cockpit, pointed frantically astern. “Boat!” he shouted. “It’s a boat!” Nick gave a surprised look over his shoulder. There was a towboat flanking through the bend behind them, exhaust pouring from its stubby stacks as it shoved its pack of barges downriver, moving fast on the heels of the drifting speedboat.

“Yes!” The boat rocked as Jason began a kind of lunging dance. “Yes!” A grin rose to Nick’s lips. He pushed the throttle forward, felt the big Evinrude respond. He cranked the wheel over and the boat heeled into a turn. Jason gave a whoop and jumped up on the gunwale, balancing with one hand on the struts for the canvas cockpit cover. He edged forward till he was on the foredeck, and then he jumped up and down, waving his arms.

The towboat came on. The water at the bow of the barges whitened as the tow increased its speed. Better get out of the way, Nick thought. Bet those barges can’t slow down so good. He swung wide. Jason gave a disappointed shout. Nick swerved back to pass the towboat on its port side.

The towboat was a big one, increasing speed now that it was in a straighter section of the channel. White water surged under its counter. Nick counted eighteen barges in its tow. When Nick cut the towboat’s wake, the boat rocked so much that Jason had to crouch on the foredeck to keep his balance. Nick saw a dark silhouette in the pilothouse, but he couldn’t see if the crewman had seen him or not.

“They’re not stopping!” Jason yelled.

Nick spun the wheel and rolled into the towboat’s wake. He pushed the throttle forward—the boat skittered on the water, the bass boat swinging like a pendulum on the end of its tow rope—and then he leaped the wake again, the boat’s fiberglass hull banging down on the brown river. The river seemed a lot harder than it had been at lower speeds.

Nick roared up alongside the towboat. Jason stood again, shouted and waved his arms at the figure in the pilothouse. Nick wished he had an air horn to blow, or some other means of alerting the towboat’s crew.

Nick swung closer. Jason waved.

The man in the pilothouse turned, stared out the side window. He’d clearly seen the boat. The crewman opened the door, waved and shouted. He was a big man, with a big round belly in his green overalls. It looked as if he were waving the speedboat away.

“Stop!” Nick could barely hear Jason’s words over the cry of the Evinrude and the roar of the towboat’s engines. “Stop! Help us!”

The crewman waved the boat away again. Nick felt anger reach for his heart. Who was this man to deny them help?

The man went into the pilothouse again. The towboat’s roaring engines increased in volume. The towboat was moving faster. Nick cranked his own throttle forward.

“God damn it!” Nick shouted. What was wrong with that man?

Jason waved and shouted. The man in the pilothouse resolutely ignored him. Nick wondered wildly what he could do. He and Jason were like a pair of mice trying to stop a charging elephant. The man in the pilothouse ducked his head. He seemed to be talking into a handset. Jason howled abuse.

“Fuckdroid! Cocksucker!”

A door opened in the superstructure, and another man appeared. He dropped down a ladder with practiced ease, then came to the gunwale. Nick maneuvered the speedboat closer. The crewman shouted and made gestures for the speedboat to clear off, but Nick couldn’t hear what he was saying. He saw Jason’s shoulders slump, though, and saw the boy turn aft.

Nick maneuvered away from the towboat, then cut the throttle and let the big boat’s wake overtake him. The speedboat rose as the wake slapped the stern counter.

“What was that?” Nick demanded. His ears rang with the sound of the speeding engines. Jason slumped into the cockpit. “Hazardous cargo,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s too dangerous to take us aboard.”

Disappointment whispered through Nick’s blood. “Well,” he said, “we know all about hazardous cargo, I guess.”

“Don’t want to blow up again.”

“I guess not.”

Nick watched the white water boiling under the swiftly receding stern of the towboat, and sadly turned the wheel.

“The river won’t let us go,” Jason said. “Every time we try to leave, it takes us back.” The day of the corpses was not yet over.

Two more towboats passed that day, one heading upstream, one down. Neither were pushing barges, and both were moving fast, water creaming at their bows. Nick didn’t try to intercept them. They seemed too determined to get to where they wanted to go.

Which is why it seemed so surprising when, after more dull hours on the river, they found a towboat that didn’t seem to be going anywhere at all.

The boat just sat there behind its tow of barges, facing upstream. Nick was too disheartened to find this sight encouraging. Even Jason seemed only moderately interested.

But as they got closer, signs looked more auspicious. The radar unit atop the pilothouse glittered silver as it spun. They could hear the subdued sound of the boat’s powerful engines, see exhaust rising from the stacks. And when Jason stood and gave a hopeful wave, Nick almost jumped out of his skin as the boat responded with a blast on its horn.

Someone came out of the pilothouse and answered Jason’s wave. Only then did Nick permit himself to feel hopeful.

They came right up to the boat before it was clear why the boat wasn’t moving. The boat and its tow had gone gently aground, like the Michelle S., and lay in only a few inches of water. The crew had carried lines astern of the boat, probably to help back her off.

None of the barges, Nick saw, seemed to contain chemicals.

The boat’s skipper met them at the gunwale. He was a short, broad-shouldered white man—“more back than leg,” as Nick’s grandmother would have remarked—and Nick felt a little warning tingle at the sight of him, that crackers with guns vibe.

Below his bushy mustache, the captain’s face split in a wide grin.

“Welcome to to Beluthahatchie, podnah,” he said in a barking Acadian voice. “Y’all been on the river long?”

Beluthahatchie was a small towboat, with a crew of four and a tow of twelve barges. The captain was the bandy-legged Jean-Joseph Malraux of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Three hours after the earthquake, Beluthahatchie, moving cautiously upstream in the dark, had come aground in what was supposed to be a deep channel.

“We had the depth sounder goin’ all the time,” the captain said, “but the river shallowed too quick for us to stop. It takes a while to stop all these barges, you know.” He barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the dumb-ass things these people do. Run their little motorboats right up in front of us, and expect us to stop for ’em.” The booming Cajun voice rang off the towboat’s superstructure, da dumb-ass t’ings dese people do. Run dere liddle modorboats…

“The whole river’s changed,” Nick said. “There are rapids upstream, new channels…” Crewmen helped him over the side, and he stood on the solid deck, feeling a strange astonishment at this sudden change in his fortunes.

“Thanks,” Jason said as he jumped to the deck.

“This your son?” the captain bellowed, tousling Jason’s hair, and then he laughed at his own joke.

“Come on and have some chow,” he said. “I’d like to hear about river conditions northaways.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Nick said. Jason, flushing a little, finger-combed his hair back into shape.

“Oh hell, podnah,” the captain said. “Call me Joe.”

“I was wondering,” Nick said, “if I could use your radio to call my daughter and let her know that everything’s all right.”

“Where is she?”

“Toussaint, Arkansas.”

Captain Joe gnawed his mustache thoughtfully. “I don’t know where that is, exactly, but if it’s in Arkansas, there’s a good chance the phones won’t be working. Even Little Rock got hammered bad, I hear. I got a crewman with relatives all over Arkansas, and he can’t reach any of ’em. But c’mon—” He gestured with one long arm and turned to climb a ladder. “We’ll give it a try. If your girl’s anywhere near a working phone, podnah, we’ll find her.”

As Nick followed Joe to the pilothouse, he felt as if his feet weren’t quite touching the deck. He had the breathless sensation of viewing some strange, swift-unfolding miracle.

A few minutes later he was wishing Arlette a happy birthday.

It was easy. A communications firm caught the towboat’s radio signal, shifted it over to the phone lines for two-way communication, and charged a small fee.

“Cost my company about six bucks,” Captain Joe said. “I figure they can stand the freight.”

“Daddy?” Arlette cried at Nick’s voice, and then, to someone else. “It’s Daddy! He’s on the phone!” A thousand-ton weight seemed to fall from Nick’s shoulders. He could feel his heart melting, turning to warm ooze within his chest. The breath came more easily to his lungs. He felt two inches taller.

“Hello, baby,” he said.

“Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, baby. I’ve been on a boat on the river with…” He looked at Jason. “With someone I met,” he finished, saving that explanation for later.

“On the river?”

“The Mississippi.”

“But you were coming by car…”

“Nick!” Manon’s voice, coming in loudly after the click of the extension picking up. “Nick, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. A little sunburned, that’s all.”

“Thank God!” Manon said.

“He’s on the river,” Arlette explained to her mother. “On a boat.”

“I’m on a towboat right now,” Nick said. “The captain let me use his radio. But we’ve been drifting on the river for a couple days.”

“Are you with Viondi?” Manon asked.

There was a moment of silence. “No,” Nick finally said. “Viondi didn’t make it.”

“Oh, Nick,” Manon breathed.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Arlette.

Nick licked his lips. “The car wrecked in the quake,” he said. “I got out by water. Somebody picked me up.” He looked at Jason again. The boy was trying not to look at him, to give him privacy. “We’ve been on the river, and we just now got picked up by a towboat.”

“So you’re okay,” Arlette said.

“Yes.” The sounds of the voices were bringing visions to Nick’s mind. The big clapboard house just outside of Toussaint, with its oaks and broad porch. Arlette by the phone in the kitchen, dressed in a checked cotton blouse and blue jeans worn white at the knees. Manon upstairs in the bedroom, pacing back and forth at the full length of the phone cord the way she did, with the lace curtains fluttering in the window behind.

Fantasies. Nick couldn’t know whether they were real or not. But they felt real, very real indeed.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday yesterday,” he said.

“It wasn’t much of a party. Not with the way—well, not the way things are here.”

“But you’re okay? And Ed, and Gros-Papa, and…”

“We’re all fine,” Arlette said. “The house came through the quake okay. But we’re on an island now. We don’t have electricity, but they managed to repair the phone exchange, at least for the houses in town.”

“We have food from the store,” Manon said. “We have enough boats, we can get away if we want. But there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to go—”

Arlette’s excited voice broke in. “Maybe you can sail here in your towboat!”

“I’ll do that, baby,” Nick said, “if the captain will let me.” And his eyes sought Captain Joe, who stood beaming in a corner of the pilothouse with his hands in his pockets.

“You tell your girl that I’ll do what I can,” he bellowed without knowing what had been asked of him.

“Anybody who got a Gros-Papa is a fren’ o’ mine!”

Nick talked to Arlette for a long while as the captain beamed and grinned. The words just seemed to float out of him. He was having a hard time not floating away himself.

Eventually the words wound down, and he saw Captain Joe standing with a pensive expression on his face, and the man on watch staring neutrally out the window.

“I should go, baby,” he said. “I think I’ve been using the captain’s radio long enough. I’ll call tomorrow if I can, okay?”

He brought the call to an end. Captain Joe turned to Jason. “You want to make a call, son?” he asked. Jason gave a short little shake of the head. “No one to call,” he said, and left the pilothouse. Captain Joe gave Nick a look, brows raised. Nick only shrugged.

“Let’s get us some chow, podnah,” Joe said.

No word from the President. Jessica hadn’t been expecting any as yet: the decision to evacuate was a big one, and she hadn’t expected that it would be made overnight.

Morning birdsong—helicopters—floated through the open sides of her command tent. She looked at the weather photos that Pat had just pulled from the Internet and frowned. The big high-pressure system had stalled right over the Midwest, and that meant continued warm and sunny weather over the disaster area. That was good.

What was bad was what was happening behind the front. The clockwise rotation of the high-pressure zone was pulling up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico—you could see it, the swirl of cloud, there on the photos, a curve from the Gulf sweeping west, then east again over the Dakotas and Minnesota. Once the moisture was over the western plains or the Rocky Mountains, the air cooled and dropped the moisture as rain.

Some of those areas had been getting rain every day for a week. Lots of water raining down into Mississippi and its tributaries, joining the ice melt pouring down from the Rockies. What this meant was that the floods weren’t going away any time soon. The rivers would stay full, and that would delay repair work on the levees and bridges, prevent people from returning to their homes, and hamper the evacuation.

Well, Jessica thought. It was time to work out what she could do.

The river below Vicksburg was still under her control, even though she’d lost everything north of it. But she could use the controlled part of the river to affect the flood to the north. When rivers flowed fast, it was for one of two reasons: either there was an enormous weight of water behind them, pushing the water down its channel at greater speed; or the path of the river was steeper. When a riverbed was steeper, gravity pulled the water along it at increased velocity. Jessica didn’t want to increase the volume of water, which would only increase flooding. But she could make the river steeper. She could release water through the Old River Control system in Louisiana. Old River Control was one of the Corps of Engineers’ most colossal and long-term projects. It was designed to keep the wandering Mississippi firmly in its place.

Over its history, the big river shifted its path through most of the state of Louisiana, always seeking the steepest, shortest route to the sea. It settled into its present path around 900 A.D., around the time of a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault; and when human settlements were built in the years since, they tended to take the Mississippi’s route as given.

By the mid-twentieth century, it had become clear that the Mississippi was ready to make a leap out of its bed and carve itself a new route to the sea. Most likely, it would bypass Baton Rouge and New Orleans and spill out into the Gulf in the vicinity of the modest town of Morgan City, well to the west of New Orleans. The salt ocean would pour upward into the river’s old bed, turning the New Orleans waterfront into a narrow, twisting bay that would soon fill with silt. Whole sections of Louisiana would be turned into unproductive salt marsh—all the fresh-water plants and animals dying in an unprecedented ecological catastrophe—and New Orleans, the nation’s largest port, would be stranded in the midst of the dying land, its economic raison d’etre gone and its drinking water turned to salt. The river’s weak point was in middle Louisiana, where the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Atchafalaya came within a few miles of one another. Old River Control was a giant engineering project built to straddle the three rivers, sending water east or west as the situation demanded. The Morganza Hoodway, with its 125 gates, could shift 600,000 cubic feet of Mississippi flood per second into the Red/Atchafalaya system, thus preserving southern Louisiana from flood. Or, if the Mississippi was low, water could be shunted from the Red into the Father of Waters, which made certain that New Orleans remained a deep-water port. To take advantage of the water moving from one system to the other, the Murray hydroelectric plant had been prefabricated in New Orleans, at the Avondale Shipyards, and shipped north on barges to take its place in the Old River system, the largest structure ever to be floated on the Mississippi.

What Jessica needed to do was shift a lot of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. This would lower the level of the river in Louisiana and make its path steeper, thereby draining the flooded lands more quickly.

She would dump as much water as she could while still retaining New Orleans and Baton Rouge as deep-water ports. If Morganza’s 125 gates weren’t enough—and she didn’t believe they’d all been open together at any point in their history—she could open the Bonnet Carre Spillway above New Orleans, which could shift two million gallons per second from the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain. That should do it, she thought with satisfaction.

Get this river moving.

They were fond of frying on the Beluthahatchie. Nick, sticking his head into the galley to ask for a glass of water, saw chicken, fish, potatoes, and okra all sizzling away. He took his glass of water and wandered off, stomach rumbling with hunger.

He found Jason straddling the gunwale near the stern, where their boats had been tied up. He was listlessly watching the water as it streamed astern in the growing darkness. Swallows in search of insects skimmed just millimeters above the surface.

“You okay?” Nick asked.

Jason nodded.

It was hard enough, Nick thought, being father to his own child. But it was clear enough, he reflected, that there was no one else here who was going to do the job. He put his glass down on the gunwale and looked at Jason.

“Your father may be in China,” he said, softly as he could, “but I know he’s worried sick about you.” Jason turned away, gazed out at the far bank of the river, the last red light of the sun that touched the tops of the distant trees. “I don’t know how to reach him.”

“He may be on his way back,” Nick said. “I would be, in his place.”

“What could he do?” Jason asked. “I’m here on this boat. He’ll be in China, or California, or someplace else. But he won’t be here.”

“Just relieve his mind, Jason. I know how I felt until I talked to Arlette just now, so I know how your father feels. He’s got to be in agony. Call where he works, call the American Red Cross and give them your name. They’ll get ahold of him—that’s what they do.” Jason looked down at his hands. “If I call,” he said, “I have to tell him that my mother’s dead.” Nick felt a lump in his throat. Nick put an arm around the boy, hugged him for a moment. Jason accepted the touch, but otherwise did not respond. “I’ll call first and tell him about your mom,” Nick offered, “if you don’t want to do it.”

Jason shook his head. “That’s my job, I guess,” he said. He sighed. “I’ll probably just get his answering machine, anyway.”

Nick dropped his arm, looked into Jason’s eyes. “When he plays that machine,” he said, “And finds out you’re alive, he’ll be the happiest man in the world. Believe me.”

There was a sudden glare of light as Beluthahatchie’s lights came on. Not just the navigation lights, but floodlights as well, the superstructure clearly illuminated. The captain was making certain that his stranded vessel was visible to any other traffic on the river.

Jason blinked in the strong light, started to say something, then fell silent. Swallows flitted over the water just beyond Beluthahatchie’s pool of light. Then Jason tried again.

“When you were talking to your daughter,” he said, “you said somebody—I don’t remember the name—the person didn’t make it.” He looked at Nick. “Was that your wife?” Nick shook his head. “Viondi,” he said. “My best friend. He was…” His voice trailed away, and he tried again. “A cop shot him. Thought he was a looter, I guess, but all he was carrying was his own stuff from the car.” He touched the bandaged wound on his arm. “Man tried to shoot me, too, but I ran.”

“I’m sorry,” Jason said.

“Me too.”

“I was kind of mad at you,” Jason said, “because you had a family, and I didn’t. But I guess you’ve lost somebody, too.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you didn’t want to go near the police the other day.” Nick’s nerves hummed to a memory of the terror that seized him then, had clamped down on his mind and made him steer the bass boat away from shore.

“That’s right,” he said. “I was scared they’d shoot me then and there.” Darkness swallowed the far bank. Jason’s shadowed expression was hard to read. “We’ve been rescued,” he said. “So tell me—why do I feel so awful?”

“Till now we were just trying to survive,” Nick said. “Now we have time to feel.” Strange, he thought, to think of emotion as a luxury.

“Almost makes me want to go back on the river,” Jason said. “As long as I was on the river, I didn’t have to think about things. The river was, like, our fate. It wouldn’t let us go, but it kept us safe.”

“We made it, Jason,” Nick said. “There’s no reason to feel bad about that.” Jason seemed unconvinced. “I guess,” he said.

He gazed out onto the river. “I keep thinking I could have saved my mother,” he said. “If I’d known about that trolling motor, maybe I could have taken the boat through the flood and pulled her out of the house. If only I’d known a little more about how things worked.”

“That’s not your fault, Jase. It wasn’t even your boat. You can’t be blamed for not knowing that motor was hidden under the deck.”

“I suppose,” he said reluctantly.

“We’re not to blame for being alive. It’s not our fault. And the people who didn’t make it, it’s not their fault, either. They’d be with us if they could.”

Jason looked out at the dark river. “I know,” he said.

Well, Nick thought, either this has made an impression or it hasn’t. No sense in beating a dead horse, no less a live one.

“Hey,” he said. “Cook’s frying up a feast for us. I stay on this boat much longer, I’m going to gain fifteen pounds.”

Jason gave him a wry look. “You’re telling me it’s time to eat, right?”

“Only if you’re hungry. You want to stay out here and think for a while, that’s fine.” Jason hesitated for a moment, then threw his leg over the gunwale and dropped to the deck. “Might as well have dinner,” he said.

Nick had underestimated dinner on the Beluthahatchie. In addition to all the fried food, there was potato salad, red beans and rice, corn bread, and icebox pie for dessert. Nick couldn’t understand why all the crew didn’t look like blimps.

Nick and Jason told Captain Joe what they knew of the river north of their location. He was impressed that they’d survived the poison gas at Helena—he’d been worried that it was still there, clouds of the stuff hovering over the river like fog. The captain told them what he and his crew had heard on radio broadcasts. “Ain’t no harbors on this river no more,” he said. “All wrecked or closed. When I got the boss man on the radio, he told me to get this boat into the Ohio as soon as I can get her afloat. Nearest berth’s in Cincinnati.”

“There are rapids between here and Cairo,” Jason said. “I went down them.”

“Waterfalls, too,” Joe said, to Jason’s surprise. “But they ain’t so bad as they were. Old Man River, he gon’ wear down them rough spots. By the time we get afloat again, I figure them chutes are gonna be safe enough for Beluthahatchie. Maybe I’ll have to moor the tow somewhere where I can pick it up later—boss man says I can do that—but we’ll make Cincinnati okay, I guess.” He looked at his watch and gave a shout of joy. “It’s eight o’clock! Time for Dr. Who.” They watched in surprise as Captain Joe jumped up from the table and headed aft. Nick looked at the other crew.

“Might as well join the captain,” one of them said. “He likes company when he watches TV.” They followed Captain Joe into a little crew lounge aft of the dining room, where they found the captain digging through a cabinet filled with a large collection of videotapes. “You like Dr. Who?” he asked.

“Never seen it,” Nick said.

“Well, podnah, you got yourself a treat in store. I watch Dr. Who every night at eight, unless I got business or a watch to stand.”

Nick didn’t make much sense of the video—it seemed to be a middle episode of a series—but he enjoyed Captain Joe’s narration, a continuous discourse on the various actors who had played the Doctor over the years, the changes in the theme music, and footnotes on the various minor characters. He talked more than he watched the television, but Nick figured that Joe had seen the episode a hundred times anyway.

As the closing credits ran, Jason rose from his chair. “Thanks for the show,” he said.

“I hope you liked it.”

“I was wondering,” Jason said, “can I ask you for a favor?”

“I reckon you can ask.” The captain grinned.

“I wonder if I could use your radio.” Jason hesitated. “I thought about someone I could call.”

“I can do that,” Captain Joe said. “Just wait till the tape rewinds here, and I’ll take you up.” Nick decided not to go with Jason, to give the boy some privacy. He waited in the lounge, staring at the empty eye of the television. Jason returned after ten minutes or so, just stood in the doorway while his eyes brooded over the little lounge.

“Everything go okay?” Nick asked.

“I got the answering machine,” Jason said.

“You said that you might.” Nick gestured at the TV set, the recorder. “You want to watch a tape or something?”

Jason shook his head. “I’m going to take a shower, if I can.”

The boy left. Nick let his head loll back on his chair, raised a hand to touch Arlette’s necklace in his breast pocket. One day soon he would give it to her. He knew that now.

It was just possible, he supposed, that now he would actually manage to relax.

“Charlie?” It was his neighbor, Bill Clemmons, the father of the girl who’d talked to him yesterday—or was it the day before? Or the day before that?

“Yeah, Bill?” Charlie, sweating in the driver’s seat of the BMW, gave his neighbor a smile. “What can I do for you?”

“You doin’ okay, Charlie?” His neighbor seemed concerned. Looked at the empty wine bottles in the car.

“I’m fine, Bill. Thanks for asking.”

Bill had a smear of white on his nose, zinc oxide against the sun. “I didn’t know if you’d heard,” he said,

“they’ve got a refugee center down at Cameron Brown Park. They’re pitching tents and distributing food.”

Charlie kept the smile plastered to his face. Never let them see you down, that was his motto.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “Did the radio mention when they’re going to get the phones fixed?” Bill shook his head. “They’re workin’ on it. The phone companies are bringing in lots of workers from out of state. But transportation is so busted up that priority is being given to food and shelter.”

“Well,” Charlie said. “I guess there are plenty of homeless people.”

“You think you might head on down there?”

Charlie shook his head. He could not see himself at a refugee camp, living in tents, holding out his begging bowl for rice as if he were a starving African farmer. This was not a place for the Lord of the Jungle. All he needed was a place that would cash a check.

“I’m doing fine, Bill,” Charlie said.

“You sure, Charlie?”

Charlie winked at him. “You bet.”

“Well,” Bill said, “I guess you know best.”

“Pastor Frankland?” said Farley Stipes. “We have a little problem—I caught a boy trying to steal some food.”

After the discouraging hour with Father Robitaille, a difficulty like this was just what Frankland needed. He felt his heart lighten. “What did you do?”

Farley was one of the Christian Gun Club kids, sixteen and red-haired and very proud of his white armband. “It was Elmore—Janey Wilcox’s boy. He’s not even ten years old, and he was trying to get a candy bar from that stack of stuff we brought back from the Piggly Wiggly, all that junk food we ain’t sorted through yet. So I ain’t done nothing other than told him to wait for you. Doris Meachum is watching him.”

“Does Janey know?”

“Oh yeah. She’s really sorry, pastor. She wants to talk to you.”

“I’ll speak to her right away,” Frankland said. “Why don’t you see if you can’t find Sister Sheryl? And then we want to round up all the kids—all of ’em, I think, to hear our message.” This was the kind of pastoral problem that Frankland liked: simple, straightforward, with a moral to be absorbed by all.

So he talked to Janey Wilcox and explained the situation. Janey was anxious and eager to please and full of apology. When Sheryl arrived, Frankland briefed her, and then the two of them rounded up all the children they could find.

While the boy Elmore apprehensively stood by, Frankland wished the children a hearty heaven-o, and he explained to the children—and to the couple dozen of adults who had turned up to watch—that things were different now. Some of you children, Frankland said, thought that maybe it was all right to take a cookie or a candy bar when you wanted it. And maybe in normal times it was okay, but these weren’t normal times. There was an emergency, and there were a lot of people who needed to be fed, and only a limited supply of food. They had gathered all the food they could find to assure that all of God’s people were fed. So it wasn’t just anybody’s food anymore, this was God’s food. And people shouldn’t steal from God.

And Frankland turned to Elmore Wilcox, whose eyes were beginning to fill with tears. And Frankland told the boy that he was sorry, but he was going to have to punish him for stealing God’s food. And that Elmore shouldn’t think that this was because Frankland hated him, or that anyone hated him. Everyone here loved Elmore, God and Frankland included. But everyone here had to see that people shouldn’t steal God’s food.

Now, Frankland went on as Elmore trembled, he was not going to punish Elmore himself, because he was a strong man and didn’t want to cause injury. So his wife Sheryl would give Elmore his punishment. They bent Elmore over a chair and Sheryl gave him twenty whacks with a belt. And then Frankland and Sheryl hugged the wailing child and assured him of God’s love, and gave him back to his mother. Frankland went in search of Hilkiah, because this would furnish a reason to put an armed guard on the food supply.

“Well,” he said, “I think it’s time to raise that slab.”

“I’ll get the winch, pastor.”

Frankland glanced over the encampment that surrounded the church. It was still clearly a work in progress. “I think we need to reorganize,” he said. “Put the married women with children in the church—that’s the safest place. Have the food supply nearby. Separate areas for the men and the women without children.”

Because otherwise, Frankland thought, the teenagers were going to pair up and start sneaking off for reasons of which the Family Values Campaign would not approve. Probably the adults, too. Best just to keep the sexes apart.

While Hilkiah brought up a triangle, a block, and Frankland’s pickup with the winch, Frankland found Sheryl and talked over the camp’s rearrangement.

“Teddy bear,” Sheryl said, “we can move the tents around all we like, but what we really need is food.”

“Maybe I’ll get the boys out to that Wal-Mart tomorrow.”

“We’ve got enough food for maybe six weeks as it is. If we can get catfish from the growers, that’ll stretch our time. But at twenty-five hundred calories per day for each adult, and five thousand if they’re doing any kind of hard work, we’re going to be stretching it to get through the end of June. And if your people keep bringing in more refugees, then the situation will get worse.”

“I can’t leave refugees out there to die, sweetie pie.”

“I know that.”

“I can talk to the farmers. If they can plow under some of their cotton and plant foodstuffs…”

“They won’t be ready in time, teddy bear,” Sheryl said. “The soy is already in the ground and it won’t ripen till fall.”

Frankland frowned, hitched up his pants. “It’s not their bellies that are important,” he said. “It’s their souls.”

“Well,” Sheryl conceded, “that’s true. But if mammas can’t feed their babies, that’s gonna make ’em crazy.”

Frankland considered it. “Cut back on the number of calories. If people are just lying around camp, they won’t need as much. Just give the full ration to the scavenging and rescue parties.”

“That might work for a while, but—”

“A while might be all we need, with the Lord’s help. The Tribulation will last seven years, but there’s no guarantee that any of us will survive it. If we can just give them all a good start.”

“Pastor? Sister Sheryl?” Hilkiah said. “I could use your help with this slab.” The winch whined. The slab rose from the sod by the steel ring that Frankland had planted in it when he laid it there. Sheryl and Frankland helped move the slab to the side of the concrete bunker. And there, below, were the guns in their cases. Rising from the pit came the smell of the heavy grease that Frankland had used to coat the rifles. His heart lifted. He looked at Sheryl.

“We’ll get the food, darlin’,” he said. “The Lord will reward us, I’m sure, for planting his kingdom here in Arkansas.” He smiled. “Like Brother Hilkiah says, ‘Trust in God and the Second Amendment.’” So there was Magnusson, the long-faced proprietor of Bear State Videoramics, with his wife and teenage son, standing in the gravel parking lot and asking for food and a place to stay. God is good, Frankland thought. He frowned at the Reverend Garb, who frowned back.

“I don’t know,” Frankland said. “Are you planning on distributing any pornography while you’re here?” Magnusson’s face reddened. “You know I ain’t,” he said. “The store’s wrecked, just like everything else.”

“The thing is,” Frankland said, “as long as your pornographic videos exist, I figure they’re a danger to the community.”

“Listen,” Magnusson said. “The store is gone. Our home is a pile of bricks and lumber. We don’t got any food. They told us in town that if we came up here, you’d feed us.”

Garb nodded. “We do what we can for the community. But you see, it’s our food—”

“We aren’t the government,” Frankland said. “We don’t have to feed anybody. We’re just a service to the community.”

“And our duty is to the community, not to individual people,” smiled Garb.

“So if someone is a threat to our community,” Frankland said, “it’s our duty to protect the community from that person.”

“God judgeth the righteous,” Garb said, “and God is angry with the wicked every day.” Magnusson’s face had turned as red as his hair. “It isn’t even your food!” he said. “I watched your people take it from the Piggly Wiggly. That’s stealing!”

“That’s initiative,” Frankland said. “I haven’t heard any complaints from the store management.”

“They’re dead.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Listen,” Magnusson said. “You won. Understand? I don’t have anything anymore. All I want is some food for my wife and my boy.”

Frankland stroked his chin and smiled. “We’ll do that. But there’s something I want you to do for us. I want you to take your truck back to town, and gather up every single one of those porn videos, and bring them back here. And then we’ll light a nice bonfire, and burn every video, and you can apologize to the community for bringing that filth into our midst.”

“And then,” Garb added, nodding, “because you are no longer a threat to us, we will accept you into our community, and give you food and shelter.”

Magnusson had gone pale. His jaw worked. His blue eyes glowed. “This is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t make those kind of conditions. This is America, damn it!” Frankland nodded. “That’s true. This is a free country. You have a free choice—to stay, or go.”

“Leaving means starvation for my family!”

“Staying,” Frankland said, “means repentance.”

“Look up,” said Garb, “and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” Magnusson glared from Frankland to Garb and back again. Then he hesitated. He glanced at his wife and son. He licked his lips.

Frankland smiled. He knew he had won.

The world had become a better place.

TWENTY-ONE

“I peddled pornography.” Magnusson’s voice, amplified by the speakers, floated through the yellow curtains into Robitaille’s room. “I didn’t care about the consequences.”

“Yes, Father Robitaille?” Frankland said. “You wanted to see me?” Frankland gasped for breath in the foul air of Robitaille’s room. When the message came that Robitaille had asked to see him, he’d left his morning service, right in the middle of Magnusson’s ritual confession. Robitaille looked appalling. Gray, moist-skinned, with dark blooms around his eyes. The straggling whiskers on his face were more white than gray. The priest’s tongue, dark and leathery, flickered out in a lizardlike way to moisten his cracked lips.

He wants to talk, Frankland thought. Robitaille’s salvation, he thought, was hanging by a thread.

“Where am I?” Robitaille croaked.

“In my home. This is my spare room.” He looked at Robitaille curiously. “Do you remember the earthquake? The broken bridge?”

The priest gave a long sigh. Frankland peered at him cautiously, wondering if the Demon Desbestioles had finally vacated Robitaille’s body, or whether he was in for another battle with the forces of darkness.

“I corrupted children!” Magnusson cried on the PA. “I broke God’s laws.” Robitaille’s eyes moved uneasily at the sound of the amplified voice.

“May I have some water?” the priest asked.

“Of course, Father Robitaille. Can you keep the water down?”

“I think so.”

The porn-peddler Magnusson moaned about his sins and begged his neighbors for forgiveness while Frankland left the room and came back with a glass of water. Robitaille raised a scabbed, scarred hand to take the glass, but the hand trembled so much that Frankland sat on the bed, raised Robitaille with an arm around his shoulders, and held the glass to his lips. Robitaille took several careful sips, then began to swallow eagerly. But he coughed, and spluttered, and in the end pushed the glass away. Frankland looked down. The consciousness of a miracle glowed inside him. This was the real Robitaille, he thought, the demon had gone.

“There’s more water when you want it,” Frankland said. “I’m glad you’ve come back to us.” Robitaille dropped with a sigh to his soiled pillow.

“Forgive me, Lord Jesus!” Magnusson wailed. “Forgive me, everybody!” Robitaille’s eyes wandered to the window. “What is that? Who is talking?”

“Brother Magnusson,” Frankland said. “Bear State Videoramics.”

“What—” Robitaille licked his lips “—what is he talking about?” Frankland smiled and slapped his thigh. “He’s doing penance. You should know how that works, right?

Being a priest?”

Robitaille furrowed his brows, but the act of comprehension seemed too much for him. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s the end of the world!” Frankland said cheerfully. “The flock must be purified. I make the sinners confess their sin, in public, so the people can learn.”

Robitaille still seemed puzzled. “Make them? How make them?”

Joy filled Frankland. Two thousand years, and neither the Pope nor his followers had worked out this one.

“See, we need everyone pulling together on this,” he said. “Times are critical. Nobody made any preparations but us. We can’t have disharmony, we have to speak with one voice. Anything that acts against scriptural reason has to be controlled.

“So what I do is make examples. I show what happens if people step from the straight and narrow. So people like Magnusson, now, they confess or they don’t eat. And their families don’t eat, either. And they confess sincere, because we can tell the difference.

“And the neat thing,” Frankland said, his enthusiasm growing, “after the first few, people got the idea. People are volunteering to come up and confess before the congregation. They talk about their problems with alcohol, with adultery—you’d be surprised how they talk. I get a kick watchin’ ’em, I really do.

“It’s working!” Frankland said. “See, I wrote it all down years ago! I have it on a schedule. Day 5—people come to a realization of sin. And that’s what happened!” Robitaille closed his eyes again. He looked very old and very tired. His lips moved, but nothing came out.

“What was that, Father?” Frankland leaned closer.

Robitaille made an effort. “You… can’t,” he said. “Can’t do that.” Frankland looked at the priest in surprise. “Can’t do what?”

Frankland could see Robitaille’s eyes moving under the pale, closed lids. The words came as a forced whisper from his cracked lips. “You are presuming to judge the Mystical Body of Christ. That is for God alone.”

Frankland reared back in surprise. The Body of Christ, he knew, was a fancy theological term for the congregation of Christian believers. He looked down at Robitaille. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I figured you’d like this part. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You listen to confession. You make people do penance.” Robitaille’s lips began moving again. Frankland leaned closer in order to hear. “… not… how it works,” he said. “Not just confession. Must be… truly contrite. Perform satisfaction to God.” He shook his head.

“Not public. Not… this. The Mystical Body of Christ is judged by the Lord alone.” Anger flared in Frankland. All these fine distinctions were pointless, he thought, the world wasn’t about to allow for fine distinctions anymore. Good or evil, take your choice, pay the penalty. That’s how it worked.

“Well,” Frankland said, “not to engage in debate, here, Father, but this is the dang end of the world, ain’t it? I can’t have bad influences in my people—I want everyone to go to Heaven, not just the few with the strength to fight the Antichrist on their own.”

Robitaille shook his head. His words were barely audible. “Can’t… judge…”

“Evil is like a virus!” Frankland roared. “I’m doing quarantine! I show the people what evil can do! Evil’s not a mystery, damn it! I know it when I see it!” He rose to his feet, waved his hands. “It’s you who are judging me\ You got no right!”

Robitaille said nothing, just lay there beneath his dirty sheet. His mouth had fallen open.

“Hey, Robitaille!” Frankland said. He shook the priest by the shoulder. “Robitaille, you asleep?” He laughed. “You dead there, Father?”

Apparently the priest was not dead. His chest rose and fell with his shallow breaths. There was a little drool at the corner of his mouth. He had fallen asleep.

“Dang it!” Frankland pounded the wall with a fist. “You answer me!” he demanded. “Who are you to judge, you ol’ drunk!”

Robitaille lay inert. Frankland punched the wall again, then stalked out of the room, past the guard he’d put on Robitaille’s door, and who had told him that the priest was awake and asking for him. The guard watched Frankland with wide eyes as he stalked down the hall. “Robitaille okay?” he asked. Frankland didn’t answer. He walked out of the house, headed toward where his people were gathered on the grass beside the church. He heard Calhoun’s voice on the PA, making a few announcements about the day’s work details.

Hilkiah met him on the way. The big man looked grim. “Brother Frankland, I just heard something.” Frankland didn’t break stride, made Hilkiah walk after him. “Yeah?” he snarled. “If it’s trouble, I don’t want to hear it.”

“You know old Sam Hanson? The farmer, from out Baxter Road?”

“Yeah? He’s here, ain’t he?”

“Well, sure. And he’s with his friend Jack MacGregor.”

“So?”

Hilkiah hesitated. “Well, according to Brother Murphy, y’know, their guide, he heard the two of ’em makin’ out in their tent last night.”

Frankland stopped dead in his tracks and swiveled on Hilkiah. “You’re telling me what, Hilkiah?” Hilkiah seemed embarrassed. “Well. You know. They’s queer.”

Frankland looked at Hilkiah in astonishment. Sam Hanson was just an old soybean farmer, past fifty, and his friend Jack wasn’t much younger. Neither of them were the slightest bit—the slightest bit of whatever homosexuals were supposed to be, effeminate or lisping or whatever. Granted, the two had lived together for longer than Frankland had been in Rails Bluff, but there hadn’t been the slightest hint that there was anything deviant going on, everyone just assumed they lived together because they shared so many hobbies.

They tied flies, Frankland remembered, they’d won a prize at the county fair.

“Is Brother Murphy sure?” Frankland said.

“Oh yeah. He said they were kinda noisy. And it wasn’t just Murphy who heard it, neither.”

“Lordamighty,” Frankland said, stunned. “I can’t have this going on in my camp!” A new determination seized him.

I know evil when I see it. You don’t need to be a Catholic priest to know when Satan was among the people.

Frankland took off at a brisk stride toward where Dr. Calhoun was finishing off the morning service.

“Wait up there!” he shouted. He reached around his back, took out his Smith & Wesson, waved it over his head.

“We got one more item of business!” Frankland shouted. “Sam Hanson, Jack MacGregor, get up here!” Judge me, will he? Frankland thought. I’ll show him judgment!

They were going to have themselves some righteous atonement, by God. And they were going to have it now.

Later on, after Hanson and MacGregor had been exposed, after they had wept and crawled and begged God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of their neighbors, after they’d been separated and sent off to work with two different parties, Frankland heard from the guard he’d put over Robitaille that the priest had died in his sleep.

“Dang it!” Frankland wanted to hit something, but there was nothing nearby, so he kicked the ground instead.

Robitaille had slipped away, had escaped Frankland’s jurisdiction. Before Frankland could argue him around to his way of thinking, before he could get Robitaille to denounce the Catholic church and join his own.

Before he could save Robitaille’s soul.

“Dang it!” Frankland said again.

If only he’d had another few more days.

“I have some preliminary figures, sir,” said Boris Lipinsky.

“By all means,” said the President. Lipinsky turned up in the Oval Office, every morning at ten a.m., to bombard his president with numbers. The President had gotten used to it by now. He was staring out the Oval Office windows at the White House grounds. A light rain was falling, spattering the glass with tiny drops. He turned and sat himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.

“Please sit down, Boris,” he said. “And if you can, try to keep it brief. I have to attend Congressman Delarue’s funeral.” Delarue, a party stalwart, had died of a heart attack during an aftershock while on a visit to his home district in Arkansas. Being what the government termed a “Vietnam-era veteran”—without, however, actually having served in Vietnam—Delarue would be buried in the military cemetery at Arlington, after a service in the capital.

Lipinsky spoke without referring to the notes in his hand. The President, who usually needed his briefing books to remind him of the reasons behind his positions on the issues, could only envy Lipinsky this ability.

“We believe the quakes in the New Madrid region have killed between fifteen and twenty thousand people. Almost two hundred thousand have injuries serious enough to require hospitalization. There are approximately three million homeless people in the New Madrid seismic zone, of whom over fifty percent are now living out of doors for lack of a safe structure to house in, and a further five million in need of one form of assistance or other, either food aid, ice, medical aid short of hospitalization, or emergency financial aid in order to purchase food or other basic necessities.” He blinked behind his thick spectacles. “These figures are very preliminary, sir.”

“Ice?” the President said. “Why are we providing people with ice?” He had pictures of cocktail parties at the government’s expense.

“To preserve food, Mr. President. The victim areas range from temperate to subtropical zones, and—”

“I understand now, thank you. Continue.”

Rain tapped on the Oval Office windows as Lipinsky licked his lips and continued. “Much of the area is still without electric power, particularly rural areas. The lack of electricity means that other utilities, such as water, gas, and sewage treatment, may be difficult if not impossible to restore. Lack of safe water and proper sanitation will almost inevitably result in epidemics of disease ranging from dysentery to cholera and typhoid.”

The President sat up in his chair. “Those diseases are in the United States?”

“I fear so, sir. Particularly on a major waterway such as the Mississippi.”

“You are taking—”

“We are taking every possible precaution, yes. Ranging from urging people to boil their water to preshipping the necessary medical supplies to centralized points within the victim areas.” He shook his head. “But there are entire districts—all rural—where we have been unable to do anything. We lack the assets to put into the victim areas, and even if we had the assets, the infrastructure no longer exists to put them in place.” Lipinsky solemnly shook his head. “Hundreds of thousands of people—maybe over a million—are entirely dependent on their own resources in this crisis. It is an ongoing tragedy to which we cannot even bear witness.”

Ongoing tragedy… For a moment the President was outraged. Lipinsky spoke about tragedy in the same pedantic manner he spoke of assets and infrastructure.

These people are not statistics, the President thought in fury. But then the fury passed, and he sighed. He was slowly growing used to his own impotence. He looked up at Lipinsky.

“The—the nuclear plant in Mississippi? This situation is being dealt with?”

“I am informed that General Frazetta will implement a—rather novel—plan at Poinsett Landing. An artificial island will be built around the reactor to stabilize it.”

They can do that? the President wondered. Well, he concluded, why not? “I want that problem neutralized,” he said. Meaning the political problem as much as any other. “The full resources of the government, you understand?”

“Indeed, sir.” Lipinsky, the President knew, understood the political dimensions of a nuclear catastrophe as well as anyone.

“And…” The President hesitated. “General Frazetta’s other problem? The water supply?” Lipinsky paused, the moment of silence adding gravity to his words. “Our HAZMAT teams are still testing the water, Mr. President. Any information is exceedingly preliminary.”

“And the preliminary reports indicate what, exactly?”

Another pause. Then Lipinsky just shook his head. “Preliminary reports are not at all encouraging, sir.” So, the President thought, it would get worse. Three million homeless, and it will get worse. Worse.

Charlie woke with a start in the middle of the night to the sound of the telephone ringing in his ear. He clawed for the receiver on the passenger seat, clutched at it, raised it to his ear.

“Hello?” he said. “Hello?”

He heard nothing, not even a hiss. Charlie looked at the phone in growing surprise. No one had called him. The cellphone had rung only in his dreams.

Charlie threw the receiver back on the seat. “Got to get a grip,” he advised himself, and opened the door to let some of the wine fumes out of the car.

He had been drinking the wine pretty steadily. It was the only food he had left. That and some hard liquor in a cabinet.

“Got to get a plan,” he muttered to himself.

He stepped from the car to let the cool evening clear his head. Pain stabbed at him from his injured leg. He wandered over to his oak tree, split right up the middle, and looked at the world from between its two halves.

He was a trader, damn it. He needed some way he could do his job. There had to be ways he could take advantage of this situation. He dealt in commodities all the time, and what everyone lacked at the moment was commodities. There had to be a way he could take advantage of that.

If only he had a place to start. A place where he could start trading. A market. When the idea came to him, it was so beautiful that he could only gaze in wonder at the picture that unfolded in his mind.

Charlie Johns, he thought to himself, you are a genius.

Charlie was back at the convenience store. In the twenty-four hours since he’d left with laughter ringing in his ears, the pile of canned goods had been reduced by about two-thirds. The cans remaining weren’t the most desirable: they were things like cranberries and pickle relish sauce.

The young man was behind the counter this time, his gun still at his waist. Behind the counter Charlie saw television sets, stereo systems, boom boxes, a few home computers. “You found some cash?” the young man said. “Or you got a TV set or something, we’ll take that, too.”

“What I’ve got, friend,” Charlie said, “is a way to get rich. What we need to do is establish a market.” The young man looked at him. “This is a market. Don’t you comprendo no English where you come from?”

“This is one kind of market,” Charlie said. “But what’s going to happen, mate, is that you’re going to run out of food soon. And then how are you going to make money?”

The young man shrugged. “We’ll get a delivery sooner or later.”

“But when?” Charlie said. “And how much is it going to cost you? See, the weakness is that you don’t know the answers to those questions, so your market isn’t stable.”

“Junior? What’s going on here?” The older man emerged from the back room, buttoning his jeans. He looked at Charlie, then scowled. “Oh,” he said. “The Limey.” Charlie turned to him. “I was explaining to your partner here—” he began.

“My son.”

“Your son,” Charlie said, “that the market for your goods is unstable, because you don’t know when you’re going to get a delivery, or how much it will cost.”

The older man reached into a back pocket, took out a round tin of Red Man, and put snuff in one cheek.

“Yeah?” he said.

“So what you do in order to regain stability,” Charlie said, “is establish a market in contracts to purchase goods when they’re delivered. Or contracts to deliver goods, if people have goods that they can sell to you.”

The two men squinted at him. “And how do I do that exactly?”

Charlie wiped sweat from his forehead. Hunger growled in his belly. “See, mate, what happens is that somebody comes in and wants to buy some bread. But you don’t have any bread, and you won’t until you get a delivery, so what you sell the man instead is a contract to sell him bread on a certain date, at a certain price. And then—”

“Wait a minute,” the old man said, “they give me money for this contract?”

“Right, mate. Yeah. The man gives you money, or—” glancing at the electronics behind the counter

“—something else of value. And then, once he has the contract, he can keep it or sell it. And if the price of bread goes down by the time you’re supposed to deliver, you’d lose money on the physical transaction, but you could make money by buying an obligation at the lower price to deliver the same goods…”

“This ol’ drunk’s crazy,” the young man said.

“No!” Charlie said. “This really works! See, if the price of bread goes up…” A young, very pregnant woman came into the store. She was badly sunburned on her forehead and shoulders. She pushed a shopping cart that held a portable television set. “How many cans can you give me for this?” she said.

“Just let me set up this market for you,” Charlie said. “I know how to do it. We can all make money.”

“We got a customer here,” the older man said. He walked to the pregnant woman, picked up the television set, looked at it. “Five cans,” he said.

Charlie looked at them in annoyance. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt the workings of this primitive system of finance you’ve developed here, but I’m talking big money here. This is the futures market I’m talking about.”

The older man looked at Charlie from under the rim of his baseball cap and put the TV set on the counter. “Pay me cash money for something,” he said, “or get out of here. I got business to transact.” Charlie couldn’t believe this stupidity. “Just listen to me!” he said. “Millions of dollars are made every day in just this way! I’ve made millions of dollars just like this! It’s easy! All you have to do is listen!” The older man slapped Charlie across the face, hard. His hand was large and rough. Charlie stared in shock at the man, at the incredible red violence in his glare. The man grabbed Charlie’s collar and rushed him through the door, shouting get out get out get out. Charlie caught a heel on the threshold and went over backward. Asphalt bit his hands, and his teeth rattled. The older man stood over him, red-faced and shouting.

“You’re right out of your mind! Get out of here before I blow your brains out!” Charlie wiped tobacco juice off his face. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“I know a drunken derelict when I see one! Now clear out!”

Charlie got cautiously to his feet, keeping his distance from the man. “I’m not a derelict!” he said. “I’m a millionaire!”

“You’re a derelict now, rich man! You’re a bobtail flush that ain’t got nothing to sell but bullshit!” Charlie backed away. His cheek stung. Bewilderment whirled through his mind. What was wrong with the man, he wondered.

He had to stop three times on the way home and sit on the curb to rest. He was rich, he protested to himself. He had guessed right about the market. So why couldn’t he buy anything?

Cable snaked through the block hung below the triangle. The electric winch whined, and the great concrete lid rose from the bunker.

Below Frankland saw packaged food. Flour, beans, rice, condensed milk, baby formula, canned fruit and vegetables, vitamins. Two years’ supply for two people. Plus seed corn and fertilizer so that crops could be raised after the food ran out.

The Rails Bluff area had finally run out of food. What had been plundered from the Piggly Wiggly, the Wal-Mart, and the cupboards of the residents would be gone within a day or so. Frankland decided to open the bunkers of the Apocalypse Club. These were supplies laid aside for the End Times by his followers, people who had answered his radio appeals and who had intended to join him here in Rails Bluff when the end of the world was clearly nigh.

But they hadn’t arrived, not one of them, and hundreds of refugees had come instead. He had to feed the people who were here, no matter who the food actually belonged to.

The Apocalypse Club had thirty sealed caches behind Frankland’s home. Some belonged to the Elders, who had three months’ supplies in their bunkers, and others to the Lions of Judah, with six months’

supplies. Some belonged to the Roots of David, who had a year’s supplies, and others belonged to the Seventh Seals, who had purchased supplies for two years or more.

Actually there were only three Seventh Seals: Frankland, Sheryl, and Hilkiah. Response to Frankland’s radio appeals had not been as great as Frankland had hoped. Hilkiah had bought his supplies on credit from Frankland and was slowly paying off the debt a few dollars at a time.

If necessary Frankland would open them all. But he would set a personal example and start with the Seventh Seals, with his and Sheryl’s own personal supplies, and work from there down the list. Things were moving along too well for material considerations to impede progress now. It was just as he had written it down in his Plan, years ago. Day 7—all unite in love and praise of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Everyone was pulling together. Everyone was praising God. Sin had been vanquished, in the persons of people like Magnusson and Hanson and MacGregor, and everyone had rejoiced in their repentance.

The only thing that Frankland regretted was the death of Robitaille. If he’d had a chance to work with the priest a little more, he’d probably have been able to bring him around.

Frankland bent and helped Hilkiah move the heavy concrete lid to the side. “There,” he said. “Let’s get it moved to the kitchens.”

“Brother Frankland?”

Frankland turned to find Sheriff Gorton approaching, along with a well-dressed, white-haired man in a coat and tie. Other than for Frankland and the other pastors, who wore ties for services, ties had been pretty rare since the End Times had begun.

The stranger looked somewhat familiar, though Frankland couldn’t place him.

“Brother Frankland,” the Sheriff said, “this is Gus Gustafson, from the County Council.” Frankland wiped the soil from his hands and shook Gustafson’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Brother Gustafson,” he said.

Gustafson glanced around the camp with ice-blue eyes. “It’s quite a place you have here, sir,” he said.

“Quite an accomplishment.”

“Thank you. But all glory goes to Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”

“Ye-es.” Gustafson’s blue eyes darted from one place to the other. “When I tell the rest of the council members what you’ve done here, I’m sure they’ll be impressed. I think the county owes a vote of thanks to you for helping so many of our people.” He cleared his throat, and his voice turned brisk. “But what I’ve come to tell you, sir,” he said, “is that the state is now able to take some of this burden off your shoulders. We’ve managed to open a road through the piney woods east from the county seat, and from there to Pine Bluff and points south.”

“Well, good!” Frankland said. “Can you send us some supplies? Because,” he confided, “the food situation is getting a little critical around here.”

“I believe what the government has in mind,” Gustafson said, “isn’t to send food here, but to send the people where the food is. You’ve heard about the President’s evacuation order, right? Well, a refugee camp is being set up in the Hot Springs National Park. The whole county is being evacuated to there.” Frankland stared at Gustafson in amazement. “But the evacuation’s all about water, right? We don’t get our water from the river! We have wells—good wells!”

Gustafson cleared his throat. “The water’s only a part of the situation, as I understand it. This area is still subject to strong earthquakes that can cause casualties and damage the infrastructure. It took a road crew three days to bulldoze through the piney woods to get to Rails Bluff from the county seat! The Emergency Management people would have a lot of trouble shipping food into an area this remote, and so it makes more sense to pull people out of the area to a place where they can be fed more efficiently.” Frankland gave an astonished laugh. “That’s the government for you!” he said. “They never think about the people at all!”

Gustafson cleared his throat again. “Well, that’s as may be. But tomorrow morning they’re sending a big convoy of National Guard vehicles to pull everyone out of here.”

Frankland shook his head. Poor old Gustafson just didn’t get it. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The people here are happy. They’re praising God. They won’t want to leave.” Sheriff Gorton dug into the dirt with the toe of his boot. For the first time Gustafson looked surprised.

“You’re sure about that, sir?” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“Well,” Gustafson nodded, “in that case, just to ease my mind, I’m sure you won’t mind if we ask them.” Sweat poured down Charlie’s nose as he punched number after number into the cellphone. Nothing happened at all. Maybe he’d worn out the batteries.

He threw the receiver down, rubbed his unshaven face. He was not a derelict, he thought. Not. Exhaust from the line of National Guard trucks blew over the camp. Frankland watched in black despair as the long line of people, clutching their small bundles and their children, began to move out of the camp, past the black walls of Sheryl’s Apocalypse, toward the waiting vehicles.

“This isn’t necessary!” Frankland called. “You can stay here! We have everything you need!”

“In the Year 70 a.d. the Temple was thrown down!” Frankland’s own voice mocked him from the loudspeakers.

Uniformed Guard personnel helped the women and children into the trucks. Officers stood by with clipboards.

“Thank you, Brother Frankland, for all you’ve done.” This was Eunice Setzer, one of his own congregation, shuffling from the camp with her three children.

“You don’t have to leave, Sister Eunice,” Frankland said as he put a hand on her arm. “We’ll take care of you here.”

“Sorry, Brother Frankland,” she said with downcast eyes, and with a twist of her body slipped free of his grasp.

“Look at Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse!” Frankland cried. “Lift your eyes and look at it! The Beast. The Woman of Babylon! That’s what’s waiting for you! That’s what’s waiting for everybody! We want to prepare you for that!”

They walked by in silence, past the angels with their vials and trumpets, past the Four Horsemen, past the City of God descending in glory. They walked as if none of it mattered, as if the End of the World was not at hand.

“Betrayal! —verse ten!” Frankland’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers. Betrayal. St. Matthew had it right. Frankland was betrayed, and so was God.

“I’ll be staying, Brother Frankland,” Sheriff Gorton assured him. “They’re not evacuating law enforcement, that’s for sure.”

Frankland readied himself for a last appeal, and he raised his arms in exhortation, but the words didn’t come. The Spirit went right out of him, something that had never happened before. The promise that God had made him, made him amid the fury of the rain and the lightning and the shaking of the earth, had come to naught.

He slumped and turned away. And then, out of the shuffling crowd, someone took him by the arm.

“Brother Frankland.”

Frankland looked up, saw the pornographer Magnusson gazing at him with a peculiar expression in his face. The man had probably come to gloat over Frankland’s defeat. “Yes?” Frankland said. Tears glimmered in Magnusson’s eyes. “I’m staying, Brother Frankland!” he said. “I’m staying with you! I owe you my salvation.”

To Frankland’s utter surprise, Magnusson threw his arms around Frankland and began sobbing on his shoulder. Slowly, Frankland put his arms around Magnusson and began patting him on the back.

“Praise God, Brother Magnusson,” he said. “Praise God.”

Ten minutes later, the National Guard officers blew their whistles, and the convoy began to move off, the inhabitants of Rails Bluff staring out the back of the trucks from under the olive-green canvas. When Frankland called for a head count, there were eighty-seven people left in the camp, including the three pastors and their families. There were probably less than a hundred others this side of the piney woods, mostly farmers who refused to leave their land, along with a few people in the Bijoux Theater too sick to be moved and under the care of a National Guard medic.

The awnings of the empty camp flapped disconsolately in the morning breeze. Frankland walked along the lines of tents, gazing in disgust at the garbage left behind by the six hundred people who had left earlier that morning, the plastic Star Wars cups and plastic sheeting and stained foam bedding. Day 8—the people confirmed and strengthened in their faith.

He had planned for years for this. For the moment when the world began to come apart, when the people would be lost and need his guidance. He had given that guidance. He had shared his own food with refugees who had nothing to call their own. He had preached to them from the depths of his heart. And now this. They had abandoned him, all but eighty-seven loyalists. Abandoned him for Hot Springs National Park! What a humiliation.

No more betrayals, he thought. He had been naive. He hadn’t foreseen the seductions that the liberal humanist/satanist government would offer to his people. Now he knew.

No more government! That was the answer. You could not serve God and Caesar. There would be no room in the camp for anything but the Lord and praising the Lord and preparing the people for the end of the world.

No more desertions. No one would leave again. The soul was what mattered, and Frankland was going to save the souls of everyone here. That was his charge.

And anyone else—any more government—who tried to interfere, Frankland would deal with it. Personally.

Birdsong floated on scented air from the Rose Garden. The President sat behind the desk that had been given from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes, the one made from the timbers of HMS Resolute. He wished he were on the Resolute right now, with eight inches of solid oak planking between him and the rest of the world.

“It’s your call, Mr. President,” said Boris Lipinsky.

Solemn faces, arrayed in a half-circle around the desk, gazed at the President. It was one of those moments where, whatever their ambitions, these people were clearly glad to be on their side of the desk, and not his.

Reports had come in, over two days, from the HAZMAT teams that had been sent to sample the water pollution levels of the Mississippi and other rivers in the disaster area. The reports had been terrifying. General Frazetta had been right. The Mississippi, along with several of its major tributaries, had become an efficient pipeline for the delivery of every conceivable toxic substance to the water systems of every town and city along the river. There probably weren’t enough water filters in the world to clean the pollutants out of the drinking water.

“Mr. President?” the Minority Leader said. “May I say a word?” The President fixed the man with a look. ” No,” he said.

Another few moments ticked past on James Monroe’s bronze-dore clock. Then the President sighed and put his hands flat on Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk.

“It’s out of my hands,” he said. “I cannot permit millions of people to drink poisoned water. I realize that shifting our efforts from managing a disaster to managing an evacuation is going to strain our resources to the maximum, but I want the evacuation to commence.”

He looked at General Shortland. “You’ve got till tomorrow morning to get your plans finalized, General,” he said. “I’ll make the announcement at nine a.m.”

Charlie Johns looked into the one container remaining in his refrigerator, the week-old pieces of duck, and wondered if it was all right to eat. It looked all right. It smelled like it had been in the refrigerator a while, but didn’t smell bad.

Maybe if he drank some brandy with it. Brandy was a disinfectant, wasn’t it?

The house was full of flies, and Charlie didn’t want to think about the reason for that, so he took the food into the shady backyard along with a bottle of Martell. He sat in the shade under his Russian olive tree and ate the duck along with swallows of brandy. He dug bits of rice off the ribs, sucked all the remaining meat off the bones, gnawed at the cartilage. Then he sucked the bones for a long while. He stared at the pool while he ate. The neighbor kids had been coming over to take drinking water from it, and they’d kept it clean of leaves and sticks and windblown junk. He’d thrown chlorine into it every day and figured it was still safe to drink.

The cramps started an hour later. He barely made it to the toilet in time. He shuddered and sweated on the toilet for hours as he emptied everything that remained in his bowels.

When the spasms finally ended, he barely had the strength to crawl to the car and drape himself across the front seats.

Jessica gazed from the old Indian mound at the transformation of Poinsett Landing nuclear station. From the wreckage and desolation of just days ago, Poinsett Landing was on its way to becoming the busiest port on the Mississippi.

Operation Island was proceeding at a truly astounding rate. While power company and Energy Department teams concentrated on the problems presented by the leaking storage pond, the Army under the direction of Jessica’s engineers had been engaged in the work of turning Poinsett Landing into a river port. Portable quays had been moved into place, cabled to building ruins, to the auxiliary building or the control facility, or when necessary to the river bottom. Barges filled with supplies and necessary equipment had been warped alongside.

The clutter of plant workers’ vehicles that stood atop the Indian mound blocked any serious and sustained use of the mound by Jessica’s engineers. The world would have forgiven her if she’d pushed these vehicles into the drink in order to turn the mound into a giant helipad, but Jessica realized she was going to depend on these plant workers, and didn’t want to commence their relationship by shoving valuable workers’ property into the Mississippi. Instead the vehicles were airlifted to Vicksburg by huge Super Stallion helicopters. On return flights, the big copters—which had been developed to carry the heavy equipment for entire Marine divisions—had carried enough supplies for a small camp atop the mound, and material to start building jetties and anchorages for the barges and boats that would bring emergency material to the landing.

For the moment, everyone in the area had been evacuated to the top of the Indian mound. Operation Island was about to enter a new phase.

“Good news, General,” said Larry Hallock, who had just returned from the auxiliary building in a boat.

“And bad news.”

And how many times had she heard that in the last few days, Jessica wondered. Well. By now, she figured, she was equal to just about anything. World ends the day after tomorrow?

Fine, we’ll come up with a plan for disassembling the planet and recycling the materials in order to create the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. Just give us a few minutes.

“Good news and bad news, Mr. Hallock?” Jessica said.

She liked Larry Hallock. He was proving indefatigable at a time when indefatigability was at a premium. Within twenty-four hours of the big quake, he had put together the plan to entomb his reactor and salvage the spent fuel, a plan so solid in its fundamentals that no one had been able to improve on it in the time since. Larry worked twenty-hour days supervising the work at the plant, his detailed knowledge of the plant site was unsurpassed, and he was always able to modify his plans to account for the limited materials available. After a day or so on the job, he’d thrown away the sling that had supported his broken collarbone and spent his days scrambling over scaffolding, jumping between barges, and climbing ladders.

Larry was the kind of soldier that Jessica always wanted in her outfit.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Good news first, if you please.”

Larry nodded. “We’ve cleared away most of the wreckage in the auxiliary building,” he said. “We’ve cut away the roof that was damaged, and reinforced the parts of the roof that are still standing. We’ve rebuilt the catwalks, and repaired the two leaks we know about. There’s probably at least one more leak that we don’t know about, because water levels are still declining, but I expect we’ll find it before long.”

“Very good, Mr. Hallock. And the bad news?”

Larry hesitated. “The crane that we hope to use to extract the spent fuel suffered some serious damage. So the repairs will delay things. We’re probably going to have to cannibalize parts from other plants and fly them out here.”

Jessica nodded. “I understand.”

“And the reactor complex has increased its list. By another half a degree.” Jessica bit her lip. The endless series of aftershocks continued to shake the soupy ground beneath the reactor’s massive concrete-and-steel foundation, eroding its support. While its current angle of list placed it in no danger of toppling, Jessica was still uneasy. What if another major earthquake occurred? The danger was by no means remote—in 1811–12, there had been no less than three major earthquakes on the New Madrid fault system, all Richter 8.0 or greater. If another big quake hit, Jessica worried that the foundation pad beneath the reactor might begin to break up. If it shattered, the Poinsett Landing reactor might well decide to start rolling down the Mississippi.

The best way to guard against this danger was to get on with Larry’s plan to turn Poinsett Landing into an island. But Operation Island, despite the name, had run into a critical shortage. In the normal course of events, when something on this scale was to be created, enormous works of engineering would be constructed to shift the river into another channel. While Poinsett Landing was dry, solid objects—such as quarried stone—would be moved from a nearby source of supply to the construction site and laid in place to form the island.

This was purely impossible. Even when the nation’s infrastructure hadn’t been shattered by an earthquake, the technology to shift a river as mighty as the Mississippi from its mucky bed would have taken years to get into place. Whatever work was to be done would have to be done with the river right where it was.

Not only that, but there was little to build an island with. There was no solid ground in the Mississippi Delta, and no source of solid material needed to implement the “island” part of Operation Island. No quarries, no hills to dismantle, no sources of stone at all. When the Corps of Engineers constructed its dikes and levees on the lower Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s, the stone used had been imported by rail all the way from Tennessee.

This was more difficult in the present day, when many quarries throughout the country had been closed as uneconomical, and when rail transport to the area had been severely compromised by earthquake damage.

It was then that Jessica realized that a lot of the necessary materials were already at hand. It didn’t have to be a pretty island, it just had to be reasonably solid—solid enough to keep the river from undermining the reactor. The earthquake had shattered tall buildings, highway bridges, and masonry structures of all descriptions. The broken bits were going to have to be swept up anyway. So why not put them on transports and ship them to Poinsett Landing?

Poinsett Island would be constructed of the debris caused by the earthquake that had made the island necessary in the first place. That, plus some other necessary material to string it all together. There was a pleasant irony in that, an irony that Jessica intended to appreciate to the full. A roar began to sound from over the treeline to the east. Jessica glanced at her watch.

“Right on time,” Jessica said to Larry. “Watch this.”

A CH-53 Super Jolly helicopter appeared over the treeline, moving with deliberate speed toward Poinsett Landing. Slung beneath it in a steel mesh cargo net was ten tons of island material. Half of it was pipe casing intended either for oil or water wells. Much of the rest was broken power and telephone poles, plus the wires that held them together.

“Operation Island,” Jessica said blissfully. Her words were drowned by the deafening sound of rotor blades.

The Super Jolly plodded out over the river, the downblast from its rotors turning the waters white. It hovered for a moment upstream of the reactor, over buoys that had been set as aiming points, then the net was tripped and, with a grating roar, ten tons of material spilled into the Mississippi. Pipes and power poles flung themselves like spears into the riverbed. As the weight was released the copter bounded upward as if yanked into the sky by an elastic band. White water leaped as the debris struck the surface of the river. The roar sounded like Niagara. Tall, confused waves leaped from the site. All that was left, as the helicopter roared away, were the tops of pipe and poles, and some of the tangle of wire that surrounded them. The inchoate structure lay about half a kilometer upstream from the power plant.

Jessica did not want to start at the nuclear plant and built upstream. In such a structure there was the possibility that the weight of the structure would actually increase the water pressure on the buildings. Rather, in building something this unprecedented, Jessica had chosen to emulate the technique of the North American beaver. The upstream part of a beaver dam was built first, and the rest filled in afterward.

Jessica would build a solid breakwater upstream from the plant, a huge tangle of pipes, timber, wire, and earthquake debris. As with a beaver dam, the pressure of the river would eventually wedge everything into a solid position. Once this was constructed, she would backfill toward the power plant, eventually engulfing its structures.

No sooner had the Super Jolly cleared the area, moving much faster without its cargo, than another copter appeared, this one a Super Stallion. Jessica had arranged a regular relay of big heavy-lift helicopters rolling in from the nearest rail-head in Jackson, where tons of earthquake debris were being moved by rail. Each Super Jolly could carry ten tons, but the big Super Stallions hauled sixteen tons each.

In a matter of days, a fair-sized island would have grown up around Poinsett Landing. Jessica felt a broad smile spreading across her face. “Isn’t it great!” she asked.