The Rift

TWENTY-TWO

Bored out of his mind, Jason strolled on the hatches of Beluthahatchie’s barges. Then he heard a yell, and turned to see one of the crew waving from the pilothouse.

“Hey, Jase! Your dad’s on the radio!”

Jason’s heart gave a lurch. He sprinted aft, jumping from one barge to the other until he clambered aboard the towboat and ran to the pilothouse. He grabbed the hand-set, raised it to his lips. He gasped for breath, spoke. “Dad?”

Jason’s heart hammered a half-dozen times before the answer came. “Jason?” His father’s intent voice.

“Are you there?”

“Yeah, Dad. It’s me.”

“You’re still on the boat. The Beulath-something.”

“Beluthahatchie.”

“I’ve been trying to get through to you for days. All the marine radio operators are jammed up with thousands of messages…”

“Frank,” Una’s insistent voice, breaking in on another line. “Ask how he is.”

“I’m fine,” Jason said. “Got a little sunburned, that’s all.” There was another little pause. Jason realized that Frank and Una were still far away, maybe still in China.

“I was so sorry to hear about Catherine,” Una said.

Jason was silent. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Are you still in China?” he said finally.

Another pause. “Yes. In Guangzhong. If you’ll get a pen, I’ll give you the number of our hotel.” Despair floated through Jason as he jotted down the number. The least his father could have done was flown to the States.

“Are they treating you okay on the boat?” Frank Adams asked.

“Oh sure. Everyone’s been real nice. They’re letting me and Nick use their radio whenever we like.”

“Nick?” There was a flicker of intent interest in Frank’s voice. “Who is this Nick, exactly?” Jason wondered where to start. “He’s a refugee, Dad. I found him on the river.” He paused, then added,

“He’s about your age, I guess.” Trying to demonstrate that Nick was a responsible citizen, not someone who was going to lead him into trouble.

He knew better than to report that Nick was black, had been shot by a cop, and had been found in a tree. This would not boost his father’s confidence in his choice of traveling companion.

“And you traveled together,” Frank said.

“Yes. For a couple days. He’s been trying to get to his daughter in Arkansas.”

“And you were in a boat? Was this Nick’s boat?”

“Uh, no.”

So Jason had to explain about his neighbor’s bass boat, and how he’d used it to get off the Indian mound and gone down the river without meaning to. And met Nick the next morning.

“So you were on the boat for two days?”

“Well, not that boat. We got another boat later.” The memory of stranding Junior and his friend on the Lucky Magnolia was too wonderful to resist, so Jason told his father what happened, how he and Nick had found themselves on the casino boat with the two thieves, and how they’d stolen their powerboat.

“And Nick let you do this?” Frank Adams said. Jason was surprised by his father’s frigid tone.

“Well,” Jason said, “he didn’t stop me.”

“I can’t believe he put you in so much danger.”

Jason licked his lips, tried to get his thoughts in order. “He really didn’t have much to do with it, Dad.”

“Well, he should have.”

“This Nick doesn’t sound like a very responsible person,” said Una.

“He didn’t know,” Jason said, “that there were thieves on board.”

“He just let you walk into this danger?” Frank demanded. “Of all the stupid, thoughtless…”

“Nick’s really okay, Dad.”

“He is not okay.” Firmly. “I don’t know what the man was thinking of.”

“I—” Jason groped for words. “You’ve got it wrong, Dad.”

Frank went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Now where is this boat you’re on? This Beulah Hatchie, or whatever.”

“Well,” Jason said. “We’re somewhere south of Helena. But the boat’s aground on a sandbar at the moment.”

“It’s what?”

“But it’s okay,” Jason said. “It’s not sinking or anything. It’s just that the river changed, and—” Frank Adams snorted. “I don’t know how a river can change,” he said.

“If you were here,” Jason said, “you’d know.”

Frank sounded as if he were trying very hard to be patient. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re stranded. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I don’t think the captain sounds very competent,” Una contributed.

“He’s fine, Una,” Jason said. “The boat’s going to Cincinnati when we can get it afloat. And that shouldn’t take too long, the captain says, because the river’s rising.”

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, then,” Frank said. “When you get to Cincinnati, there will be a ticket waiting for you. And then you’ll fly to Syracuse, and your aunt Stacy will be waiting for you.”

“Aunt Stacy?” Jason couldn’t believe he was hearing this. His aunt Stacy, who was actually his great-aunt, lived in upstate New York. Though she was kind, he couldn’t see spending the whole summer with her. She was elderly and didn’t get out much, and where she lived there was nothing to do.

“Why can’t I come to California?” he asked.

“Our apartment is really too small for a family, Jason.”

Horrid visions of staying forever with Aunt Stacy flashed through Jason’s mind. “Wait a minute!” he said.

“I was coming in August.”

“That was just for two weeks, Jason,” Una said. “If you’re coming to stay for good, we’ll need more room.”

Hatred blazed in Jason’s heart. He had never hated anyone so much as he hated Una in that instant.

“Una and I will look for a house,” Frank said. “We’ll have it all ready for you when it’s time to start school in the fall.”

Jason was appalled. “I don’t even get to see you?” he said.

“I can’t come,” Frank said. His voice was almost a shout. “They won’t let me come and get you.” Jason blinked. “What?”

“The government isn’t letting anyone fly into the quake zone!” Frank’s voice was almost a shout. “They aren’t letting phone calls in. You can fly out, you can call out if you need help, but I can’t get in to you. They won’t let me come!”

There was a moment of silence. Jason could hear atmospherics hissing from the radio speaker.

“Once you get to Syracuse, I’ll come see you,” Frank said. “They’ll let me fly there. But in the meantime the only way I can talk to you is to get a radio operator to try to call your boat.”

“Fly me to California,” he said. “I don’t want to go to New York.”

“We’ve been into that. There’s no room in our apartment. I’ve talked to Aunt Stacy, and it’s all arranged. Now could you hand the receiver to the captain of the Beulah-whatever, so I could talk to him?”

“He’s not in the pilothouse at the moment.”

“Could you go get him, then?”

From the sound of it, Jason’s father planned to give Captain Joe some orders. Which he did. Captain Joe opened the conversation with a cheerful, “Hi, y’all,” but soon fell silent as Jason’s father began to speak. This went on for some time.

When the conversation was over, Joe put his arm around Jason’s shoulders and walked with him down the companionway. “Your poppa’s got a lot of opinions,” he said.

“Yeah,” Jason said. “I know.”

“He wants me to keep you away from Nick. He seems to have something against that man.” He gave Jason a look from under one bushy eyebrow. “Is your poppa prejudiced or something?”

“No,” Jason said. “He’s a lawyer.”

Captain Joe nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Now I understand.” Nick heard Arlette’s voice over the sound of hammering. Some of the family, she had explained, were up on the roof, replacing the shingles that had spilled during the big quake. “We’re trying to get the house in shape,” she said, “because we don’t want it to fall apart if we have to leave.” Sudden anxiety clawed at Nick’s heart. “You’ll be leaving Toussaint?” he asked. “When?”

“That depends on the bayou. Looks like it’s getting set to rise. And I’ve never seen it run so fast.” He had wasted too much time, Nick thought as he rubbed the nearly healed wound on his left arm. He should have taken the speedboat to Toussaint after the first night on the Beluthahatchie. But it had been comfortable on the boat, and safe, and he’d been able to talk to Arlette every day. And every time he thought about getting back on the river again, a bloated body would float by. He and Jason had been on board five days. He’d talked to Arlette twice a day. And he’d tried to get in touch with Viondi’s family, but there was no answer at Viondi’s number, or his plumbing business, or at the numbers of Viondi’s sons that Nick’d been given by directory assistance. He wondered if the whole family had been wiped out.

Finally, after several days, he’d got an answering machine at Viondi’s business. He hated to pass on the news by machine, but he had little choice: he identified himself and told the machine that Viondi was dead, and that he’d try to call later.

When he called the next day, he didn’t even get the machine.

“The phone exchange is sandbagged,” Arlette said. “And we’ve got pumps running. But if the bayou gets much higher, we could lose the phones. Half the people here are living in the second floors of their homes already. So Gros-Papa is getting everyone organized to leave by boat. He and Gilly and Aunt Penelope are going to stay and look after things.”

Nick bit his lip. “How are you going to get out? The river’s a mess.”

“We’re not going to follow the river. We’re going to follow the road. In our boats, it shouldn’t matter if the roads are torn up or the bridges are out.”

“Honey. The roads might be blocked. A lot of trees and power lines have fallen down.”

“We can float around obstructions, Gros-Papa says. But we’ll have chainsaws just in case. And plenty of food.” Her voice turned reassuring. “We’ll be okay, Daddy. We know where we’re going.” Should have gone there, Nick thought. Should have been there for her. And for Manon.

“Besides,” she added, “we’ve got to leave. Did you hear the President’s address? We’re getting our water from the bayou—we can’t keep on drinking it, not with the fertilizer plant upstream.” The President should be doing something, Nick thought. Something besides making speeches.

“I’m coming to you, baby,” Nick decided. “You just hang in there for another couple days, and I’ll be there.”

“I want to wait for you, Daddy.” She hesitated, then spoke. “But it’s the bayou that has to wait.” With Captain Joe’s assistance, Nick plotted his river journey in the chartroom just below Beluthahatchie’s pilothouse. Down the Mississippi, up the White River to Lopez Bayou, and up Lopez Bayou to Toussaint Bayou.

“But it’s not goin’ to look like this, podnah,” Captain Joe said. “Everything on the map is nice an’ neat, but you can look right out this window here and see how neat this river is.” He looked down at the map and tapped the Arkansas Delta with a big knuckle. “This is all goin’ to be under water. It will be hard to find the channel. Some of the navigation markers are goin’ to be missing, others will have moved. The White River may have shifted its mouth—already done it once—and you maybe won’t be able to tell one from the other. There ain’t no towns on that stretch at all. Your marks are gonna be these three lights—Clay Wilson, Smith Point, and Henrico Bar. If the lights are there at all—they could all three have been wrecked.”

He shook his head. “If you get to the light at Montgomery Point, you’ve gone too far. This Napoleon light here—” tapping again with his knuckle “—that’s on a town that the river took over a hundred years ago. Napoleon, Arkansas. You used to be able to see parts of it at low water, but now maybe even the light ain’t there.” Captain Joe looked at Nick and tugged on his grizzled mustache. “This river just went through a big change, podnah. Maybe Napoleon’s above water again. Maybe some other town’s under. This map will prob’ly just get you lost. All’s you can hope to do is stay in the river and out of the batture.”

“The what?”

Joe gave a laugh. “Batture’s an ol’ Louisiana word, podnah. Means the floodplain, between the levee and the river.”

Nick looked down at the map, felt his jaw clench. “Can you give me some paper?” he asked. “I’d like to make some notes.”

“Hell, podnah, take the maps.” With a grand gesture, he tore three maps out of the spiralbound Army Corps of Engineers map set. He opened more long, flat drawers in his map chest, withdrew more maps.

“I can give you maps of the White and the Arkansas, too,” he said, “but they ain’t up to date. We ain’t gone up there in years.”

Nick looked at the captain. “Thank you,” he said.

Captain Joe grinned, clapped Nick on the shoulder. “You just say hey to your little girl from me,” he said, “and to her Gros-Papa, too.”

Jason watched Nick after he’d come back from talking to his daughter, and he saw Nick’s face glow with love and delight. In the evenings, he’d call his father and try to tell him that things on the boat were okay: that Nick wasn’t some deranged stranger who’d try to get everyone killed, that Captain Joe wasn’t the captain of the Titanic about to massacre them all.

He’d leave the radio vibrating with anger, and then he’d see Nick musing over a cup of coffee, his face still radiating love.

Then Jason would hate everybody, and find a place on the boat where he could be alone.

“You want to learn how to use that scope of yours?” Captain Joe asked after one evening’s episode of Doctor Who.

Captain Joe took the rewound tape out of the player, archived it carefully with the others.

“You know astronomy?” Jason asked.

The telescope had been stowed under Jason’s bunk since he’d been on the towboat. Sometimes, when he saw it, the anger boiled up in him and he thought about throwing it over the side. But somehow the scope hadn’t ever seemed worth the effort.

“What I learned,” Captain Joe said, “was celestial navigation. Useless on the river, but I didn’t know I was going to be spending my whole career being a truck driver on the Mississippi, I thought maybe I’d go to salt water one of these days. I never left the river, but once I got into the habit, I kept lookin’ up, y’know what I mean?”

Captain Joe switched off Beluthahatchie’s floodlights and took Jason and Nick aft of the stacks, where the boat’s remaining lights wouldn’t blind them. There he set up Jason’s telescope and pointed it upward at the brilliant swash of stars overhead. This was the best viewing, the captain declared, that he’d ever seen: the quake had wiped out light pollution for miles around, and the factories and automobiles that produced other forms of pollution were wrecked or unused.

“Here, podnah. Look at this.”

Jason put his eye to the scope. It took a moment for his eye to adjust to the faint light that had crossed millions of miles of space to reach him, and then awe filled him as the great globular cluster M13 in Hercules grew brighter in the Astroscan: a huge ball of stars, so closely packed together that they looked as if they had merged, with fine trails of stars sailing in all directions from the core.

“A million stars or more, M13,” Captain Joe said. “All concentrated in a ball.” A million stars, Jason’s mind echoed. In Los Angeles, a valley flooded with the light of a million streetlamps, he could go years without ever seeing so much as a single star. And now he was a looking at a million of them, all packed into the little eyepiece of Astroscan. He had no idea the universe held such bounty.

“How far away is it?” he asked.

“Globular clusters are all on the perimeter of our galaxy. Say maybe twenty-five thousand light-years.”

“So the light from those million stars took twenty-five thousand years to get here,” Nick mused from over Jason’s shoulder.

A million stars, Jason thought again. All in my eye at once.

Captain Joe showed them other globular clusters: M81, M82, M51. The Blackeye Galaxy, M64, beautifully defined spiral arms, all made of stars, spinning out from a blazing center, and curling across its center a long dark cloud, like a streak of chocolate swirled into whipped cream.

“Billions of stars there, podnah,” Captain Joe said. “Maybe even a trillion. That’s one with twelve zeroes after it.”

“And people?” Jason asked.

“Mos’ likely. Or maybe not people exactly, but intelligent life. Seems silly to think we’re the only ones, not when there’s so much potential for life in the universe, and so much room. A supernova will throw out everything you need for life—I’ll show you a supernova in a few minutes, here.” Jason wondered what his mother would have said if she’d looked through the telescope at the Blackeye Galaxy. She probably knew people who talked to the Blackeye Galaxy, who conversed with the people there like neighbors chatting across the back fence.

And all the aliens, according to his mother, believed just what his mother believed. Races throughout the universe embraced peace, drumming, reincarnation, astrology, pyramid power, and Atlantis. It was only the folks on earth who remained mostly unconvinced.

Surely in all those billions of stars, Jason thought, there was somebody who would disagree with his mother.

Captain Joe shifted the telescope, peered busily through the eyepiece. Then he laughed, clapped his hands together with a bang. “There we are!” he said. “I was wondering if I could catch the detail with this little scope, but we in luck tonight! Take a look at this, podnah.”

At first Jason saw only a small fuzzy blotch, but as his eye adjusted to the lens he saw that the blotch was hollow, a ghostly smoke-ring hovering in the darkness.

“That’s the Ring Nebula!” Captain Joe proclaimed. “I told you I’d show you a supernova, and there it is!”

“I thought a supernova would be brighter,” Jason said, his eye glued to the strange apparition.

“That’s supernova remnants, that cloud, not the supernova itself. What supernovas do is manufacture all the heavier elements, see—iron, oxygen, carbon—and they blast ’em all into space in a huge explosion. Our sun is made up of old supernovas, and so is earth and the other planets. We are made of old supernovas. All living things. If it weren’t for those big stars blowing up, no life would exist.”

“They blow up?” Jason said.

“Yeah. Give Nick a look, then lemme show you another one.”

Jason stepped back from the telescope. A chill threaded remorselessly through his soul. The problem with his mother’s philosophy, he thought, wasn’t that people, or even aliens, disagreed with her; it was that the whole universe disagreed. She had thought of the universe as being no more complex than her own backyard, and no less welcoming; but she was wrong. Stars blew up regardless of whether people built pyramids; earthquakes shook the earth whether or not they chanted and burnt incense; bodies rolled lifeless along the chill bottom of the Mississippi whether they practiced astrology or not. Existence was filled with wonder and terror and incomprehensible violence, from his mother’s backyard to the Blackeye Galaxy. Human comprehension was limited, and human life terribly fragile.

The stars burned overhead, arching across the destroyed landscape. Jason stared up at them in fascination and horror.

Captain Joe showed Jason the Veil Nebula next, but Jason’s pleasure in the sight, the gorgeous phosphorescent threads that floated in the darkness, was tempered by the knowledge that this was the remnant of another supernova, something else that had torn itself to shreds at the behest of Nature. He could feel a pressure in his mind. His internal scale was growing, pressing against the inside of his skull. He felt as if his thoughts were racing outward at the speed of light, trying to catch up with the universe. A trillion stars…

It was a matter of scale, Jason felt. He did not know how to relate what he’d seen, the universe of stars and galaxies and immeasurable distances, to the rest of his life, to Nick and the Beluthahatchie and the torn landscape, the sagging bridges and the bodies floating down the river, a raft for crows. All things were mortal, he thought. That was what everything had in common.

Everything was mortal, and even a star could die.

Jason didn’t see why he needed to go to Aunt Stacy’s. It was just another pointless scheme of his father’s to stick him out of the way where his father wouldn’t have to think about him. He helped Nick stock the speedboat with supplies for the trip to Toussaint. Canned food, lots of fresh water. Ice and fresh food in the bass boat’s cooler. Blankets, clothes, rain gear, a pair of proper oars for the bass boat, a pair of flashlights, tools, insect repellent. Much of it went into the lockers of the bass boat, which Nick planned to tow behind him—“like a tender,” as Captain Joe said. Anticipation glittered in Nick’s eyes as he planned the trip to his family. Jason tried to stay cheerful about it for Nick’s sake, but all he could think about was that Nick would soon be with his family, and that Jason would never be with his family—his whole family—ever again.

Nick was going to leave in the morning. The only adult who had ever talked to him as if he was a human being, not a little marching moron to be given orders, or tried to pay for his neglect with presents that he didn’t even pick himself.

Jason felt a sudden yearning to be on the river again, to hide somehow on the speedboat and not come out until they arrived at Toussaint, at the place where there was a family waiting. But it was pointless to think about stowing away on a twenty-foot boat. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t be seen. He went to bed that night with fantasies of escape spinning through his mind. He thought about flying up into the night sky, free in Captain Joe’s world of stars, the universe to choose from. Jason woke to a knock on the door of the cabin he shared with Nick. “Better get up, podnah.” Captain Joe’s voice. “The river’s risin’ fast. We’re gonna float off this sandbar, and we’ve got to get you onto the water before we head upriver.”

“It’s still dark,” Jason said.

“River makes up its mind to do something, we gotta do it,” Joe called. Jason and Nick dressed in the dark. Beluthahatchie’s big turbines vibrated up through the deck. Jason reached under his bunk and grabbed his telescope by its strap. Outside the towboat sat in a pool of white light, crewmen bustling, winches tightening the anchor lines that had been trailed aft. The speedboat and the bass boat had been moored to the side out of the way, ready to be boarded.

“Godspeed, then, podnah,” Joe said, and stuck out his hand. Nick shook it.

“Thanks, Captain. Thanks for everything.”

Jason held out his hand. The words take me with you were on the tip of his tongue. “Good luck,” he said.

“Thanks.” Nick took the hand, then put the other around Jason’s shoulders, gave him a brief, fierce hug.

“You take care, Jason.” He released Jason, looked at the telescope. “You going to watch me with your ’scope?” he said.

“Sure.”

“I don’t know if you’ll see much. I won’t be carrying a light.”

Nick turned to the boat, then hesitated. He turned to Captain Joe. “Can I call my girl?” he said. “Tell her I’m on my way?”

Joe glanced over the side at the rising river, then nodded. “Make it quick,” he said, and then he and Nick hurried forward to the pilothouse and the radio.

There was a sudden loud clatter as a winch hauled on an anchor line. Jason jumped. His heart hammered. Light glittered on the river’s wavelets.

Below him the speed boat tugged on its line, eager to be off. Retired and Gone Fishin’ bobbed behind on its towline.

The river was terror. The river was liberation. The river was Edge Living, and his fate. Jason walked aft a few feet, then went over the side and dropped soundlessly into the bass boat. He crawled under the casting deck forward. The space was narrow, with only an inch or two to spare. It was damp and it smelled bad. Water chuckled against the boat’s chine.

Dad is going to be really pissed, Jason thought, and closed his eyes. Paxton looked down at the dead body in the bar ditch. “God damn it, Jedthus,” he said.

“Didn’t meant to kill him,” Jedthus said. “There ain’t more’n three inches of water down there.”

“Nigger asked for it,” said Jedthus’s new partner, a Klan boy named Leckie who hailed from Washington Parish, and whom Omar had made a special deputy.

Jedthus gave Omar a defiant look. “He was talkin’ smack, Omar, and that’s the truth.” Omar walked around the car that Jedthus and Leckie had pulled over for reckless driving, looked with his flashlight at the license plate. New Orleans, he saw. The car was a late-1970s Mercury with a battered paint job and torn upholstery.

Leckie turned his flashlight on the body. “We was just sittin’ on him and whalin’ on him with our flashlights,” he said. “Guess he must’ve drowned in the ditch without our knowing it.” Fury howled in Omar’s veins. ” Turn off that light!”

Leckie stared at him in surprise, then obeyed. There was a moment of silence filled only by the night songs of insects.

Omar stalked again around the car, looked up and down the two-lane road. The Bayou Bridge was visible, a shadow on the night’s darkness, a quarter-mile away.

These boys were going to put him in goddam prison, he thought. Killed some stranger passing through, then panicked and called him to ask what to do next. They’d made him an accessory! His whole career, his whole life, could end right here.

What a fucking joke. He took off his cap, ran his hands through his hair. At least it happened late at night, on a stretch of road where there was almost no traffic at this hour.

“We could say he resisted arrest,” Jedthus said. “We could say he attacked us.”

“So you drowned him?” Omar said. “In a ditch? In self-defense? Oh yeah, they’ll believe that, all right.” Jedthus blinked, turned away. Omar closed his eyes and tried to think.

“Okay,” he said. “This never happened. None of us ever saw this car. None of us ever saw this boy. Okay?”

“Sure, Omar,” Jedthus said.

“Now what you two do,” Omar said, “is put this boy in the trunk of his car. And you take the car down the bayou, where nobody can see, and you shove the car in. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” said Leckie, and looked back at the Bayou Bridge.

“And I mean far down the bayou,” Omar said. “Not just down to the bridge. Take the car someplace where nobody ever goes fishing. Where no teenagers go to screw. Where nobody’s been in a hundred years. I don’t care if you have to cut a road to get there.”

Jedthus looked nervously at Leckie. “Yeah, Omar. We’ll do that.”

“Because if you screw this up,” said Omar, “you two are going to spend the rest of your lives in prison being raped by big-dick niggers. You understand me?”

Leckie’s eyes were wide. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.

“Now get moving,” Omar said. “And police the damn area afterward. I don’t want anyone tomorrow to find a thing belonging to this boy.” He began moving toward his car. “I’m heading home to finish watching the Tonight Show.”

Omar heard splashing sounds as Jedthus and Leckie waded into the ditch to pat down the dead man, find his keys, and open his trunk. He opened the door to his car, prepared to step in, and then saw headlights glaring on the other side of the Bayou Bridge.

“Careful!” he called. “Car coming!”

Leckie and Jedthus straightened and stood self-consciously by the ditch, like guilty children. Omar cursed, slammed his door, walked toward the other two. Checked the sight lines, made sure the body wasn’t visible from the road. Headlights glared in his eyes.

The car rolled past. A Buick, Omar saw, a white family with children. Everyone but the driver asleep. As soon as the driver was past, Leckie and Jedthus bent again to their work. Omar heard Jedthus curse under his breath.

“No fuckin’ keys,” Leckie said.

Another set of headlights were coming. Frustration boiled in Omar’s veins. “Have you tried the ignition?” he demanded.

Jedthus cursed, splashed in the ditch. He wrenched open the door and triggered a buzzing alarm. Omar’s nerves jumped at the sound. Jedthus yanked keys from the ignition and the alarm stopped.

“Wait for the car to go by,” Omar warned.

The car was a big white Chevy Suburban packed with someone’s possessions, with more tied on top. Part of a couch hung out the back end.

“What the hell is going on?” Jedthus said. “This is a week night. What are all these people doing out here?”

“Another car,” Omar said. Jedthus banged his fist on the trunk of the dead man’s Mercury. The car was a little red Honda hatchback with a black woman driving, a kid in the passenger seat, and more belongings piled in the back.

And behind the Honda were two more cars.

The cars just kept coming, eighteen or twenty of them, all packed with people or possessions. Omar went to his car and sat in the driver’s seat, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and tried to think. One of the cars slowed to a stop, and Omar saw the driver rolling down the window. Omar winced, withdrew farther into the car.

“Excuse me, officer,” the stranger said. He was a little white man, elderly, with a frosted mustache.

“Yes?” Omar said.

“Is there a motel anywhere ahead?”

“Not in this parish, sir,” Omar said. The man rolled up his window and went on. Finally there was a break in the traffic, and Omar helped the other two pick up the corpse and drop it into the trunk. Jedthus was breathing hard as he slammed the trunk lid down, and Leckie looked pale and frightened, as if he was about to run off into the night.

“What is going on?” Jedthus demanded.

“They’re evacuating,” Omar said. “You heard that everyone on the river’s got to leave.” Jedthus looked bewildered. “Why are they coming here?” he demanded. “We don’t have anything for refugees here. And they’re driving farther into the earthquake zone.”

“This highway’s a hurricane evacuation route. These people have just been following the signs.” Jedthus stared. “Jee-zus,” he said.

“More cars coming,” Leckie said.

“Dang it,” Jedthus said.

Omar put his hand on Jedthus’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said. “Stay cool. Just do what I said, and take this car way down the bayou. And no one will ever know.”

Jedthus looked at Omar and nodded. Omar went back to his car and started the engine. When he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw another line of cars coming.

Nick watched Beluthahatchie fall astern as he drifted down the river. He hadn’t started the outboard except for a brief burst to show that he could start it if he needed to. He didn’t want to speed downriver at night and risk running into an obstacle or losing his way, so he planned to drift easy till dawn, then make his way by whatever landmarks were still visible.

Beluthahatchie’s turbines revved, the sound filling the still river. Winches clattered. It was tricky pulling the tow off the mud, Captain Joe had explained, because all fifteen barges were held together with just a single steel cable. If the cable parted, the entire tow would come apart, and the whipping steel cable could cut a man in half.

The river had risen four inches in just three hours, according to the captain, which should more than float the tow. Captain Joe hadn’t expected it—reports from upriver had indicated a much slower rise—but the towboat’s captain was going to take advantage of the flood while he could.

Nick looked ahead and felt anxiety claw lightly at his nerves. He hadn’t been able to reach Toussaint with his radio call. The water was rising there, too, Arlette had said, and was threatening to flood the telephone exchange. Perhaps all communication with Toussaint was out.

Captain Joe had said that he’d keep calling. All Nick could do was hope that he hadn’t delayed too long in getting on the river, that Arlette and her mother would still be in Toussaint when he arrived. Nick jumped at the sound of the towboat’s horn blasting over the river. It sounded three times, the echoes dying away in the trees, and then Beluthahatchie began to move, its turbines whining as it backed away from the hidden sandbar. Then it paused while the stern anchors were taken up, the boat’s outline glowing in the darkness; its horn sounded again and it began to move forward. Nick raised a hand and waved.

The towboat moved slowly and cautiously, but nevertheless, in a few short moments, it left Nick alone on the river.

“Omar?” Wilona asked sleepily. “Who is that?”

“I’ll find out, darling,” Omar said.

He reached for the pistol he kept on the nightstand as the knock on the front door persisted. It was four in the morning, and he had left Jedthus and Leckie with their corpse around midnight. They’d probably screwed it up, he thought. He could hardly believe that they were stupid enough to come here asking for advice.

And if it wasn’t Jedthus knocking, it was someone else who had even less business knocking on his door. Black militants. Jew assassins. Even that crazy Micah Knox, wanting vengeance for the way Omar had treated him. Omar was famous now, which meant that people he had never met would want to kill him, just like they’d killed John Lennon.

Omar held his pistol ready as he slipped to the front window and twitched aside the curtains, saw the familiar face under the porch light. His heart leaped. He put his pistol on a side table, unlocked the door, and threw his arms around his son.

“David! What are you doing here?”

His boy grinned at him, patted him on the back. “Baton Rouge is being evacuated. My summer job’s gone, so I thought I might as well come home.”

Omar stepped back, grinned. “Why didn’t you call?”

“I tried. The phones were all jammed. So I just came.” David was a younger version of his father—tall, with broad shoulders, curling black hair, and movie-star features that got him a lot of girlfriends.

“David!” Wilona called from the bedroom. She rushed to embrace her son. Omar helped David carry his bags into the back room.

“The traffic was bumper-to-bumper almost all the way here,” David said. “It looked like the whole state was on the move.”

“They started driving through earlier tonight,” Omar said. “I don’t know why they’re heading this way.”

“I don’t think they know, either. They’re city people, you know? They’ll just keep driving till they see something familiar, like a Holiday Inn or a McDonald’s.”

“Can I get you something to eat?” Wilona asked.

David nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I haven’t had anything since lunch.”

“I’ve got some cold ham and potatoes. I could reheat it in the microwave.”

“Cold is fine, Mama.”

“Heating it’s no problem. You want some Co-Cola?” Retying her bathrobe, Wilona headed for the kitchen.

David and Omar looked at each other for a moment. Then David grinned. “I saw you on TV, Dad. You looked good.”

“Thanks.”

“There was a lot of talk on campus about you. You’d be surprised how many friends you have there.” Omar nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.” Campus. He had a son who was on campus. No Paxton had ever been to college before.

Father and son, they were on the move.

They walked back to the front room and sat down. David looked around. “The house seems to have come through okay,” he said.

“Your mama put a lot of work into making it look that way,” Omar said. “But you’ll be eating off a plastic plate tonight. All the china fell out of the cabinet and smashed.”

David made a face. “I hope the insurance covers it.”

“No. The policy has an exemption for earthquakes and floods.”

“Bastards,” David said. “Jew bastards.”

“Here’s your Co-Cola.” Wilona, returning with a plastic party cup in her hand.

“Thank you, Mama.” Smiling. David turned back to Omar. “Is there any more work I can do around the house? Or should I see if I can find a paying job somewheres else?”

Omar considered. “The National Guard shipped too many of my deputies up north. I’ve been swearing in special deputies. And with all these refugees coming through, we’ll need more just to handle the traffic.” David grinned. “Sounds great,” he said. “Kind of like working for the family firm.” It would be good to have somebody intelligent working for him, Omar thought.

Not like Leckie and Jedthus, who were probably up to their hips in the bayou right now, finding a place to hide a corpse.

The current was sluggish, and American Dream turned slow circles around Retired and Gone Fishin’ as it drifted. Nick let the boat do what it wanted, and only tried to keep it in the center of the channel, between the dimly sensed flood plain on either side. The night was dark, but the stars blazed overhead with an intensity Nick had never seen. He could see dozens of nebulae with the naked eye, little bright clouds between the stars, and he could never remember seeing so many before.

He wished he had Jason’s telescope aboard.

He felt a breath of wind on his skin, and then he heard a distant rushing sound ahead. He turned his head downstream, cupped hands to his ears. The sound might be wind through trees. It might be rapids.

It might be a waterfall.

The wind freshened, fell, freshened again from another direction. The rushing sound grew louder. Nick strained his eyes for sign of white water.

Captain Joe hadn’t received any reports of rapids on this stretch. Boats had been going up and down the river and hadn’t reported white water here. It didn’t make any sense.

Stay alive for Arlette, Nick thought. He dropped into the cockpit seat and started the engine. He turned the bow upstream and motored slowly for ten minutes. Then cut the motor and drifted again, till he felt the winds and heard the rushing. Then he did it again. And again.

Till dawn.

When the east turned pale he was surprised by the size and sluggishness of the river. The trees in what Captain Joe would call the batture sat deeper in the water than he’d seen them before. Debris floated aimlessly on the still water, turning small circles or pushed around by little predawn wind gusts. It was as if the river had almost ceased to flow, had become a lake three or four miles wide. Almost. The water was moving south very slowly, taking the boat with it. Nick folded back the boat’s canvas top, then stood to peer ahead, scratched his bristly chin in thought. Something, he thought, was causing the river to rise, had floated Beluthahatchie off its bar. What could cause the river to rise four inches in just a matter of hours? Four inches over this huge expanse was a lot of water. Nick wondered if the Arkansas had changed its course, struck the Mississippi just south of here and backed up the water. The sun blazed above the trees to the east, brightened the dark river with its touch. Nick could hear that roaring sound again. What was going on?

The southern horizon seemed indistinct, misty. Banks of fog?

Fear shivered up Nick’s spine. He wondered if the mist was rising off rapids.

“Hey, Nick. What’s happening?”

Nick turned and saw Jason sitting in the bass boat’s little cockpit. His hair was tousled, and there was a sleepy smile on the boy’s face.

Fury flashed like fire along Nick’s nerves. ” What are you doing here?” he roared. Jason’s eyes widened in surprise at the strength of Nick’s anger, but when he replied his tone was deliberately casual. “Didn’t want to spend the summer with my aunt. I thought I’d go with you.”

“God damn it!” Nick banged a fist on the gunwale. ” God damn it, you’re not my kid!”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Jason said. He lifted his hands in appeal. “I won’t get in your way. I can be useful. You know that.”

Nick glared at him. “Now I’ve got to take you back to Captain Joe,” he said. He threw himself into the cockpit seat, pulled out the choke.

“Hey, wait! You’ll never catch the Beluthahatchie. You’ve been going down the river all night.” Nick didn’t even bother to look at Jason as he shouted his answer. “No, I haven’t! I’ve been staying in the same place all damn night long! And if you had any damn brains, you’d know that!”

“No! Wait!”

Nick punched the starter, felt the big Evinrude catch. He gunned the engine to drown out Jason’s protests, then put it in gear. He spun the wheel, turned the speedboat upstream, and pushed the throttle forward. He felt the little tug that meant the tow rope to the bass boat had gone taut, and imagined rather than saw Jason being flung back in his seat as the bass boat accelerated on the end of its line. The boat’s nose rose as it gained speed. Nick could still hear Jason’s shouts over the roar of the engine. He dodged debris as he roared upriver at top speed, smiling as he pictured the bass boat playing crack-the-whip on the end of its line. Run it into a few trees, he thought, serve Jason right. Then he sighed. Who, he wondered, was he trying to kid? There was no way he could catch the towboat with its head start.

He pulled back on the throttle, then switched off the ignition. There was a rush of water as the speedboat fell off its bow wave.

“I’m sorry!” Jason called in the sudden silence. “I didn’t think you’d be mad!”

“You didn’t think at all,” Nick said. Anger beat a slow throb in his temples. He stood, turned to face Jason as the boat lost momentum. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.

“Take me with you? Come on, Nick—I won’t be any trouble.”

That bright grin, Nick thought, must have got a lot of goodies out of Jason’s old man. Rage burst like a firework in Nick’s brain.

“I’m not your father!” he shouted. And then added, half to himself, “And your daddy’s gonna kill me.”

“Tell him it’s all my fault,” Jason said. “He’ll believe that. He’s used to blaming me for things.” Nick glared at the boy. “I suppose he’s got reasons!” he said. He collapsed into his seat, shook his head.

“I don’t know what I should do.”

Jason crawled onto the bass boat’s foredeck, then began pulling on the tow rope, drawing himself closer to the speedboat. “It’ll be okay, Nick, really.”

“Bullshit.”

Jason clambered aboard the American Dream, dropped into the seat next to Nick. “Listen. You can say you didn’t have a choice.”

Nick looked at him. Fury simmered in his veins. “First town we come to—first landing, first boat, first inhabited damn building—I’m putting you off. I don’t care if you have to live on somebody’s roof for the next two weeks.”

Jason opened his mouth, closed it.

“And another thing,” Nick said, and he heard the echo of his father in his voice, General Ruford chewing out some subordinate, and he was pleased by the sound, “you better mind me from this point, boy, because if you don’t, I’m going to kick your lily ass all over this boat.” Jason stared, swallowed. “Yes, sir,” he said.

Nick hit the starter, felt the Evinrude growl, like one of his father’s tanks. “Now,” he said, “there’s something weird going on downstream, so I want you to keep an eye out, right?”

“Umm. Shall I get my telescope?”

“You’ve got it with you? Okay. Yes.”

Jason set up the telescope on the foredeck, peered into it, fiddled with the focus knob. Nick motored cautiously downstream, standing behind the wheel so that he could see to avoid debris. Sweat prickled on his forehead as the rising sun began to burn down on the flooded country.

Over the murmuring engine he could hear the rushing sound, and the southern horizon seemed indistinct and misty. He called to Jason. “What do you see?”

Jason looked up from the eyepiece, shook his head. “I can’t tell. It’s all weird.”

“Is it rapids?”

Jason shook his head again. “I don’t know. It looks like there might be white water.” Nick clenched his teeth. This didn’t make any sense.

He motored closer. Puffs of wind gusted from different parts of the compass. Nick put the Evinrude in neutral and throttled down so that he could hear better. Jason’s eye was glued to the eyepiece of the Astroscan.

“It’s an island,” Jason said. “I think. It looks like water’s breaking around something. And I see lots of driftwood piled up.”

If it was an island, Nick thought, he could go around it. “Okay,” he said.

“It’s a big island,” Jason said. He panned the scope back and forth, muttered something as he inadvertently shoved the inverted image the wrong way, then regained his view. Finally he sat up, looked at Nick.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “It looks like the island is right across the whole river.” Nick gnawed his lip. “Let me see,” he decided finally.

He made his way onto the foredeck, knelt next to Jason, put his eye to the scope. The upside-down image bobbed uneasily with the motion of the boat. He saw tree roots, white water, mist. Carefully he nudged the scope left and right, panning across the horizon. He could hear the roar of white water. The island looked huge.

He straightened. Rushing water dinned at his ears. His brain whirled, and then his mouth went dry as comprehension dawned. “Oh shit,” he said.

“What?” Jason asked. “What is it?”

“It’s not an island,” Nick said. “It’s a dam.” He rose, the boat swaying under him, and made his way back to the cockpit.

Jason looked after him. “A dam? How can it be a dam?”

“Dam’s made of driftwood,” Nick said. “All that debris going downriver—a lot of it got hung up here. Maybe there was an island, or some rocks, or just a mud bar. But once the driftwood and other rubbish started collecting, it just kept stacking up. That’s why the river’s rising so fast. It’s been dammed.” Nick bit his lip as he thought about the water piled up behind the dam. Millions of tons, all pressing on the haphazard accretion of rubbish that was holding them back. He knew how much power water could exert, how it would push through every crevice, prod at every weak point. Even well-built levees and breakwaters failed under the constant pressure of water: the driftwood dam, he suspected, wouldn’t last long, not with the weight of the flooded Mississippi behind it.

And when the end came for the dam, he thought, my God. All the water pouring out in a flood and carrying the debris with it. A huge wave heading downstream, churning with tons of battering wreckage. He was going to have to wait for the dam to burst, he thought. And then wait a long time after that, so as not to get caught in the flood or the wreckage the flood would carry with it. Impatience twitched along his nerves. He wanted to get south, get to Arlette. Maybe he could find a way around the dam, find a chute of water he could ride south, or some way through the trees where the water flowed more normally.

But no. Even if there was a chute, even if he could get down the chute without mishap, that would just put him in the way of that deadly wall of water when it finally broke free.

Stay alive, he told himself. Stay alive for Arlette.

He turned the boat around, pushed the throttle forward. They might as well head for the treeline to the east, where they could tie up in the shade and wait.

Jason looked at him questioningly.

“Might as well have breakfast,” he said.

The debris dam cracked around noon. There were a series of concussions, like bombs exploding. Flocks of birds flapped skyward in surprise. Jason and Nick both straightened, looked toward the sound. Another boom sounded over the still water. And then they both heard the roaring, building over the trees, as water began to flow.

Jason turned to Nick. “Do we go now?”

“Too dangerous. Wait for the water to go down.”

It dropped fast. Six inches in the first hour, judging by the high-flood marks left on the boles of trees. Every so often another blast from the dam echoed through the trees, as well as prolonged grinding noises, as if pieces of driftwood were being torn away from the dam with incredible violence. By two o’clock the water was falling so slowly that Nick couldn’t track its progress, debris was moving on the river at what seemed to be a normal pace, and the roaring sound had faded, replaced by the calls of birds in the trees. Nick decided that he may as well investigate.

The water was moving fast in the center of the river, and as Nick approached he began to hear the roaring sound again. Parts of the southern horizon were misty, presumably where the driftwood dam was still intact, but other parts were clear. Nick steered for the widest of the gaps, the Evinrude throttled down so far it barely kept headway. The roaring sound grew, and apprehension tingled along Nick’s nerves.

Go or no-go? He stood behind the wheel, peered anxiously ahead. Half-submerged debris ground against the boat’s side and set his teeth on edge. Suddenly he realized, from the strong breeze in his face, that the current was carrying the boat along at high speed.

Go or no-go? The decision might well be taken out of his hands at any second. The boat dropped into a kind of watery chuckhole, bounced up again. Nick swayed on his feet, felt spray on his face. The Evinrude whined in protest. Ahead the water looked choppy.

“Can you see…?” he asked Jason.

Jason shrugged. “Looks clear.”

“Right.” He pushed the throttle forward. He didn’t want to barrel through at high speed, but he wanted enough momentum to get himself out of any trouble he might run into.

The river jostled the boat, slapping at its chine. Nick blinked spray from his eyes, then opened them wide as the river yawned before him and flashed its teeth of white.

The boat pitched down, and Nick dropped abruptly into his seat. The propeller shrieked as the stern flew up into the air. Nick could feel himself flying. Ahead he could see nothing but a wall of foaming water. By his side, he heard Jason give a surprised yelp.

The boat smashed into the water, and the impact threw Nick forward onto the wheel. The boat buried its foredeck in the Mississippi, then surged sluggishly upward as water poured aft. A wave climbed the windscreen and hit Nick full in the face. The propeller dropped into water, caught, and threw the boat forward as water sloshed toward the stern.

Something smashed against the stern of the boat, and without even looking Nick knew what it was.

“Untie the bass boat!” he shouted. He didn’t want it climbing in the cockpit with him. Nick caught a glimpse of a tangled thorn-hedge of foaming tree roots ahead, and calmer water to the right: he spun the wheel, threw the throttle forward. The boat slewed, banged on hard water as if it were a brick wall, then surged past the slashing roots with room to spare. Something bright and metallic loomed ahead—it might have been a grain silo that had lost its roof, or a gasoline storage tank—and Nick cranked the wheel in the other direction.

“Bass boat’s untied!” Jason yelled.

American Dream smashed into the metal obstruction broadside, and then the propeller dug in and the speedboat leaped ahead. The sound of rushing water was loud, but not as loud as the pulse that beat in Nick’s ears. Through the gleaming diamonds of spray on the windscreen, Nick saw another obstruction ahead—he cranked the wheel, felt the boat respond. A tree-root tangle swept past, then another. Then Nick was weightless again as the boat launched itself over a waterfall before pancaking onto the water with a hollow boom.

The timber dam hadn’t just broken open, it had scattered bits of itself downstream, obstacles like tiger teeth waiting to impale the unwary. The water didn’t pour through in a stream, it leaped down in stages, like a rapid.

Nick slalomed through the obstacles, his confidence growing as the boat responded to his commands. And then he was clear, the Mississippi opening up before him, choked with floating wreckage but still perfectly navigable. He laughed, turned to Jason.

The boy looked at him, eyes wide. “My God, Nick!” he said.

Nick grinned at him. “Glad we waited till it was safe, huh?” he said. He pointed. “And look there!” The bass boat bobbed in the current, scarred and glittering with spray but still defiantly afloat. Nick pulled the speedboat alongside, and Jason caught the bass boat’s trailing towline with a boathook and then tied it astern of American Dream.

Nick looked out at the river through the spray-bedecked windscreen. He reached for the throttle and pushed it forward. The boat’s bow rose high as the Evinrude bellowed. Arlette, he thought, I’m on my way.

Larry stood above the holding pond in the auxiliary building. His boots were planted on the fuel handling machine that was used to shift fuel assemblies within the holding pond—in essence a giant overhead crane that ran on tracks, like the one in the reactor containment building but less robust. The machine had suffered considerable damage when the roof had fallen on it during M1, and putting it into working order had been one of Larry’s greatest priorities.

Replacement parts had been a problem. Machines of this sort were intended to last decades, longer than the nuclear facility itself, and for that reason spare parts were not readily available, and such as had been available were stored in buildings destroyed by the quake and then flooded. Larry missed Poinsett Landing’s huge machine shops, which could probably have scratch-built a Saturn V moon rocket, let alone parts for a big crane. In the end the parts were scavenged from other nuclear facilities and installed by Larry, Jameel, and Meg Tarlton. Power was provided to the system by a generator warped alongside the auxiliary building in a barge. Now the three of them stood on the machine’s control platform, looking at the kludged-together control panel—part of which consisted of switches set into a raw-looking piece of plywood—and were ready to give the system its first test.

Larry raised his walkie-talkie to his lips, then paused while a helicopter thundered overhead. He caught a glimpse, through the open roof of the auxiliary building, of an Army Super Jolly helicopter with a load of earthquake debris.

The island that Larry had recommended be built around Poinsett Landing was rapidly taking shape, a steel, stone, and concrete ship’s prow pointing upstream into the river. After the helicopter crews had a chance to practice their aim, and demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction that they weren’t about to drop a ten-ton load on plant workers, Larry and his people had been allowed back into the building. Larry waited for the helicopter sound to recede, then pressed the handset trigger. “Power up!”

“Power up, Mr. Hallock,” the answer fizzed out of the speakers.

Elsewhere in the building, huge circuit-breakers were thrown. Lights gleamed on the control panel. Larry felt himself tense, waiting for the short, the pop of a fuse, the fizz of a misinstalled control system. Dim pain throbbed in his broken collarbone, and he rubbed the broken bone absently. It almost never bothered him unless he was under physical tension.

Nothing. No disaster. Larry’s breathing eased.

“Just take her forward and back,” he said.

Jameel approached the control panel, flicked switches, pressed a lever. With a hum of electric motors, the crane began smoothly moving forward along its tracks. He braked, then moved the crane back the way it had come.

“Nice,” Larry said. “Now traverse the turret.”

Larry leaned over the rail to peer at what he could see of the turret on the bottom of the crane, which was intended to traverse left and right so as to be able to drop the grab into any of the fuel storage racks in the storage pond. Another set of electric motors hummed. He saw the turret rotate, the grab on the end of its distended snout tracking past his field of view.

“Works fine,” he said. “Swing it t’other way.”

He waited for the snout to traverse into his field of vision, then called to Jameel to halt.

“Drop the grab,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The grab was like a metal claw on the end of the machine’s double chain. It was spring-activated so as to snatch a fuel assembly from its rack on contact, and would not disengage as long as the weight of a fuel assembly was detected at the end of the chain.

Jameel took hold of a lever screwed to the plywood control board and gave it a nudge. The bright stainless steel double chain clanked as it rolled out of the turret, the heavy grab swaying only slightly as it dropped to the water below. The Mississippi water in the holding pond lacked the brilliant clarity of the demineralized water that normally filled this space—the mud had mostly settled to the bottom, but its dark presence reflected little light and made it difficult to see into the water. We’re going to have to put a lot of floodlights down there, Larry thought. Otherwise we won’t be able to see a dang thing. The grab smoothly entered the water, the chain unrolling above it. “Stop!” Larry called. He didn’t want to grab a fuel assembly by accident. He didn’t have anyplace to put it. There was a tremor, a rattle of roof panels, and Larry realized an aftershock was hammering the building. Larry’s heart kicked into a higher rhythm as he felt the crane sway on its tall platform, and he backed hastily away from the rail he’d been hanging over.

The remaining roof beams and panels creaked. Fortunately, Larry noticed, he and the crane were under open sky.

The aftershock stopped. Meg gave a nervous laugh. Larry waited a few moments to see if it would begin again, then gingerly approached the end of the platform and looked down at the grab on the end of its chain.

“Bring ’er back up,” he said.

Jameel stopped the chain, then threw another lever. There was a brief electronic hum from the winch motors, and then a hiss and a pop as one of the control panel fuses blew. Jameel jumped back from the control panel as if stung, then gave a nervous chuckle at his overreaction.

“Cut power!” Larry bawled into his handset.

Lights on the control panel died. Meg was already down on one knee, reaching for her tool box. “Just a short, Mr. Hallock,” she said. “I’ll have that fixed in a jiff.” While Meg and Jameel worked on the board, Larry took off his glasses and rubbed his aching eyes. There seemed no end to the problems. Solving one just meant another reared its ugly head. The fuel handling machine was normally computer controlled, but the computer that did the job was now under the surface of the Mississippi. Control would have to be by hand and by eye, and that was going to result in awkwardness and lengthy delays in extracting over 1000 tons of nuclear waste from the pond. Lost also were the records of exactly which fuel assemblies had been racked in which place, both those on computer file and the paper hardcopy, which had been stored in a destroyed building. Larry had no records that told him which of the rods in the pond below were the old safe ones, and which the new hot ones. He was going to have to drop radiation detectors into the pond on the end of a line to find out, and that was going to produce results that were messy and had a high degree of inaccuracy. One problem after another, he repeated to himself. You’ve only got to solve one problem at a time. At one time, he thought, that had seemed like a good thing.

TWENTY-THREE

When the trees opened up again to show the big white frame house on its little green mound, Nick was taken completely by surprise. His heart turned cartwheels.

“We’re there,” he said, and his voice seemed unbelieving even to himself. They had gone up the White River—flooded, filled with more debris even than the Mississippi—then spent a night on Lopez Bayou. He had tried to keep track, by dead reckoning, of how far they had come, but he knew that his estimates had to be wildly out of true. He was more surprised than anyone when a stretch of water opened up just where he expected Toussaint Bayou to be. They hadn’t seen a soul the entire trip to Toussaint. Some flooded cotton fields, some abandoned farmhouses fallen into the flood, but no sign of a living human being.

Jason, in the other seat, turned to look at the big house with interest. Nick spun the wheel, aimed for the house.

One of the big oaks that shaded the house had fallen, he saw, but someone had turned the timber into a neatly piled stack of lumber. The windows had lost their glass, and the two brick chimneys had fallen. There had been some hasty repairs to the roof with plastic sheeting and mismatched shingles. Some of the outbuildings had collapsed into the flood. But the house itself was intact, and the sight of it made Nick want to laugh out loud.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jason said. “What’s a Gros-Papa? If I meet him, I should know what it means, right?”

“It’s French,” Nick said. “It means Big Daddy. It’s a name they have down here for grandfather.” And then he added, “Tennessee Williams had a Big Daddy in one of his plays. I don’t remember which one.” Nick cut the motor and ran the boat up onto the green slope below the house, then ran forward, tossed the mushroom anchor onto the grass so the boat wouldn’t float away again, then jumped to solid ground. He held the prow steady while Jason jumped ashore, then realized he was staring at the boy with a silly smile, just a dumb happy guy standing on green grass in the sun, like any idiot about to see his daughter for the first time in months, and then he shook his head and started for the house at a brisk walk. They approached the back of the house across a grassy plateau, walking toward the kitchen door. The town of Toussaint, such as it was, was on the other side of the house, and Toussaint Bayou curved around to meet it. The only sign of the town visible from where Nick walked was the water tower. A rooster crowed from one of the outbuildings. Chickens scurried away from their approach.

“This is an old Indian mound,” Nick said. “They built this house up here over a hundred years ago to keep above the floods, but they didn’t know the mound was artificial until some archaeologists came up here in the fifties.”

“There was a mound where we lived in Missouri,” Jason said, and then an expression of loss crossed his face, and he fell silent.

Nick put his arm around the boy and walked with him through the grass, through the old shade oaks, to the kitchen door. The back windows had lost their glass, but screens were in place to keep out insects. The kitchen door, he saw, was open and the screen slightly ajar. Someone was home. He wanted to sing.

“Hello?” He opened the screen door and rapped on the frame. When no one answered, he stepped inside the big kitchen with its tall old wooden cabinets and its large modern range, and suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull. There was horror here. Somehow he knew it—there was a smell in the house, or a peculiar, ominous brand of silence, or some kind of spectral, psychic echo of terror…

Whatever it was, he’d felt it once before. In Helena.

He put a hand on Jason’s chest as the boy was about to step into the kitchen, and held him back. “Stay here,” he said. The boy’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension and alarm, and he stepped backward, out of the doorway. Silently, carefully, Nick closed the screen door.

He could hear the buzzing of flies in the next room. If anything had happened to Arlette, he felt, his heart would tear open like the ground had torn in the quake, and he would die on the spot. His nerves tingled as he walked past the big butcher-block kitchen table to the arched doorway that led to the dining room. There, by the dining table, he found Penelope, Gros-Papa’s younger half-sister, who had moved into the house to look after him after his wife died. She had been shot several times in the back. She had her apron on when she died.

Gros-Papa lay in the front parlor, all three hundred pounds of him, in the jacket and tie he wore even on informal occasions. His silver-rimmed glasses were perched firmly on his stern nose. Shot in the chest. The watch chain he wore across his big stomach was gone and, Nick presumed, the watch with it, the watch that played “Claire de Lune” when you opened it.

Nick went to the gun cabinet in Gros-Papa’s study, but the guns had all been taken. The drawers of the desk and file cabinets had been opened, and their contents strewn on the floor. Gros-Papa’s second son Gilly—short for Guillaume—was on the stair, as if he’d tried to run upstairs and been shot as he fled. Near misses had punched holes in the wall above the stair and knocked down a small watercolor that someone had made of the house a hundred years ago.

Nick’s head swam. He hadn’t really dared to breathe since he’d entered the house. He forced himself to take in a breath, and then he searched the house for Arlette and her mother. He went to Arlette’s room first, found the closets ransacked, the drawers emptied. The scent of his daughter still hung in the room. His own image, a photo of Nick, gazed up at him from its frame.

The other rooms had been looted as well. Jewelry was gone, and probably money. Nick found no living persons, no additional bodies. Arlette and Manon and the others of the household were gone. They’d evacuated, then. Got away before this had happened. Relief sang through Nick’s blood. But the relief died as a horrifying thought rose in his mind.

Where had the killers come from? Arlette and her family were moving down the bayou by boat, toward the White River and the Arkansas. They had probably left sometime yesterday. If the killers had been coming up the White, they would have encountered the David family, and the encounter might well have been violent. But Nick and Jason had seen no sign of any violent encounter, or any encounter at all. Which meant that the killers were coming down the bayou, traveling on Arlette’s heels, possibly only a few hours behind. They hadn’t turned down the White, because otherwise they would have met Jason and Nick. So that meant they had gone upriver, right on Arlette’s trail…

He felt his lips peeling back from his teeth in a snarl. No. He would find the killers before they could find Arlette, and do what was necessary.

Nick went down the stair, avoiding Gilly’s body, and then crouched for a moment next to Gros-Papa. He steeled himself, then reached out and touched the old man’s large dead hand. Cool to the touch. He took the hand in his fingers and tried to raise it, but there was still a faint stiffness in the corpse: the rigor not yet passed. The death had been fairly recent, maybe last night.

Nick straightened, felt his head swim, then walked carefully back to the kitchen. Light glared in from the screen door. He paused by the butcher-block table for a moment, tried to clear his head and decide what he needed to do, and then he looked down and saw the envelope that rested on the table. The word Daddy was written on the back in Arlette’s hand.

Much of his burden of dread fell instantly away. He felt physically lighter, as if someone had removed a burden from his shoulders.

Arlette had left him a message, and if she’d done that she wouldn’t have been herded away at gunpoint. He picked up the envelope and headed out the screen door.

Jason stood in the shade of one of the oaks, pale and nervous. His lips were blue as if he’d been standing up to his neck in cold water. “What happened?”

“Three people killed,” Nick said. And then, in answer to the question he saw in the boy’s horrified eyes, he added, “Not Arlette. Not Manon. They must have left before it happened.”

“Is it gas again?” Jason asked. “Poison or something?”

Nick’s fingers trembled as he opened the unsealed envelope. He shook his head. “They were shot. Robbers.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Jason said. “Jesus, Nick, I’m sorry.”

Nick’s fingers were trembling so hard he couldn’t manage to get the paper out of the envelope. He paused, took a breath, pressed his hands together with the envelope between them. Then tried again, and succeeded. His daughter’s round, exuberant script opened before him like a flower. Daddy,

I am sorry but we have to leave. The phone exchange was flooded and I couldn’t call you to let you know, and the water plant is flooded too and the water is not safe to drink. We are going in boats to Pine Bluff and I am drawing you a map.

I love you and I hope to see you soon. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe. Love, your daughter.

Below the words were a row of hearts and then the map, which looked as if it had been traced off a highway map. Nick crushed the paper to his face, inhaled the scent of paper and ink and, maybe, Arlette. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe. It was up to Nick to make certain that remained true.

“Come on,” he told Jason, “we have to hurry.” And he began walking off before Jason began asking questions.

Nick didn’t want to leave the bodies unburied, to leave the house open. But his duty was to the living, and every moment might count.

There was decay in Toussaint’s general store, and for a moment Nick felt faint, expecting more bodies. But then he realized that the smell was coming from dead minnows in the galvanized bait tanks that lined one side of the store. The bayou hadn’t reached high enough to wash the minnows out. Toussaint consisted of about a dozen buildings grouped around a crossroads, most of them owned by the David family. People’s farms and private residences spread for miles up and down the roads, and they all gave “Toussaint” as their address, but what passed for the village itself was tiny. It was tinier now than it had been. The brick office building had been wrecked, along with its post office, and so had the brick filling station. The David family, who between them owned all these properties, had taken a couple big hits.

The general store had come off its foundations in the quake and had collapsed to one side. The roof sagged. Clapboards and shingles were missing. The flood had risen to the middle of the doorframe. Nick tied the boat to one of the supports of the sagging porch, then dropped into the cool water. He felt ahead with his feet as he carefully made his way into the store’s interior.

When he returned he was armed with weapons that had been stored high above the flood. He had a Winchester Model 94 lever-action 30-30, a pump shotgun, and a couple of revolvers, a pair of .38s, one large and one small. He hadn’t handled firearms since he’d left high school, and they felt heavier than he’d remembered, solid and purposeful. The weight of them in his hands didn’t make him nervous, but he found they didn’t give him an increased sense of security, either.

In a rucksack he carried boxes of ammunition, holsters for the pistols, a cleaning kit, and a sling for the rifle. Holding all this over his head, he waded back to the front porch and put it all on the speedboat’s foredeck.

Jason looked down at the pile of weaponry with a stunned expression, as if he was trying to work out what horrible, apocalyptic movie scenario he’d just wandered into. “Jeez,” he said. Nick hoisted himself onto the boat. Water sluiced from his soaked clothing. “Can you take the boat down the bayou?” he asked. “Back the way we came? I’ve got to sort out these guns.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Nick untied the boat and then carried his gear into the cockpit. He loaded the larger of the two pistols, put it in the holster, and clipped the holster to his belt in the back. He practiced drawing it a few times, but he saw Jason looking at him, and he quit. It’s not like he was going to turn himself into a gunfighter overnight.

He worked the action of the rifle, dry-fired it a few times, then loaded it and the shotgun, leaving the chamber empty in each instance so that the gun couldn’t fire accidentally. He left the long guns on one of the bench seats that ran the length of the cockpit, then moved forward to sit in the bucket seat next to Jason.

“Have you ever used firearms?” he asked.

“No. My parents just didn’t—don’t—have them around. Muppet and I were going to go shooting over the levee when the water dropped but—” Jason swallowed. “We never got to it.”

“In that case, I don’t want you touching the guns.”

“No problem.”

“I really don’t want you touching them.”

“Okay!” Jason said, his voice loud over the roaring engine.

“I need to confirm this, Jason. Because your record at following orders isn’t very good.” Jason glared at him, his cheeks reddening. “I won’t touch your guns, okay?” Nick took a long breath. Maybe his insistence on this would just make Jason mess with the guns out of sheer contrariness, but he thought he needed to make his point. “Maybe I can teach you how to use them when we get the time,” he said, conciliating, “but until then I want you to take this very seriously.” Jason nodded again. Then he turned to Nick and said, “What are we doing, exactly?” he said. “Are you trying to get into a fight or something?”

Nick looked at Jason in surprise. He had been so absorbed in his own grim thoughts that he hadn’t considered how this would look to the boy. Finding his in-laws murdered, loading the boat with guns, then heading down the bayou, all without a word of explanation.

Jason probably thought that Nick was involved in some kind of gang war and bent on vengeance.

“No,” Nick said. “No, not at all. I’m trying to get to Arlette and her family, and protect them from the robbers who killed her relations. Those robbers might still be around, and I don’t want Arlette to be without help.”

A look of relief crossed Jason’s face. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

“Good.”

Jason looked ahead and steered the boat around a tangle of cypress trees that the quake had cut off just above water level.

“Faster,” Nick said, and Jason looked surprised again. “We need to go faster.” They found the place where Toussaint Bayou opened out onto Lopez Bayou, then instead of turning left, to retrace their path, they turned right, following Arlette’s map. Nick kept wanting Jason to go faster. Jason didn’t mind: he liked standing in the cockpit as he boomed up the quiet bayou, scattering ducks and herons and sending the boat’s big wake surging out among the trees.

Nick was nervous and had a hard time sitting still in the passenger seat, and eventually he took over the driving.

Jason went to the back of the boat and ate his lunch out of cans, and looked thoughtfully at the guns that sat on the bench seat opposite his own.

In the movies, he thought, there were a number of things that happened during every big disaster. And one of these involved some bad people with Really Great Hair, who, the very first thing broke into biker stores and stole all the cool leathers. And then they got some guns and some wheels and went on a general rampage until the good guy chilled them out in the last reel.

Something like those bad guys had happened to Nick’s in-laws. The cinematic prophecy seemed to be coming true.

Jason looked at the guns and wondered if Nick was the hero who was destined to destroy the bad guys at the end.

No, he thought. He knew who he and Nick would play in the movies. We’re the bad guys’ victims, he thought. The people the bad guys kill on their way to dying at the hands of the hero. That’s who they were. Corpses.

He turned away from the guns and looked ahead, at the still, silent bayou ahead. He didn’t want to think about the guns anymore.

It proved fairly easy going up the bayou. The obstructions had been cleared away by chainsaws and axes, presumably by the David party, and for the most part this left a channel wide enough to take their craft upstream. On occasion Jason was called to shove some piece of wreckage out of the way, and Nick tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the obstacle was clear and he could gun the engine ahead.

By late afternoon they came to a two-lane road that dead-ended on the bayou. This, Nick said, was where the David party had turned south, and turned south himself.

The road was narrower than the bayou, and choked with debris. Some of the debris had been cleared by the Davids, but some had just been shoved aside and drifted back, and other debris had floated into place since the Davids had passed. The road, though flooded, was elevated several feet above the surrounding country, and Nick tilted the Evinrude forward to keep the propeller from striking the roadway.

It was hard going. Jason stood on the foredeck and tried to clear away the obstructions with his pole. Within minutes he was bathed in sweat. Nick detoured off the roadway and around the obstructions where possible, but often this just led them into dead ends, or areas where the trees were too thick to permit passage.

When Jason was exhausted, Nick took his place on the foredeck, and Jason steered. The sun was far to the west when they came to a debris field, hundreds of tree trunks piled over and across each other into a huge lumber raft that stretched as far as they could see. It looked as if a thousand beavers had labored on the dam for a thousand years. There was no way through the mass, and no indication that anyone had ever tried.

Nick looked at the obstruction in despair. “Did they go around?” he asked. “Or did they turn back?” Jason looked left and right in the fading light. “Let’s see if we can go around.” They tried, but every attempt to leave the roadway was blocked, either by falling or standing timber. It didn’t look as if anyone had tried to get through.

“Where did they go?” Nick moaned. Shiny cables stood out on his neck, and sweat made big blotches on his T-shirt. “Where did they go?”

“They had to have turned back from here,” Jason said. “They probably went farther up Lopez Bayou, then tried to cut south on another road.”

Nick bit his lip. “If they’d gone the other way, to the White, we’d have run into them,” he said.

“Right.”

“Turn the boat around, then.” Anger entered his voice. “We’ve wasted the whole day.”

“It’s getting dark, Nick.”

“Just go!”

The return journey began. Jason turned the boat around, banging into the trailing bass boat in the narrow passage, and crept forward toward the first obstacles. Nick stabbed furiously with his pole at the floating debris until it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore.

“Flashlight!” he called. “Give me a flashlight!”

Jason passed forward one of the two flashlights. They kept going down the roadway, while Nick juggled his pole and the flashlight. Jason could hear Nick cursing under his breath as the bow ground against debris. Finally Jason saw Nick’s shoulders sag in the fading light of the flash.

“God damn it!” Nick jabbed at a floating tree trunk as if it were an enemy to be impaled on his spear.

“This is useless!”

Jason said nothing. Nick’s pole clattered on the foredeck.

“Eat,” Nick said. “Sleep. We’ll get an early start at first light.” Nick stalked aft, the flashlight reflecting the fury in his eyes. Jason pulled the bass boat up close and climbed aboard to get access to the stores.

When he had stowed away, Jason thought, he’d expected to spend the summer in some big farmhouse, with Nick’s daughter and in-laws. Instead he’d been thrown back into the river again, and he was trapped on a small boat, in a dead-end waterway, with a heavily armed man who was in a bad mood. To put the icing on the cake, there were a bunch of murderers loose in the area. It occurred to Jason that leaving the Beluthahatchie might not have been the smartest thing he’d ever done.

After their meal Nick didn’t insist they continue their journey to the bayou, but he was too agitated to sleep. He paced up and down the short length of the cabin, pausing occasionally to pick up one of his guns or drum his hands on the steering wheel.

Eventually exhaustion claimed Jason, and he fell asleep despite Nick’s restlessness. He woke with a full bladder hours later. Nick was asleep on the bench seat opposite. Jason rose stiffly from his bed, stepped aft, leaned against the fiberglass hull, and relieved himself into the water. He looked up and saw past the overhanging branches of the trees the stars wheeling overhead. He looked for M13—a million stars—and found the cluster easily enough, a bright smudge against the hard, brilliant light of the stars. Twenty-five thousand light-years away. No matter what happened here—no matter what catastrophes, horrors, anguish—whatever lived in M13 wouldn’t know about it for twenty-five thousand years, not even if they were interested.

He finished and zipped his pants, but he still stood gazing skyward, looking into the silent beyond. And then the night’s darkness faded. Suddenly the entire country began to glow, as if hidden floodlights had suddenly switched on, bathing the still waters and the trunks of the trees in golden radiance. The suddenness and silence of this ghostly flourishing was breathtaking.

“Nick!” Jason called. “Look!”

“Wha?” came Nick’s sleepy voice.

“Look!” Jason could see leaves outlined perfectly in the glow, the patterns on tree bark, the vines coiling up the trunks.

“Oh my God,” Nick breathed in awe.

And then the quake struck, and the world again turned dark.

A roar filled the air like the earth moaning in pain. Spray spilled into the boat as the water turned white around them. The air filled with leaves and twigs. Debris ground against the hull, and Jason fell, heart hammering, into the bench seat next to him.

“Get into cover!” He heard Nick shout, but all he could do was cling to the side of the boat as it leaped up and down to the music of the quake. Tearing sounds filled the air as tree limbs began to crack and fall. Nick’s strong hand grabbed Jason by the arm and pulled, and suddenly Jason was able to move. He crawled forward, past the driver’s seat, and wormed into the damp space below the foredeck. Nick crawled in after him. A falling limb dropped onto the bulwark where Jason had been lying, then ground against the hull as it slid into the water.

“It’s a bad one!” Nick shouted in his ear. Jason knew that already. Jason clamped his eyes shut. The boat vibrated, banging up and down on water that seemed hard as concrete. His inner ear spun as the boat slewed to the push of the water. He could feel his teeth chattering.

Something heavy mashed the boat’s canvas top, and he gave a cry at the thought of being killed here, in the darkness. The cold waters pouring in as he struggled, trapped, in the close little space under the forepeak. He gulped down a sudden flood of stomach acid that had poured into his throat.

“It’s okay!” Nick chanted. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay!” But Jason knew it was pretty clearly not okay. He heard the shriek of wood as a tree limb tore free, and then the limb thundered off the gunwale as it splashed into the water next to the boat. The boat tilted alarmingly to port. Jason gave a shout as Nick rolled onto him, squeezing the breath from his lungs.

“It’s okay!” Nick said. “It’s okay!” The boat righted itself, and Nick’s weight fell away.

“It’s okay!” Nick said.

Jason bit his knuckle to keep from screaming.

The earth roared on, and the boat danced to its anguished tune.

TWENTY-FOUR

Captain Jean-Joseph Malraux hummed Bernard Herrman’s theme music to the film Jason and the Argonauts as he steered Beluthahatchie down the channel of the Ohio River. The pilothouse was dark around him except for the glow of the instruments. The lights of Bay City were falling astern, and the mass of the Shawnee National Forest loomed dark and silent off to port. Joe kept one eye cocked on the depth indicator as he steered, making certain not to run onto any more unexpected sandbanks looming out of the river’s channel.

His company had given him permission to moor his tow of fifteen barges to the St. Francis revetment, where it could be picked up when the river was safer, and so he had only the fast and highly maneuverable Beluthahatchie to worry about. He was happy to be out of the Mississippi with its shifting channel, its hidden reefs, and its masses of saw-toothed debris. The Ohio was in bad shape as well, with the bridge at Cairo lacking a span and Locks and Dams No. 52 and 53 both broken. But the Corps of Engineers had been clearing the wreckage, the river was high enough so that the dams weren’t necessary to keep the channel full, and all the wreckage was heading to where Joe had been, to the Mississippi. And now that he was above the intact Smithfield Lock and Dam, the Ohio was smooth sailing. The worst part of the last two days, though, had been calling Frank Adams on the marine band to tell him that his kid had gone missing. Frank had reamed him up one side and down the other. He had used language that would make a longshoreman blush, as Joe, who had known plenty of long-shoremen in his time, could testify.

And then, when Joe had refused Frank’s demand to turn his boat around and head back to conduct a search for his missing son, Frank’s language had grown even more violent, and Joe’s temper had finally snapped, and he’d given Frank the company’s phone number, and told him that the company had lawyers who were paid to take that kind of abuse.

Joe felt kind of bad about that. Frank had just been looking for someone to blame, which was understandable enough.

But it wasn’t Joe’s fault. He had looked after Nick and Jase as well as he could. It wasn’t his fault that they had left Beluthahatchie. And damned if he was going to let some Los Angeles shyster tell him that it was.

Cincinnati, he thought hopefully, in the morning. And then a lot of downtime, while barge traffic languished and the Mississippi was made safe again. Time in which Captain Joe would probably not be employed.

At least it would give him a chance to get his video collection in order.

Bernard Herrman kettledrums boomed through his mind. He pictured the Argonauts’ galley moving up the river, drums beating time to the oars, while invisible gods and goddesses bickered overhead. The door to the pilothouse opened, and his bowman came in. “Coffee, skip. And some beignets.”

“Thanks,” Joe said. He had barely slept in the two days since Beluthahatchie had got off its sandbar in the Lower Mississippi. He was the only crewman aboard certified by the Coast Guard, and he wanted to be on hand at every moment of the treacherous passage.

The bowman, who shared his watch, dropped the coffee cup into its waiting holder, and put the plate of beignets within Joe’s reach. Joe reached for one of the beignets, but they were fresh from the deep-fryer and burned his fingers. He dropped the beignet and licked confectioner’s sugar from his fingers. And then the water began to dance around him, thousands of little wave-crests criss-crossing the river’s still surface in the light of Beluthahatchie’s floodlights. He could feel a trembling run through the towboat, shiver through the wheel beneath his fingers. To port and starboard, whole forests waved madly in the darkness.

“Aftershock,” he said to his bowman. He had seen this before.

But the aftershock didn’t die. Instead the wave peaks grew taller, and Joe could see foam forming in streaks along the surface. The vibration increased. The plate of beignets threatened to slide onto the floor, and Joe’s heart beat like the Argonauts’ kettledrums. His hand hovered over the engine throttles, but he didn’t know whether it would be safer to throttle up or down, so he decided not to make a change.

“Go get the other watch,” he told the bowman. “I want as many pair of eyes up here as possible.” The aftershock could stir up all kinds of crap in the channel.

The bowman nodded and left the pilothouse in a hurry. Spray bounded over Beluthahatchie’s blunt bow. And then the pilothouse door slammed, and the bowman was back, his eyes wild.

“Big wave!” he shouted, one finger pointing aft. “Just behind us!” Joe’s hand slammed the throttles forward before he looked over his shoulder. The turbines roared to a higher pitch as Joe craned his neck aft, searching the leaping water for sign of the overtaking wave. Joe’s heart gave a lurch. There it was, a big black wall moving across the leaping, foam-flecked water. It had to be at least fifteen feet high, and it was about to climb right up Beluthathatchie’s ass. Tsunami. The great sea-wave caused by an earthquake.

Joe had never heard of a tsunami on a river before.

“Sound the collision alert!” Joe yelled. He didn’t want to take his hands off the controls, but the off-duty watch needed to be ready for what was going to hit them. The other watch, plus any other human being within hearing distance of the signal.

The bowman threw himself across the pilothouse and the alarm blared out. White water boiled under Beluthahatchie’s counter as the turbines redlined. Joe peered at the great wave rising astern, tried to judge its speed relative to the boat.

Still overtaking. Damn it.

The bridge telephone rang. The off-duty watch, trying to find out what was happening.

“Answer that!” Joe snapped. Calculations leaped through his mind. If the wave rolled over the towboat’s stern, it could sweep Beluthahatchie from stern to stem, bury it beneath tons of water. The boat might survive that, he reckoned, or it might not. And if the wave caught the boat broadside, Beluthahatchie would almost certainly capsize.

There was one possible escape, Joe thought. And that was to keep forward of the crest, by using the wave’s own power.

He gripped the wheel with one hand, the throttles with the other. The bowman, shouting into the bridge telephone, was looking aft with eyes wide as saucers. “Hoo-aaah!” Joe shouted in a voice intended to be heard on the other end of the telephone. ” Hang on! We goin’ surfing, podnah!” Joe pulled the throttles back, saw the wave loom closer. He let it come till he felt the wave just begin to lift Beluthahatchie’s stern, then throttled forward again. Turbines shrieked. The boat rose, and Joe felt a flutter in his stomach, panic rising in his throat.

Joe throttled way back. The boat continued to lift. The foaming curl at the wave top loomed closer, then stopped, hanging over the stern. Exultation screamed through Joe’s veins.

“Yeeow! Hang ten, baby!”

He adjusted the throttles so that he was neither climbing the face of the wave, nor dropping forward. The power of the wave itself was doing most of the work.

Joe’s inner ear swam. There was a sense of movement swirling on the other side of the pilothouse windows, and Joe felt panic burn along his nerves. He threw the wheel over, shoved the throttles forward. The boat straightened.

Joe took a gasping breath. He had almost lost the boat. If he’d let the wave push him to one side or the other, he’d have swung broadside to the wave and been rolled under.

Debris boomed on the bottom of the hull. The boat swayed: Joe corrected. The bowman was standing in the pilothouse staring aft, his knuckles clenched around the telephone.

“Put that down and call the Coast Guard!” Joe said. “Tell them we got a tsunami on the Ohio heading for Golconda! Move it, there, podnah!”

The bowman lunged for the radio. Joe’s head lashed back and forth, peering behind to make certain the tsunami wasn’t about to fall on them, staring forward into the night to see if the wave was going to run them right onto an island.

“Careful baby baby careful just a little more a little more juice gawdamn…” Words burbled from his lips in accompaniment to his thought. The blackness off the port bow was broken by light. Joe peered at it, trying to make certain the light wasn’t a reflection on the pilothouse glass… Golconda. Already. He didn’t dare think about how fast they were going. Whoah. He juiced the throttle, swung the boat to starboard. He’d almost lost it there. And if that was Golconda, he thought, that meant he was coming up on a big island that sat smack in the middle of the river. And if he made it past the island, the river was going to make a sweeping ninety-degree curve to the right, and that meant the big wave was going to get complicated… Adrenaline screamed through his veins. He goosed the throttle, shaved the wheel just a little. Joe wanted to steer down the face of the wave, moving laterally to port as the wave kept rolling down the channel. He needed to get well clear of that island before he impaled the boat on it…

“Whoah whoah whoah you cochon just a little baby there you go…” He was inside the wave’s curl, heading slantwise down the wave. Golconda was dead ahead. Now if he could just head the boat a little to port, get it moving straight again…

“There you go baby there you go aiaaah surfin’ USA careful there goose her yaaah…” The boat swayed, the wave crest looming on over her, and then Beluthahatchie leaped down the wave, picking up speed. Joe’s laugh boomed in the pilothouse.

Golconda was past and the island flashed up to starboard. Joe heard the grinding, grating, booming noise as the tsunami pounded over the island, ripping it and its timber to shreds.

“Roi de la riviere! C’est moil” Joe felt like pounding his chest in triumph. The island caused the wave to lose cohesion, caused ripples and back-eddies to build under the crest. Joe twitched the wheel and throttles to keep Beluthahatchie on course. And then the island was astern, and the tsunami shuddered as it met its twin, the wave that had creamed along the Kentucky side of the island. Joe felt sweat popping on his forehead as the boat surged beneath him.

“Yah, baby, roi de la riviere! Surf’s up!”

He tried to decide what to do about the upcoming bend. He didn’t want to be where he was, near the north bank of the river, when the river turned to the right—he would get caught between the bank and the tsunami and pounded to bits against the timber in the floodplain. So what he needed to do was cross over the front of the wave again and get as close to the south bank as he could…

“Here we go here we go on t’udder side…”

He was traveling along the front of the wave again, the turbines carrying him to starboard, white water creaming behind. The wave’s curl hung overhead, looming over them like a white-fanged monster about to drop on them from above.

“Skip! What are you doing?” the bowman demanded, staring at the curl in horror.

“Hang on podnah.” Joe skated right across the front of the wave, speed building. Then he turned the wheel, got the wave behind him, felt the boat lift…

He could see the silver surface of the water curving to the right. Damn they were going fast. Water boiled white to port as the tsunami slammed into the outer bank of the river bend. There was a rending, crashing, as if the wave was trying to tear the riverbed itself from the earth. But the part of the wave pushing Beluthahatchie seemed to be speeding up, going faster as it skiddered around the inside of the river bend. The boat swerved violently, and Joe steadied it just in time, a bellow of terror and exultation rising in his throat.

The roar to port continued. Joe worked the throttles. “Yah baby you go papa say you go…” The wave kept going, rolling across the curving river to smash into the north bank in a fountain of white foam. Trees went down like ranks of soldiers before machine-gun fire. But Beluthahatchie was flung away, across the river’s inner curve and into the calmer upper river, like a watermelon seed squeezed between the fingertips.

Joe throttled up, intending to get clear of the turbulent water behind him and the reduced reflection of the tsunami as it bounced off the north bank. He looked into the terrified eyes of his bowman and gave a wild laugh.

“The Argonauts ain’t got nothin’ on me!” he shouted, and reached for the horn button so that Beluthahatchie could trumpet his joy, send the sound ringing from Kentucky to Indiana and back again, the triumphant cry of the old river man who has beaten the elements, and is bringing his boat safely home…

As soon as the first jolt wakened her from sleep, Jessica was moving. She wasn’t sure whether she’d rolled off her cot as she intended, or whether the tremblers kicked the cot out from under her. No sooner had she landed than the ground rose and punched her in the ribs. She reached blindly for the helmet she’d placed on the ground by the cot, felt it under her fingers, and jammed it on her head. And then pain rocketed through her skull as something lunged under her helmet rim and smacked her in the eye. Sparks shot through her vision. She lay back, stunned, the helmet partly fallen from her head. There was a strange corkscrew motion to the earth this time, something that she didn’t remember from the last big quake, and nausea rose in her throat.

Arms came around her. She felt herself being drawn protectively against Pat’s shoulder. That hadn’t happened in the last quake, either. She huddled against him like a soldier in a bombardment sheltering against a basement wall.

The earth roared like a wounded bull. Pain throbbed through Jessica’s injured eye with every shudder. She heard cracking and snapping sounds, and then rough canvas covered them like a blanket. Their sleeping tent had come down around them.

Which was not unexpected. Though her home had come through the first big quake reasonably intact, she had slept under canvas every night since, and she’d advised everyone else to do the same until the danger of a major aftershock was long over. Being draped by canvas, and at the worst getting hit by a falling tent pole, was a far more preferable fate than having a wall fall on you. Jessica could hear Pat’s teeth rattling next to her ear. The earth rolled under her in waves, giving her a little toss at each peak.

This was not, she thought, a mere aftershock. This was another major quake, one that felt at least as strong as M1.

The earth’s roaring faded. The temblors gradually decreased, although from the way her inner ear still reeled, Jessica suspected they hadn’t diminished entirely. She pushed her helmet back onto her head, began to shift in Pat’s arms, aiming toward the front flap of the tent.

“Sorry I hit you,” Pat said.

“You hit me?” she said.

“With my elbow. I was reaching for you, and the quake just picked you up and threw you at me.” Jessica blinked her wounded eye. Sparks flashed in her vision. “I’m going to get a shiner at least.”

“Sorry.”

She kissed his unshaven chin. “That’s okay. Worse things have happened in earthquakes. Let’s get out of here.”

She belly-crawled beneath the fallen canvas, found the flap, made her way out into the night. Cool drops of dew anointed her bare feet as she helped Pat emerge from beneath the canvas. The camp was in an uproar, a babble of voices rising up on all sides, orders and curses mixed with shouts of bewilderment and cries for help. Almost all the tents had fallen, and fresh fissures had gouged themselves across the landscape. Jessica saw that the satellite transmitter/receivers were down, and she ran across the stretch of ground and rounded up soldiers to set things up again. If any of them saw anything unusual at the sight of a major general helping to wrestle satellite dishes into place while dressed only in her helmet, olive-green boxers, and tank top, they did not venture to say so. Once she had the receiver dishes up again, Jessica wouldn’t have to spend the first three or four hours trying to find a way of communicating with the rest of the country. All key personnel, throughout the area affected by M1, had by now been equipped with modern satellite-based communications gear, ranging from Iridium cellphones to the state-of-the-art Army mobile communications center here in Vicksburg. They could be in contact in a matter of seconds.

Generators coughed into life. Lights flashed. Tents were raised, and communications techs manned their stations.

Jessica was back in touch with the world.

Dams first, she decided. If dams had broken, then alerts would have to go out fast. After that, she would contact district levee superintendents. Then transportation, check as many bridges as possible. And then…

Horror struck her. The evacuation, she thought.

There were tens of thousands of people on the road. Maybe not all in their automobiles when the earthquake hit—maybe they were in motels or campgrounds, sheltering in churches or other refugee centers, or just sleeping in their cars—but they were all in transit, between their homes and the areas that had been set up to receive them.

They were cut off, without any way to call for help.

The evacuation, she thought again. My evacuation.

She may have just sent thousands of people to their doom.

The first shock bucked Omar up off the mattress, then dropped him down again. The house shook as if an explosion had gone off just outside. Wilona screamed, and adrenaline rocketed through Omar’s veins. For a moment he groped for the gun he kept on the nightstand, and then he heard the express-train roar of the onrushing quake and knew what was coming.

When the express train hit, it had a sideways snap to it that sent the bed crashing against the wall. There was a crash of shelves falling. Wilona screamed again. Omar was terrified that the chifforobe on the far side of the room would walk across the floor and fall on them. “Get under the bed!” he shouted, but the bed was traveling in wild corkscrew circles, and to get off was only to be run down. He felt Wilona clutching at him. Glass smashed. Omar heard the doors of the chifforobe slapping back and forth. In the darkness he saw a flash of white as one of the ceiling panels swung down like a trapdoor, and he rolled partly atop Wilona to protect her in case the ceiling came down. Her nails dug into his skin. The mirror on the wall exploded, sending shards over the room. The crazy corkscrew motion was making Omar sick to his stomach. Wilona wept and shrieked in his ear. Another ceiling panel fell, bounced off Omar’s shoulders. There was a roaring crash as one of the magnolias shed a limb onto the roof. He just held on, for long minutes, until the motion faded. And then he got unsteadily to his feet, and rushed across broken glass to David’s room. He hadn’t heard anything from his son at all, and that seemed ominous.

When he looked at the empty bed he remembered that David, now a special deputy, was on duty tonight, on call at sheriff’s headquarters.

Omar began to check the damage. When the old double shotgun home had been jacked back up onto its foundation after the first quake, it had been supported by new brick pilings and hardwood wedges, and this time the foundation held. But otherwise the damage was far worse: half the clap-boards were shaken off the walls, almost all the shingles were gone from the roof, the ceiling and wall panels were torn away, and parts of the floor buckled or caved in.

And none of it insured, Omar knew.

He went back to his bedroom and began pulling on his uniform. He knew that Spottswood Parish was going to have a long night.

Charlie Johns lay asleep in Megan’s BMW, a bottle of wine near his hand. The earth rumbled—the car leaped and shivered—but Charlie stirred for a moment, only a moment, and then slept on. Earthquake, he thought vaguely. Ridiculous. They only happen in California. The shock faded, and night sounds resumed.

Next to Charlie, on the passenger seat, the cellphone gave an almost-silent purr. Its batteries were too exhausted to ring loudly; the sound was only a whisper, the barest touch of sound to Charlie’s ear. Charlie slept on. The phone purred again, and again, and again. And then fell silent. When Charlie woke, he thought he heard Megan’s voice.

The President rolled toward the phone on the nightstand. “Get me the First Lady,” he said, “the Vice President, and whoever’s in charge at the CDRG.”

And then he looked at the clock. Five minutes after two.

He felt a panicked throb in his chest. That was a quake, he thought. His experience in the National Cathedral, and the days he’d spent touring the disaster areas in the Midwest, had sensitized him to earth tremors. The first temblor that shivered up through his mattress had awakened him from sound sleep. And he had felt it here, in the White House, which meant it was another big one. He kicked off the covers, felt for his slippers with his toes. And then a woman’s voice spoke in his ear.

“Mr. President? This is Beverly Maddox at the CDRG. May I help you?”

“Did you feel that quake? Do you have any information?”

There was a moment’s pause. “I felt no quake, sir, but I’ll check.” And then, before the President could say anything more, heard the click, and then syrupy music. She had put him on hold.

“Jesus Christ!” the President barked in amazement. Nobody ever put the President of the United States on hold.

There was another click, and then the voice again. “Nobody here felt a quake, sir. I take it you’re not calling from D.C.?”

“Don’t ever put me on hold again!”

Stunned silence filled the line.

“I will remain on this line,” the President said. “You will find out about the quake and report to your commander-in-chief as soon as you have the information.”

“Yes, sir. Uh… sorry.” And then he heard her put down the phone and shout to someone else in the office.

There was a click as another call came through. The President changed over and immediately heard the voice of the Vice President, calling from Jackson, Mississippi, where he’d been based in his current round of Compassion Duty.

“Did you feel the quake?” he said. “That was a big one.”

“You’re all right?” said the President.

“Just shook up. The bed was jumping around, and the drawers jumped right out of the bureau. Secret Service came rushing in to see if I was all right, and they could barely keep their feet.” The President found himself wondering if they’d tried to wrestle the earthquake to the ground.

“I felt it here,” the President said. “That’s why I’m calling.” And for once, he thought, I’m ahead of the curve. I know more than FEMA does. And then it occurred to him that this, more than anything else, was frightening.

The first large May quake, M1, had been followed over successive days by thousands of aftershocks, four of which were deemed strong enough to deserve numbers of their own, causing damage rated at 7 or better—out of a possible 12—on the Mercalli Scale. But the M6 shock, ten days following M1, was a major earthquake in its own right.

M6 began at 1:02 A.M., Central Daylight Time, as an eleven-meter right-lateral strike-slip motion on the Blytheville Arch, a fifty-mile-long fault structure running more or less under the Mississippi, and centered on Blytheville, Arkansas, just south of Swampeast Missouri. M1 had loaded the Blytheville Arch with tectonic energy which the Arch now discharged. On the Richter scale, the quake reached a force of 8.5, one-quarter the size of M1 at 8.9, but still the equivalent of the Alaskan quake of 1964, one of the greatest quakes of the twentieth century. As during M1, the solid structure of the North American continent transmitted the destructive force of the quake hundreds of miles. The Arch directed most of its energy toward the south and west, into Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kansas, which suffered greater property loss than they had during M1. These powerful shocks in turn released additional energy stored along the Oklahoma Fault, resulting in significant destruction as far west as Oklahoma City and Wichita Falls. But the directional nature of the temblors meant that northern Missouri, including St. Louis, Illinois, and Iowa, were spared a repeat of the leveling caused by M1, though destruction there was certainly bad enough.

Memphis, close to the river and the center of the Blytheville Arch, received another pounding. The slippage of the Blytheville Arch transmitted to other subterranean fault lines via the Bootheel Lineament, which connects all other fault structures in the area. All the faults suffered further slippage, though a particularly severe shock was created along the Reelfoot South seismicity trend. This fault hammered western Kentucky and Tennessee—shaking unlucky Memphis from north as well as west—and created a pair of tsunamis, one that roared up the Ohio River, another that launched itself up the Mississippi, destroying the old river town of Cairo, which fortunately for its inhabitants had been evacuated due to flooding.

Other effects of M6 were similar to M1: ground liquefaction and geysering, widespread destruction to timber and other natural resources, and significant infrastructure damage. Buildings, levees, bridges, and other structures weakened by M1 and its aftershocks now collapsed. Damage in Mississippi, southern Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana exceeded that suffered in M1.

In some respects M6 was more merciful than its predecessor. Most of the population were asleep, not on the highways returning from work. The people had been suffering quakes for ten days and knew how to react; they knew to avoid weakened structures, and had evacuated lowlying areas subject to flood. A survivable satellite-based communications network was in place throughout the area. Emergency rescue and medical teams were deployed and already in the field. Loss of life was in the hundreds, not in the thousands. There were fewer catastrophic fires, and none that leveled whole areas of cities. But in other respects, M6 was a social catastrophe. It struck in the middle of the largest evacuation in the history of North America. Tens of thousands of people were caught somewhere in the process of evacuation, and though most of these people were not injured, they were isolated, unable to leave the areas where the quake had stranded them.

They were dependent, for every basic necessity, on the kindness of strangers. Frankland spent the quake praying. On his stomach, because the temblors would not let him stay on his knees. There was a nasty whiplike snap to the movement of the earth this time, something calculated to take the world off its feet.

Frankland prayed that the Lord’s will be done, that His kingdom would soon come. As the quake went on he prayed that his sins would be forgiven, that his wife’s life would be spared. He could hear the metal-framed church shrieking and rattling, and he prayed that the church roof wouldn’t fall in on the women and children.

He prayed that the Lord would be merciful on the hundreds of deserters who had left the camp, who had abandoned the faith of their fathers and accepted the false comfort of the godless government. He prayed that the Lord not drop these faithless, worthless, miserable people in crevasses, or strike them with his lightning, or break their bones, or cause buildings or trees to fall on them, or permit the ground at Hot Springs National Park to crack and release the magma that lay beneath the surface, so that the faithless deserters who had not remained true to Christ would not burn forever in God’s righteous hellfire.

Finally, as the shaking went on and on, and every thought was driven from his head, he just repeated Lord Lord Lord to himself, until suddenly the earth had ceased its groans and the world rang with silence.

And then the silence was broken by the screaming of children. Hundreds of them, wailing out of the night.

He spent the next few hours ministering to the hysterical children, who had been shaken from their dreams by a repeat of the trauma that had cost so many their homes, their belongings, and their loved ones.

Afterward Sheriff Gorton came to report. He had not deserted his faith; Gorton stayed in the camp and had been driving every day to his job at the county seat. But now he seemed in shock, pale, his watery eyes wide. “The Bijoux’s gone,” he said.

The sick people who hadn’t been able to evacuate were in there, along with the National Guard medic who had been detailed to look after them. And now they were dead.

“God’s mercy upon them,” said Frankland. “I guess we’re on our own, now.” Which was not, he considered, a bad thing at all.

It was fifty minutes after the quake that the President—pacing up and down in the situation room while he waited for senior staff to arrive—finally heard from the First Lady’s party.

He did not hear from the First Lady herself, but from one of her advance people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where the First Lady had gone to present awards to members of a local radio station. After the quakes, people had begun to swarm into the disaster area to help with the business of rebuilding. Contractors, lumber dealers, homebuilders, roofers, heating and cooling specialists, hauling and freight companies, dealers in foodstuffs and fuel, all planning on making a profit at helping the victims of the quake to rebuild.

They were all, in some sense, profiteers. They did not leave their homes in safe parts of the country and travel, over dangerous roads, to hazardous areas without the intention of being rewarded for their services. If they wanted to make a normal profit, they would have stayed at home. Services out of the ordinary, they reckoned, deserved profits a little out of the ordinary. But the devastated areas had been so thoroughly destroyed, leaving such total damage, that repair and restoration very swiftly became a sellers’ market. Price gouging had become common. The suffering population had become enraged at the newcomers’ attempts to milk them for the few remaining pennies in their pockets.

There had been a move to freeze prices in the affected areas at pre-earthquake levels. But all that meant was that the people who had come to repair earthquake damage, deprived of the hope of extra profit that had caused them to leave home in the first place, would return home.

What the Jonesboro radio station had done was simply to start reporting prices in the area. All they did was quote numbers. Basic foodstuffs, lumber, roofing supplies, all the necessities for surviving the Year of the Earthquake. If a foodstore or a contractor was demanding unreasonable prices, that was reported, too, and people knew to avoid them. The radio station had restored a buyers’ market. Price-gougers were left without customers.

The Jonesboro program had been such a success that other stations began to imitate them. Essential supplies and services were still available, but prices had fallen all across the earthquake zone. It was one of the great successes of the recovery effort.

And so the radio station was deemed worthy of a visit from the First Lady, who was still shuttling about the devastated area on Permanent Compassion Duty. She was scheduled to appear on the radio station the next morning. Her plane had been landing on the repaired runway at Jonesboro at the very moment when M6 struck, and a crevasse had opened directly in its path. The plane’s nose wheel had dropped into the fracture, the plane rolled and burst into flame.

The First Lady and everyone aboard had been killed.

“Do you understand, sir? Mr. President?” The aide who had called the President was crying.

“Yes,” the President said. “Yes, I heard you.”

Softly, he put the phone in its cradle. And sat behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk, hands on his knees, and listened to the slow, inexorable ticking of the casement clock on the wall. He waited in that posture for twenty minutes, until an aide appeared to remind him that the emergency working group was waiting in the Cabinet Room.

“I’ll be along in a minute,” the President said.

But he didn’t move. He sat there, behind the big desk, and listened to the clock as it ticked away the seconds of his life.

Larry’s helicopter circled around the brightly lit spectacle of Poinsett Island. That was good, he thought, at least they hadn’t lost power.

The earthquake had sent his bed careening into the bedroom wall shortly after one in the morning. He and Helen had clutched at each other while the earth thundered at them. At the penultimate jolt, the house had given a huge lurch as it fell off its foundation. Furniture and kitchenware crashed. None of the shelves fell over, even as their contents spilled to the floor. Helen’s anchor bolts held. As soon as the quake died, Larry groped for his clothes, his boots. He knew he had to head for Poinsett Landing.

Helen was going to be left with home cleanup again.

There weren’t many people who stayed at Poinsett Landing overnight. All of them, under the direction of Meg Tarlton, were safely on the Indian mound when Larry landed and staggered out of the aircraft into an aftershock that kept trying to buckle his knees. He pursued his path grimly until he saw Meg walking toward him beneath the light of the floods, swaying as the ground jounced beneath her with every step.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

The two of them lurched like inexpert dancers to the rumbling music of the aftershock. “I can’t get near the plant, sir,” Meg said. “The piers and the barges are too dangerous. Some of the barges got loose, and a couple of the others were sunk.”

“Dang it,” Larry said.

“No radiation releases, though. First thing we checked.”

The aftershock faded. Larry stood on the edge of the mound and shaded his eyes from the nearby floodlights. He looked out over the water and could plainly see the damage to the little port that the Corps of Engineers built around the nuclear facility.

The portable harbor was lightly built, made of material that could be hauled or towed into place, and the morning’s earthquake had chewed it up considerably. Some of the barges had drifted off, still lashed to broken chunks of quay, then come aground on partly submerged ruins. Others had, seemingly, disappeared downriver. Bits of the quays were tilted up on edge. Others had disappeared. One towboat, ablaze with light, was heading away from the plant with deliberate speed, turbines whining loud in the still night. Larry wondered if it was going after lost barges or simply fleeing the scene.

“Lucky it happened at night,” Meg said. “Nobody’s out there now.” Larry said nothing, just turned and began to walk back to the helicopter.

He was going to have to radio Jessica and tell her that her little harbor, of which she had seemed so proud, had just been shattered.

It took Omar and Wilona over three hours to get from their home to Shelburne City, a journey far more difficult than it had been following the first big quake. Chasms or sudden upthrusts were scored across the highway, and the parish road crews had to attend to them before Omar could move onward. The traffic was another problem. The quake had struck with the evacuation in full swing, and the road was filled with cars from the southern part of the state. Hundreds of them, filled with families and possessions, pets and paintings and the family silver, all stuck on the road, unable to move on because the quake had gouged rents across their path. When one fissure was filled in, the cars would all surge along to the next chasm, then clump up in another disorderly mass. And when these people saw a police car moving along, they naturally tried to flag it down, or crowded around it, to ask Omar what to do, where they could stay, how far to the next town.

Nor were the refugees the only folk who needed help. This quake had caused significant damage to the area’s lightly built homes. Omar suspected that half the parish was homeless, at least for the present. It was fortunate that Omar had his radio, and he was able to deploy his department as well as conditions permitted, and also to contact other parish officials.

He also contacted his son David, who had come through the quake just fine, and was now involved in driving the injured to Dr. Patel’s clinic.

When Omar got to Shelburne City, he was shocked at the damage. Ozie Welk’s bar, south of town, was a pile of ruined lumber, with several pickup trucks parked out front, and Omar wondered if the roof had dropped on Ozie and his customers. Half the storefronts on Shelburne Street had collapsed. The Commissary’s roof had fallen in. All the black-jack oaks in front of the courthouse were down. The Mourning Confederate had pitched head-first off its broken plinth. The courthouse itself displayed some jagged cracks in its load-bearing walls.

“Do you think it’s safe?” Wilona asked as they entered.

Omar only shrugged. He had too much work to do to worry about whether the courthouse was going to fall on him.

Information came in. Electric power was restored, at least to the courthouse and a couple of blocks around. The injured were brought to Dr. Patel’s clinic, but because the building was unsafe, they were put on areas of lawn or side streets where nothing was likely to fall on them. No one quite trusted the churches or the schools not to fall down, and indeed some of them already had. It was toward dawn that the worst piece of news came in, passed on from the state police. “The staties say that the District Levee’s gone, right at the Parish Floodway.”

Omar reached for the radio that sat behind his desk. “This is Omar,” he said. “Says which?”

“District Levee’s gone. A two-hundred-foot crevasse, they said. The highway’s cut.” On the south end of the Parish Floodway, the highway ran for almost seven miles along the top of the District Levee. With the levee broken, the evacuation route to Arkansas had been cut off, and much of the land behind the levee would have been flooded. This also cut them off from the northern third of the parish, with about a third of the parish’s population of seven thousand. There was only one sheriff’s car out there to help police all those people. Omar guessed that meant they had become Arkansas’ problem. And with refugees continuing to pour up the highway from the south, that meant that Spottswood Parish had become a bottleneck on the evacuation route, a trap for everyone who entered. A random bunch of Louisianans, Omar thought. Mostly from the cities. And bringing city problems with them—crime, disorder, and negritude.

Jesus, he thought. Inner-city niggers. They’d probably start selling crack to the kids on the playground. Omar had to get those people turned around, get them out of his parish before they ate the place out like a swarm of locusts.

First he called the state police, told them of the situation, and asked them to get a roadblock put up south of the parish line, turn new refugees back before they entered the trap. Omar was told that the staties were fully occupied dealing with aftereffects of the quake, but would set up the road-block as soon as they had the personnel to do it.

As soon as they get their asses into their white Crown Victorias, Omar thought. He did not have a great deal of confidence in the staties. For one thing, they couldn’t even decide what they were called. They had State Police on the rear of their cars, State Troopers on the front fenders, and Louisiana State Police on the front doors.

How could you trust these people for anything? They didn’t even know who they were. So Omar directed Merle to set up a roadblock on the far side of the Bayou Bridge and to turn people back there. It took an hour and a half for one of the patrol cars to get that far south, and the officer reported that the Bayou Bridge had lost some of its superstructure in the quake, that it trembled when they crossed, and that they were worried about getting back safely.

“I’ll get the bridge inspected when I can get someone from the parish down there,” Omar told them. “Just keep people off it, for God’s sake.”

“That’s going to be a tough job, Omar,” Merle said. “Some of these people abandoned their cars miles back and are coming in on foot. The rest say there’s nothing behind them but wreckage.”

“There’s nothing but wreckage here. You tell them to wait there, okay?”

“Ten-four. I’ll do what I can.”

Omar kept on working. In the pale twilit hour just before dawn, Omar felt the bang, then heard the onrushing-train sound of a quake, and as he stared for a horrified moment at the wall of his office, he remembered the cracks he’d seen in the thick courthouse walls, and then adrenaline slammed into his body and he dived under his desk.

The earth groaned for a long moment, shaking the court-house like shrimp in a pan, then fell silent. Omar stayed motionless for a moment, waiting for the roof to come down as he listened to the light fixture overhead creak as it swayed back and forth, and then he crawled from cover. His limbs shivered. He reached for the radio receiver behind his desk, turned up the volume to listen to the reports. The Bayou Bridge has fallen, Merle said, along its entire length, cutting Omar off from the southern quarter of the parish and the five hundred or so people who lived there.

The center part of Spottswood Parish was now an island, with hundreds of strangers trapped by the flood, and no way to get them off.

“Old River’s gone?” Jessica said. She stared blankly into the red dawn rising east of Vicksburg as she held her Iridium cellphone to her ear. “What do you mean, gone?”

“Low Sill, Morganza, Auxiliary Control came through okay,” her informant told her. “The Murray hydroelectric plant’s rode it out, too, but it’s offline because they lost too many transmission wires, and they’re losing water pressure through the turbines. The river went around the systems built to control it.”

“God damn,” Jessica said. Fury burned along her nerves. She took off her helmet, flung it on the ground. The ballistic material bounced well on the springy Mississippi turf.

Old River Control. The Corps of Engineers’ greatest project, its greatest fortress against the enemy that was the river.

But when the river attacked, it hadn’t attacked the fortress, it had gone around. Bypassed the frontier fortresses and struck directly into the heartland.

Jessica kicked her helmet toward the communications tent. She told her informant to call her as soon as he had any hard information, then put away her cellphone.

“I want all chopper wing commanders here ASAP,” she ordered. “We’ve got a lot of rescue missions to run.” She looked at one of the radio operators. “Get me the jarheads and the swabbies,” she said. “We’re going to need their copters, too.”

“Mr. Hallock reporting, General,” said another operator. “From Poinsett Landing. He wanted to speak to you.”

Jessica picked up the radio receiver and blinked. Stars shot through her left eye. Ever since Pat had elbowed her eye during the quake, she’d both been developing a magnificent black eye and seeing flashes.

It was probably all right, she thought. Stars were what you were supposed to see after being hit in the head. Right?

“Mr. Hallock?” she said. “This is General Frazetta.”

Larry’s New Mexico drawl hissed over the speakers. “I’ve inspected the auxiliary building,” he said. “We lost some of the scaffolding in there. Otherwise things are stable for the moment, ’cept that we’ve sprung another leak. Or maybe that ol’ leak we could never find got bigger, I can’t tell. Anyway, we’ve got the pumps going, and we’re keeping the water and boron levels high.”

“Roger, Mr. Hallock. Good work.”

“We’ll look for the leak and patch it if we can. But your port is a real mess, ma’am, and my people are afraid to go out on those quays.”

I don’t blame them, Jessica thought.

“And,” Larry went on, “we checked the containment building. It’s listing at another two degrees.” Jessica took a slow, careful breath. Two degrees… A two-million-ton reactor leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

“Roger that, Mr. Hallock,” she said, her mouth dry. Star shells flashed in her left eye. The last two problems—the fragility of the temporary harbor and the dangerous position of the reactor—could be fixed by accelerating Operation Island. Keep the big Sikorsky helicopters dropping tons of rubble twenty-four hours per day. Build a real harbor, make the reactor complex part of something solid.

But that meant the helicopters would not be free for other tasks, such as searching for refugees. People could die if she kept the heavy-lift machines moving rubble from one place to another instead of helping the victims of the quake.

But that’s what she had to do. A worst-case accident at Poinsett Landing could poison the Mississippi for the next five hundred years.

“Mr. Hallock,” she said, “I’m going to accelerate Operation Island. I want you to move your personnel out of the area, except for those you need to fix the leak and to keep the auxiliary building stable.” There was a pause. “Roger that, General.”

“I’ll see you later, Mr. Hallock.” There was another pause.

“Good luck, General Frazetta.” Jessica nodded.

“And to you,” she said.

He had to put them somewhere, all these refugees. There weren’t many choices. And so Omar found himself visiting the Reverend Dr. Morris.

Dr. Morris preached at the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Spottswood Parish, and was a white-haired black man of unimpeachable rectitude and gravel-voiced eloquence. It was fortunate for Omar that few people had listened to Morris at the last election.

Morris knew that Omar was coming—one did not do these things unannounced—and waited for him on the front lawn of the ruined brick California bungalow that had once been his parsonage. Next door, his church, of frame construction, had largely survived, though it had lost its steeple, most of its shingles, and all of its windows.

Dr. Morris was surrounded by his family and several of what Omar assumed were his parishioners, forming a half-circle behind him, like a bodyguard. Morris, or his friends, wanted witnesses to the meeting of their parson and the Kleagle.

Like Omar was going to go berserk and start throwing fire-bombs. These people, Omar thought, should know better.

Gravel crunched as Omar turned into Morris’ driveway. He stepped out of the car, adjusted his hat, tried to mask his unease. He was here in the role of a supplicant, and he didn’t like it. He walked toward Morris, and behind his sunglasses he scanned the silent, hostile black faces that surrounded the minister. “Dr. Morris,” he said, “Miz Morris,” and touched the brim of his hat to the reverend’s lady.

“Sheriff.” Morris nodded. His wife gave a nod that seemed civil enough, though her unblinking eyes didn’t leave Omar’s face for a second.

“We’ve got a lot of refugees in the parish,” Omar said. He turned, scanned the cars lined behind them on the road. “You can see that yourself. We’ve got to put them somewhere until they can be evacuated. I thought that the land where you hold your camp meetings might be suitable—you have facilities there, yes? Toilets and water and such?”

Dr. Morris nodded. “Yes. And we have grills for outdoor cooking, and a kitchen to serve hot meals. Though I don’t know whether the cookhouse survived last night.”

“Can you open the property on short notice, Doctor? We’ve got to put these people somewhere before they start keeling over of sunstroke.”

The preacher nodded. “I can do that, Sheriff,” he said.

“Thank you, Dr. Morris. I’ll tell my men to give you an hour or so before they start sending people over.” Dr. Morris nodded. “Very well, Sheriff. We’ll have the place open, and we’ll do what we can for the people.”

Omar touched his hat to Mrs. Morris again, then returned to his car.

All summer long, the A.M.E. ran camp meetings at their site north of Shelburne City. Whole families of black people from all over the South-Central U.S. drove to the meetings, pitched their tents, and spent their money at the Commissary and the local BBQ and burger joints. It was one of the few mainstays of the local economy that hadn’t gone to hell in the last twenty years. Even the Klan was happy for the addition to the revenues of the parish.

Camp sites, toilets, running water. Exactly what the situation called for.

Omar was less happy with the subject of his next visit. Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden, the last member of the family that had run the parish for the last nine or ten generations, and—he suspected—a far more dedicated and skilled political opponent even than Dr. Morris. The river was all over the goddam place. Stars flashed in Jessica’s left eye as she peered down at the flooded Atchafalaya country from her seat in the Kiowa. She was on a personal reconnaissance, and it was as bad as it could get. It was 1927 all over again.

And on her watch. She tried not to think about that.

Before M6, Jessica had every expectation of penning the runaway river in its proper banks somewhere north of Vicksburg. Except for a few places like Poinsett Landing where the river had found a new channel, the levees were mostly intact from Vicksburg south, and Jessica had made certain they were inspected to make certain they would hold, and any weaknesses shored up or repaired. Any water that got behind the levees could be siphoned off by the various winding bayous, like LaFourche or Boeuf, that paralleled the Mississippi, then drained off into the Mississippi or the Red. But M6 had wrecked that. Jessica had to get the river back in its banks somewhere south of the Old River structures in central Louisiana, which meant that the whole focus of her effort had shifted a couple hundred miles south of where she’d intended.

Goddam goddam goddam. She’d had to give up everything north of Baton Rouge. Her jurisdiction—the part of the twenty-three-hundred-mile river that actually obeyed her commands—had shrunk to the two hundred and fifty miles north of its outlet. A little more than one tenth. The rest was flood and swamp, refugees and ruin.

“Please sit down, Sheriff Paxton,” said Mrs. Ashenden. “May I offer you some tea?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He hitched his gun out of the way and sat carefully on an antique rococo armchair.

Mrs. Ashenden sat opposite Omar on a matching loveseat. Its curved legs were in the shape of animal legs, each clawed foot holding a carved wooden ball. Mrs. Ashenden was in her sixties, with white hair, a soft, languorous voice, and piercing blue eyes that glittered like diamonds. Her age had not dimmed her mind, and Omar imagined that her control of Garden Club politics had not weakened at all.

“We have our own blend that’s come down from the Rildia family—we have it mixed in San Francisco and shipped here. Would you like to try it, or would you prefer Earl Grey or, ah, something else?”

“Whatever you’re having, Miz LaGrande,” Omar said.

Mrs. Ashenden turned to her maid, an elderly black woman named Lorette, and said, “The Rildia blend, then. And some of the macaroons, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lorette said.

While Mrs. Ashenden spoke to the maid, Omar glanced over Clarendon’s front parlor. The big house, with its heavy post and beam construction, had survived the two big quakes very well—Miz LaGrande’s ancestors—or the two hundred slaves they owned—had built for the ages, had hauled huge cypress-wood beams to the building site and dug them deep into massive foundations. Other than broken windows and a couple of fallen chimneys, Clarendon had done very well. Even the front portico, with its four mis-matched pillars—why did he remember the term distyle-in-antis?—still stood to proudly greet Omar as he drove down the live-oak alley toward the house. The oak alley itself had not done nearly as well—at least half the trees were down.

The interior appeared to have come through the quake intact. The mantelpiece and tables seemed a bit bare—presumably they had been cleared of breakables, either by the quake or by the housekeeping staff. But the furniture looked unscarred, and the cut crystal of the overhead chandelier seemed to have survived without a scratch.

“I wanted to say,” Mrs. Ashenden said, “how much we enjoyed your Wilona, when she called the other day.”

Omar looked at his nemesis and smiled. “She told me how much she enjoyed the visit. It was very kind of you to invite her.”

Mrs. Ashenden tilted her head, gave Omar a birdlike look. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen you here, Sheriff Paxton.” Her ice-blue eyes glittered.

“I’ve had no reason to take your time, Miz LaGrande,” Omar said. No reason to crawl to Clarendon for favors when he could take what he wanted by other means, he meant. He let Mrs. Ashenden absorb this for a moment, then glanced deliberately around the parlor.

“You seem to have weathered the quakes very well,” he said.

“Yes. Mr. Oliver Shelburne built well when he built this place.” She smoothed her lap. “I won’t be able to serve you off the Wedgwood, I’m afraid. We had too many pieces of the creamware broken in the first quake, and some of it is impossible to repair, so we put everything in storage until the danger is over. It is fortunate that the pre-1830 Waterford came through all right, though some of the more modern crystal was damaged.”

All our McDonalds cups came through just fine, Omar was tempted to reply. Even the Darth Vader. But he just smiled and told Mrs. Ashenden that she’d been lucky.

“Yes. Particularly during last night’s horror. I understand many in the parish have lost their homes.”

“Yes. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Ah. Here’s our tea.”

Lorette arrived with tea on a tray and poured. Omar asked for sugar, no cream, and got a sugar cube dropped into his cup with silver tongs. He stirred the dissolving lump into his tea—he knew from Wilona that his silver teaspoon was to a pattern made exclusively by a firm in Vicksburg since the 1840s—and he glanced at his cup as he raised it to his lips. Even if this was the second-best china, it was still impressive enough: thin and delicate as the petals of a flower, gold-rimmed, with a design of a shepherd frolicking with a shepherdess. Omar could crush it to powder by closing one hand, and for a moment—

only a moment—he was tempted to do so.

Mrs. Ashenden had seen him study the cup. “It’s Sevres,” she said, “but it’s soft-paste, not porcelaine royale, and our set is incomplete.”

“It’s very fine, ma’am,” Omar said. Mrs. Ashenden was lucky she had inherited the porcelain, the silver, and Clarendon, too, because if she hadn’t, she might well be wandering the parish bereft as any refugee. Her husband, the late Herbert Temple Ashenden of Fort Worth, had gone through their combined fortunes like a hailstorm through ripe wheat. He had lost most of their money in the oil business, and then dropped the rest in a scheme to turn the Shelburne cotton fields into an exclusive hunting resort here in Spottswood Parish, a place carefully groomed to support quail, deer, duck, trout, and who-knew-what. He’d built a lodge and preened the country, and imported or otherwise attracted the game, and then found that no one came.

Rich people, it seemed, had better places to spend their time than Spottswood Parish. The scheme leaked money like a sieve. Ashenden, along with his blond girlfriend, a former Miss Concordia Parish, died in a car crash in Mississippi. Most of the old Shelburne plantation had been sold to pay his debts, and now belonged to Swiss Jews who had demolished the lodge, chased off the wildlife, and put the land back into cotton.

Omar had heard that Mrs. Ashenden had a hard time coming up with the taxes on the property she had remaining, but had made an agreement with a cousin, one of the Davises, to leave Clarendon to her in return for having her taxes paid. Rogers Wilcox, who worked at the courthouse, claimed to have seen the legal documents when they were filed.

It was hearing this that had determined Omar to run for office. Mrs. Ashenden couldn’t back her political favorites with money, only with words and sheer force of habit. It was time, Omar thought, that the old habits died.

Omar put his cup into his saucer. “What I wanted to talk to you about, Miz LaGrande,” he said, “is the homeless people here in the parish, and the casualties.”

Concern entered Mrs. Ashenden’s voice. “Are there very many injured?”

“There are some who really need to go to a hospital,” Omar said, “but we don’t even have the clinic anymore. Dr. Patel’s offices collapsed last night. I know this is an imposition, but we need a place to put the injured, and this is the safest building in the parish.”

“Of course you may bring them here,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “We have always done our bit in an emergency. We sheltered a great many people during the Flood of 1927.” She gave a little smile. “It will be like the War Between the States, I fancy, when so many of our homes were turned into hospitals.” A troubled look crossed her face. “But I don’t have the staff here to care for people. Just Lorette, and Joseph, and the gardener.”

“Dr. Patel and his nurse will be here,” Omar said. “And we hope that the families will pitch in.”

“Ye-es,” Mrs. Ashenden said, a little vaguely, as if she were picturing to herself a horde of people swarming into her house to look after their relations.

“Besides the injured,” Omar continued, “the parish seems to have acquired a lot of, ah, misplaced people. Evacuees who were on the road last night when the quake hit. I don’t know how many, but there are hundreds. The Bayou Bridge is down, and the Parish Floodway’s broken, so right now there’s no way in or out.”

“Mercy.”

“We’ve got to put these people somewhere until we can get them shipped out, or until we can get the bridges rebuilt. Last time we used churches and the schools, but none of those buildings are safe anymore.”

“Yes?” There was calculation behind those ice-blue eyes.

“I thought your lawns and gardens,” Omar said, then added quickly. “You’ve got what—six-eight acres?

Nice, flat, with grass. We can put people under tents or some other kind of shelter, and we can use your house as an infirmary and your kitchens as a cookhouse.”

“Gracious.” Mrs. Ashenden seemed surprised. “Don’t you have anyplace else?”

“I’ve got Dr. Morris to open up the A.M.E. campground, but that’s going to fill up pretty quick. And everyplace else in the parish is either wilderness, under water, or planted in cotton. You know what it’s like around here. I can’t put people in a cotton field, and I can’t scatter them around, because I need to bring food and other supplies to a central point.”

Mrs. Ashenden absorbed this. “But I don’t have the staff. Not any longer. I don’t have the means to take care of all these people.”

“Well, Miz LaGrande,” Omar said, “I suppose they didn’t have the staff in the War Between the States, either, but they managed somehow.”

He saw the glint of duty in her eyes, and knew he’d won. There was nothing more sacred to a Shelburne than the traditions of Southern Womanhood. In times of crisis, the lady of the manor opened her home to those in need, and that was that.

Omar helped himself to one of Mrs. Ashenden’s macaroons on the way out. When he got into his cruiser, he turned to look at the massive front portico, the four giant pillars—distyle-in-antis—and he thought of Clarendon surrounded by a shantytown, refugees living under tents or blankets, screaming children breaking down the neat hedges and rolling in the flowerbeds, the boiling laundry and slit-trench latrines contributing their odor to the flower-scented Clarendon air… wonderful, he thought. Just like the War Between the States.

When Omar got back to his office, he dispatched two officers to Miz LaGrande’s to direct traffic, and another two to the A.M.E. campground. Then he got on the radio and told his officers to start moving the refugees to the camps.

“Sheriff?” came a reply, “how do we know which camp to send folks to?” Omar recognized Merle’s voice.

“Well,” Omar said, “if they look like an African Methodist Episcopal to you, send them there. And if they don’t, send them to Clarendon.”

There was a pause. “Ten-four, chief,” came the answer. Omar could just picture Merle’s grin. Omar had actually considered sending all the blacks to Clarendon, just burying Mrs. Ashenden in niggers. But Clarendon was only half a mile from Shelburne City’s town square, and he knew the merchants and landowners would complain if he packed the town with refugee blacks from the inner city. Best to keep them well out of town, in their own place.

Wilona put her head into the office. She looked exhausted, deep circles under her eyes, lines of worry at the corners of her mouth. Omar signed off the radio, then went to Wilona and put his arms around her.

“You okay?”

“Just tired. I’m worried about our house, with all these strangers around.”

“The neighbors will keep a lookout.” He kissed her. “I’ve been to Miz LaGrande’s.” She brightened immediately. “Yes?” she said. “Did you talk with her?”

“I had tea,” he said, “off the second-best china.”

“Well,” Wilona frowned, “the Wedgwood was probably in storage, to keep it safe.” Omar grinned. “That’s what Miz LaGrande said.”

She brightened again. “So what did you talk about?”

“We’re going to set up a hospital at Clarendon, and put a refugee camp on the grounds.” Wilona’s eyes widened. “It’ll be just like the War!” she said.

“I think the crisis has passed,” Omar said. “Why don’t you go down to the squad room, lie down, and get some rest?”

“I should go to Clarendon,” Wilona said. “I should offer to help Miz LaGrande with her work.” Omar looked at her sourly. It was as if Wilona was planning on nursing the wounded of the Confederacy.

“You’ve got plenty enough to do.” he said. “We’ve got a busted house, and if that isn’t enough there’s plenty to do here.”

“But I could help at Clarendon!” Wilona said.

“It’s not going to be a tea party,” Omar said. “It’s going to be a refugee camp with screaming babies and sick people and bugs. Probably there will be a fair number of criminals, too. No place for white gloves and pearls.”

Wilona seemed unconvinced. “I think it could be lovely.”

“Wilona,” Omar said. “What is it you came in here to tell me?”

“Oh. Sorry. Tree Simpson needs you in the council chamber.”

The room where the parish council met was a court room when the council wasn’t meeting there. Tree—short for Trelawny—Simpson sat on the council. He ran one of the parish’s two pharmacies, was a middle-sized man with a little grizzled mustache, and looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.

“We’re not getting the Bayou Bridge replaced anytime soon,” he said. “Every portable or collapsible bridge in the U.S. of A. has already been deployed into the disaster area.”

“How about an evacuation?” Omar said.

Tree only shrugged. “I couldn’t get ahold of anybody who had the authority to do a thing. I got someone who said he’d put me on a list for someone in logistics, so that at least we could get sent some food.”

“Joy in the mornin’,” said Omar.

“The rest of the council are getting food supplies together. Paying with personal checks. At least we’ll be able to feed our guests later today. Oh.” He looked up as he remembered something. “The governor’s declared martial law in several parishes, including ours. If that makes your job any easier.”

“Could be,” Omar said.

There was a tap on the door, and one of Omar’s special deputies stuck his head in the door. “Sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “But I thought I’d better tell you there’s been a shooting.” It was clear enough what happened. The drifter had been digging through the fallen remains of Ozie Welks’ storeroom. He’d run when Ozie had challenged him, trailed bottles of Miller Genuine Draft behind him as he fled, and then as he paused to hop over Ozie’s straggling barbed-wire fence, Ozie blew the back of his head off with the shotgun he kept on the rack in his pickup truck. The most natural thing in the world, shoot a stranger who was trying to steal your stuff. That’s what you carried shotguns for.

The stranger was a little man, white, with a wrinkled cotton shirt and a porkpie hat. He was maybe fifty, with a homemade tattoo on the back of one hand. Even in death, he still clutched a bottle of Jim Beam to his breast.

“That’s a looter, all right,” said David, one of the first on the scene. Wearing one of his father’s spare uniforms, he looked more official than most of the special deputies, whose uniform consisted of a star and a gun worn over civilian clothes. David poked at the bottle of Beam with the toe of his boot. “Got the evidence right in his hand.” David looked at Ozie with an admiring grin. “That’s a good shot, Ozie.”

“Some ol’ drunk,” said Ozie. “Couldn’t live without the hooch for another minute.” He had come back from helping a friend rescue some furniture from his collapsed mobile home, and he’d found the drifter looting his bar in broad daylight.

“Any ID on the body?” Omar said.

David shook his head. “We checked.”

Omar looked at the looter. Sweat trickled down the sides of his nose. He let his gaze travel over the road, the cars pulled off the highway during the quake and then abandoned by people heading into town.

“One of those cars is probably his,” he said, “but there’s no way to know which one.”

“Shall we take the body to the coroner?” asked one of the deputies. Who, come to think of it, was Tree Simpson. Tree had been appointed when the last coroner, a tire salesman, had been electrocuted in his bathtub.

“Bag it up,” Omar said. “Show it to Tree. Then we’ll shove it in the potter’s field.”

“Dang,” David said. “That was a great shot.”

Ozie looked grim. “I’m going to have to put up with a lot of shit on account of this, ain’t I?” Omar shook his head. “Not with a looter. Not at a time like this.”

“Good.” Ozie wiped sweat off his stubbly chin with the back of one arm. “Maybe nobody’ll miss this boy at all.”

Omar glanced up as a pair of cars drove by, each packed with families heading for Clarendon. The cars slowed, and Omar felt himself being scanned by the eyes of strangers. The Klan Kop, Komplete with Korpse.

He could feel their little tiny refugee brains drawing conclusions.

Strangers, Omar thought, refugees. Wandering around without supervision. Bound to get into trouble, and one of them had just got shot by a local. And unless Omar got things under better control, this body wouldn’t be the last.

He walked to the car, unhooked the mike from the radio, and spoke to the guards he’d sent to his two refugee camps.

“Once people get into the camps,” he said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless they can tell you the name of the local resident they’ll be visiting. Unless they know somebody here, there’s no place for them to go.”

He held the microphone to his lips for a moment, saw the corpse lying by the vine-covered barbed wire. The Louisiana heat beat on his head.

“Tell them it’s for their own protection,” he added.

Bill Clemmons knew it was going to be bad when he saw the flies. He was carrying government food home from Cameron Brown Park in a wheelbarrow, and when he passed the BMW that his neighbor Charlie Johns had been living in, he saw clouds of black flies floating in and out of the open door. Thousands of them.

Bill hesitated while sweat tracked down his nose. He knew well enough what the clouds of flies meant. He was tempted to let it be someone else’s problem.

But it was his problem. He couldn’t have that next to his own house, his own family. What went wrong? he wondered. What had gone wrong with Charlie Johns? He was too smart to die like this.

Bill started pushing the barrow again. He’d deliver the food, then he’d walk back to the park to inform the authorities about the corpse lying in the BMW.

By late afternoon Omar had a head count. Two hundred thirty refugees, mostly black, on the A.M.E. campsite. Four hundred and forty-three, mostly white, crammed into Clarendon’s parklands, a stench unto the nostrils of Mrs. Ashenden. Thirty-one badly injured people had been moved into the house itself, where they could fulfill her Civil War fantasies—maybe, Omar thought, she’d feed them off the Wedgwood.

And then of course there was the dead man occupying a body bag at the coroner’s office. Omar didn’t know how many natives of the parish were without homes, but it was well into the hundreds. Many had taken refuge with friends; others were camping or living in their cars. Omar couldn’t just round them up. After all, they were voters.

The strangers were all hungry. The parish had done what was possible to get food to them, but there wasn’t that much food in the parish to begin with, less than a week’s supply. Fortunately Judge Moseley had been on the phone to the Emergency Management people, and they had promised for the next day a helicopter supply mission, food, tents, and medical equipment. Omar had just been to the A.M.E. camp to tell them that help was coming tomorrow. His reception hadn’t been very cordial. “There are some damned angry niggers here,” Merle grinned as Omar got out of his car. The camp inmates, Merle implied, wanted assistance now, and they weren’t taking any shit from Klan Kops.

Omar went into the camp and tried to talk to Reverend Dr. Morris, tell him that the government was shipping in stuff tomorrow, but that everyone would have to sleep in their cars tonight—but there wasn’t just Morris, there was a whole wall of black folks, all of them talking. All the white people in the camp—and there were a few—were probably in hiding. Some of the blacks looked like aliens, with dreadlocks or strange headgear or crazy, incomprehensible speech. All of them seemed to know who he was. “You can’t scare us, cone-head motherfucker,” one big man chanted, the deep voice repeating the words over and over, sometimes varying his rhythm, mother fucker alternating with mother fucker. There were at least two people with video cameras, hoping to catch Omar in some brutality. Adrenaline flared through Omar’s veins as he tried to shout his message over the sound of the crowd. He felt his fingers tingle as he thought about his pistol, thought about the flap holding the pistol in the holster. He thought about firing the pistol into the air just to get everyone to shut up. He repressed the thought. These people could be armed, he thought. They could shoot back.

He delivered his message and left. Taunts rang in his ears as he stalked away. Merle stood by his car at the gate, his easy grin turned taut on his face. “Figured I might have to pull you out of there, boss,” he said, and showed Omar the Ingram Mac-11 he was holding concealed behind his car door. The thing fired eighty zillion rounds per second, Omar knew, and not a one of them accurate.

“Jesus,” Omar said. “You would have shot me along with all the others.”

“The first burst would have gone over their heads,” Merle said.

Omar was not comforted. He looked over his shoulder at the angry crowd, the video cameras that were still trained on him. “Put that gun back in the car.” he said, “if you don’t want it on the evening news.”

“I’m gonna need more boys here for crowd control,” Merle said.

Omar pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. Anger snarled through his nerves. “You’ll get them,” he said.

“Make sure they’ve got shotguns at least,” Merle said. “These aren’t our niggers we’re dealing with.” Omar rolled his cruiser carefully over a barely-filled-in crevasse as he drove down Main, then turned onto Courthouse Road. Anger still shimmered in his nerves, though weariness was beginning to beat it down. The courthouse lawn, with its stubs and torn stumps of blackjack oak, looked strangely bare in the slanting western rays of the sun. A wrecker, with a crane on the back, had been backed onto the courthouse lawn. Probably yanking stumps or hauling wood away, he thought.

He would sleep in his office tonight. After sixteen hours of coping with one emergency after another, he didn’t think he could face the wreckage that was his home.

The parking place that had been reserved for the sheriff and other parish employees had been filled by a truck full of building scrap from the collapsed Robbie’s Barber Shop across Courthouse, so Omar turned the car around and parked next to the courthouse lawn. He got out of the car, crossed the broken concrete sidewalk, then stopped in surprise as he saw who was standing by the wrecker under the cracked plinth of the Mourning Confederate.

Micah Knox. The biggety bantam Crusader stood among a knot of strangers, a camouflage baseball cap cocked back on his burrcut head, the long sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled down to his wrists. And standing next to Knox, looming over him almost, was the tall figure of Omar’s son, David. David looked up and grinned as Omar approached. “Hey, Dad,” he said.

“Hey,” Omar said.

The wrecker had been backed up to the Mourning Confederate, Omar saw. The bronze statue had pitched head-first off its plinth during the morning’s earthquake and stuck in the soft ground like a spear. A cable had been wrapped around the statue, and the crane on the wrecker was about to lift the Confederate and set it upright.

“Micah said it wasn’t right that the statue should just be left there,” David said.

“Not in Liberated America,” Knox said.

“I agreed with him,” David said, “so I got ahold of Judd Criswell and got him to bring his wrecker.”

“Micah?” Omar said. He looked from David to Knox and back. “You know each other?”

“Since this afternoon,” David said. “Micah and his buddies came in on a boat this afternoon, down by the Bayou Bridge.”

And David and his partner patrolled down there, Omar knew, looking out in case refugees managed to get across the bayou.

“We were pretty grungy,” Knox said. “We’d been on the river almost a week.” He grinned at David, fiddled with a gold watch chain looped between a front and back trouser pocket. “Dave here took us to your house so that we could get a shower.”

“And they cleaned the place!” David said. “Set the furniture up, tidied up the broken glass. Nailed the ceiling panels and the box siding that come loose.”

Knox grinned, bounced up on the tips of his toes. “Five people,” he said. “Working for an hour, while Dave was off on his patrol. It’s not as nice as Wilona would make it, but it’s a lot neater than it was.” Omar looked at the strangers. “Who are your friends, Micah?” he said.

“Crusaders brave and true,” Knox said. “We keep in touch through the Internet and arranged a rendezvous. They’re all happy to be here in Liberated America.”

He introduced them. They were all bigger than Knox. Some looked like serious streetfighters that Omar would hate to encounter in a barfight situation. They were all young and wore combat boots and bits of military uniform. Their ears stuck out from short-cropped heads. Two had bad acne, and all displayed lots of insect bites. None of them seemed particularly happy to be in Shelburne City, liberated zone or not.

“Where’ve you been?” Omar asked.

“Arkansas, mostly. We met up there, before everyone started evacuating. We just wandered around, then got a boat when we got caught by flood—” His restless hands touched his cap brim, his belt, his shoes. His voice turned louder. “Hey, you know Omar, this quake knocked ZOG for shit. No Feds anywhere. No FBI, no DEA, no judges, no marshals, no military. No Equal Opportunity Commission. Just the people, for a change. It’s like the frontier all over again.”

“Hey, Omar,” Judd Criswell said from the cab of his wrecker. “Can we get moving, here? I got plenty work for this truck.”

“You bet,” David said.

The winch whined, and the bronze man slowly rose from the soil. The others pitched it over so it would land right-side up, and Criswell carefully lowered it again to the ground.

“There we go,” David said admiringly. “Straight up-and-dicular.” The figure had survived remarkably well. The muzzle of the statue’s rifle had broken off, but the bowed head, with its somber expression, and the body in its caped overcoat had come through unscathed. David stepped forward and wiped dark soil from the mustached face.

“Can’t get it back on the pillar, I guess,” he said. “But the least we could do was set the ol’ boy on his feet again.”

After Judd Criswell disconnected his cable and drove off in his truck, Knox drew himself to attention and gave the statue an elaborate salute. “Comrade, we salute you!” he said. “We have kept the faith! The struggle goes on!” The Confederate gazed at him with glacial sorrow.

Then Knox turned to Omar and gave another salute. “Micah Knox and detachment reporting for duty, Sheriff Paxton,” he said. “Tell us what you want us to do.”

“I mentioned you could make ’em special deputies.” David said.

Omar hesitated. “I don’t know rightly,” he said. “You’re not from around here.”

“Neither are the Klan boys you brought in,” David said. “I heard the radio calls from that African Methodist camp—sounds like you need more people.”

Omar paused for a brief moment to admire the thought of Knox and his Crusaders National race warriors guarding the nigger camp—now that would be fun to watch—but he remembered the video cameras and reluctantly dismissed the idea.

“Okay,” he said. “You boys can relieve some of my trained men, and they can look after the camp.” Knox’s strange emerald pupils blazed from within their rim of white. “We are trained, sir,” he said.

“Not for police work, son.”

Knox accepted this judgment with reluctance. Omar took them into the courthouse, swore them in, and assigned them as partners to other deputies, then sent the deputies’ old partners either to bed or the A.M.E. camp.

He was going to have to do something about that camp, he thought as he sat in his office and listened to radio calls crackling out. Too many guns out there. Too many strangers. Too much unruliness. He thought about it, and an idea came to him. He smiled.

Knox and his Crusaders might be useful after all.

The morning after the quake, Nick and Jason continued their water journey. But the waterscape had changed completely: they floated through a forest of broken trees, stumps, and raw wood spears jabbing from the flood. The water was choked with wreckage, and it was very easy to wander from the roadway they had been following. After losing it and finding it several times, they lost it for good, and after that they tried to navigate by the position of the sun.

Eventually they stopped using the speedboat’s engine, because it spent so much time idling that they reckoned they were wasting fuel. Because the speedboat was too wide to row, they moved to Retired and Gone Fishin’, which they could row with the oars that Captain Joe had provided them. They towed the speedboat behind on a line. They traded rowing with fending off wreckage and trying to clear a path for the boat.

It was hot, backbreaking work. Insects buzzed round them in swarms. They had no idea whether they were moving in a straight line or in circles.

The next morning was no better, but by noon they found themselves rowing through water that was perceptibly moving, trickling past the stumps and standing trees. They decided to follow the direction the water seemed to be flowing, even though it was in a different direction than the one in which they’d been going. The trees seemed to open up gradually, and they found themselves in what might have been a river, or a flooded road, or possibly even a section line cleared of trees, but at any rate seemed to be a straight path that was taking them somewhere. The sun seemed right overhead, and they couldn’t tell whether they were moving east, west, or south.

They moved from the bass boat to the speedboat, though they didn’t start the engine, just drifted with the current. They stretched their kinked and sore muscles, and shared a can of tuna, some pickles, and an orange.

Then the trees opened up to the right, and drifting into sight came an open field with an old Allis-Chalmers tractor standing in it, the water up to its motor. Visible in the near distance were the collapsed remnants of a farm and its out-buildings. And between the farm and their boat was another boat, a fifteen-foot open flat-bottomed aluminum fishing boat with three people in it. Jason’s heart leaped. “Look!” he said. Nick jumped up with a shout poised on his lips, and then he hesitated. A darker look came into his eyes.

“Get into the driver’s seat,” he said. “Take us close to them. But not too close.” Jason’s mouth went dry as Nick reached for his rifle and crouched down in the cockpit. Nick looked over his shoulder, saw Jason’s expression. “I’m just being careful,” he said. Jason’s heart hammered in his chest. He got into the driver’s seat, pulled the choke, pressed the starter. The Evinrude started up with a roar.

The people in the other boat heard the engine start up, and they jumped upright and started waving. Jason coasted closer to them. All three were black, he saw, one older man and a pair of boys about Jason’s age.

“That’s close enough,” Nick said.

Jason cut the engine and drifted. Jason watched Nick’s hand clench and unclench on the barrel of his rifle. The three in the other boat waved their arms and shouted.

“Heaven-o!” they cried. “Heaven-o!”

TWENTY-FIVE

“Oh it’s just lovely,” Wilona said. “Miz LaGrande has moved beds in, and she’s divided the big rooms into wards. She’s so gracious to everybody, even the ones who are in pain and shouting for help.” She shook her head. “Those poor people. Broken bones, most of them. Some bad burns. But Dr. Patel is wonderful! I don’t think he’s slept in days.”

She looked down at her drink. “I’m getting used to Co-Cola warm, you know that?” Warm because there was no ice. Electricity had still not been restored to Hardee, even though most of Shelburne City had power.

Some things never changed.

Wilona sat on the couch in the old double shotgun with her feet tucked under her. Omar sat with a warm beer in his easy chair, gazing with heavy-lidded eyes at the dead television set.

“We lost a little colored girl this morning,” Wilona said. “No older than six. Her mama crashed the car into a power pole during the quake. I held the little girl’s hand till she passed, and her mama held the other.” A look of melancholy crossed her face. “Gone where the woodbine twineth,” she sighed. Omar said nothing.

“Mrs. Ashenden was so kind to the little girl’s mama afterward. Sat her down in the kitchen and talked to her for half an hour.”

“Did Miz LaGrande give her any macaroons?” he said. “Serve her off the good china?” Wilona looked cross. “You are so tacky sometimes.”

“Everybody’s been working hard,” Omar said. “The old lady shouldn’t get any special credit. I’ve been dealing with criminals and drug addicts. I’d like to see Miz LaGrande do that.”

“I think you’re being too negative,” said Wilona.

“Miz LaGrande’s had her foot on my neck from the day I was born.”

Omar turned his head at the sound of a car pulling up in front of their house. David let himself in through the screen door, took off his gun belt, and put it on the sofa as he kissed his mother.

“We were expecting you earlier,” Wilona said.

“I was with Micah Knox and his buddies.” David sat on the couch next to Wilona. “We had a few beers and chewed the fat for a while. He’s an interesting guy.”

“Be careful around him,” Omar said.

David looked at Omar in surprise. “He agrees with you, Dad. That’s why he’s here.”

“Just be careful. That’s all I ask.”

“But he’s so polite,” Wilona said. “So polite he’s almost Southern. He and his friends helped fix up our house.”

“David,” Omar said, and looked at his son. “He’s not one of us. Okay?” David hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Okay, Dad,” he said.

Omar turned to stare at the dead television again. “Maybe I’ll just go to bed,” he said. The big military copters flew into Shelburne City in mid-morning. Judge Moseley had directed them to the fields adjacent to the big house at Clarendon—an easy landmark for the chopper pilots—and the parish had trucks available to receive the government’s bounty. Surplus cheese, rice, butter, and flour were unloaded, along with powdered milk, dried oat-meal, baby formula, rolls of plastic sheeting, two crated generators, water purification gear, and some moth-eaten old military tents that smelled as if they’d lain in a government warehouse since the Korean War. Big plastic bladders of gasoline and diesel fuel were rolled off the helicopters, and a man from the Emergency Management Agency—he looked like the worst case of overwork Omar had ever seen, eyes red, beard scruffy, skin flaking from sunburn—handed out a case of Iridium cellphones so that parish officials could stay in touch with each other and the world.

Then all the government people got back on their helicopters and roared away. They said they had work elsewhere, they would bring another shipment of food in a few days, and the parish should call if they needed help, but they left so quickly that Omar figured they didn’t want to spend any more time in Spottswood Parish than necessary.

To hell with them, Omar decided.

He got some of the food on the trucks, along with most of his force of deputies and the specials, and rolled them onto the Hess-Meier cotton field opposite the A.M.E. camp. He had instructed the guards there not to permit anyone to cross the road until the food was ready to be distributed. Then he let the people cross, no more than twenty at a time, to get their names on a list and draw rations. He had the parents and children cross the road first. Once they crossed into the cotton field, no one was allowed to return to the camp.

Once they were all away from the camp, Omar gave the signal. And his deputies, including Knox and his Crusaders, swarmed into the camp to search for firearms and contraband.

When the refugees saw what was going on, there was an outcry, and they surged toward the road in a swarm—but there were deputies in their path, with shotguns, and Omar shouting on a bullhorn, telling the refugees that the search was for weapons and drugs, that nobody was going to be arrested or get into trouble, but that the camp had to be made safe.

He pulled it off, just barely. There were some young men who stood on the far edge of the bar ditch and glared, their bodies trembling with the urge to violence, faces and bodies frozen in fury while others swarmed behind them, shouting taunts and abuse.

Many of the refugees, he noticed, didn’t seem concerned by the search at all. They were a lot more interested in the food.

Everything in the camp was searched, even the cars—Omar had brought a locksmith to get into locked vehicles and trunks. Almost fifty firearms were found, along with bags of reefer, rock cocaine, a little baggie of brown heroin, and a whole sack of paraphernalia, ranging from a marijuana bong in the form of Godzilla to a very well-used syringe.

With any luck, some video cameras would disappear as well. In his briefing, Omar had mentioned that this would not be an occurrence that he would view as a tragedy.

“Sheriff! Sheriff, what’s this?” One of his special deputies bounded eagerly across the road, holding out a small screw-top bottle half-filled with white lumps. “Is it crack cocaine or what?” Omar opened the screw top, held it below his nose, took a careful sniff. He screwed the top on and handed it back.

“Moth balls,” he said.

The deputy was crestfallen. “I thought I’d found a big stash of something.”

“Better luck next time.”

Omar turned to the refugees and raised his bullhorn. “When the emergency is over,” Omar told them,

“you can apply to the sheriff’s department for a return of your property. Please be ready to furnish a description.”

Steel wool, he imagined on a form, small blowtorch, crack pipe made from old Dr. Pepper bottle. Some of these boys, he figured, were natural sorry to the point where they’d probably apply to get their drugs back.

After the search had been made, and the guns and other gear toted out of the camp and put in the trunks of the deputies’ cars, Omar and his deputies stepped back and let the refugees swarm back to the A.M.E. camp in one great mass.

The Reverend Dr. Morris, Omar saw, had left the group and was approaching. Without, Omar saw, his usual scowling escort.

“There are still some things we need, Sheriff,” Morris said.

Omar nodded. “Can you give me a list?”

“Some people need medication. Insulin is the most urgent, but we’ve got manic-depressives, folks with hypertension, thyroid cases…”

“If you’ll furnish a list to the parish authorities…” Omar began. He really wasn’t in charge of medication, except for the illegal kind.

“I was hoping we could get Dr. Patel here to write some prescriptions.”

“He’s at Clarendon looking after the injured. I could talk to him, but maybe it’s just better if you make up a list and visit him yourself.”

“We also need shelter. We don’t have many tents.”

“We didn’t get much in that line,” Omar considered. The mangy tents that came off the helicopters had been delivered to the Clarendon camp. Omar suspected there was something in the way of a tent shortage in the U.S. right now.

“We can give you some plastic sheeting,” he said.

“We’ll take it. But I was thinking you might send us some cotton wagons. We could park them in the camp, put plastic sheeting or canvas on the top, and they could hold quite a few people.”

“Cotton wagons,” Omar repeated.

There were scores of them in the parish, he knew. They were big open wagons with chicken-wire sides, used during the time of the cotton harvest to carry freshly picked cotton to the gins. Wisps of cotton blew across the roads at that season, caught in trees and fences, piled in the ditches like a strange summer frost. Cotton wagons choked the roads, slow-moving targets often as not drawn at five miles per hour by a tractor, sometimes even by a mule. The wagons were unlit and dangerous at night, the cause of many an accident as fast-moving cars piled into them from behind. The rest of the year the wagons sat in barns or fields, useless.

“I’ll put out a call for cotton wagons, Reverend,” Omar nodded.

Black folks wanted to live in cotton wagons, it was all one to him.

Omar returned to his car, saw the firearms piled in his open trunk. Real guns, he saw. Glocks, Colts, Remingtons. And all the ammunition you’d need to stage a small war.

Tomorrow, Omar thought as he looked at the guns piled into the trunk of his cruiser, we better do this to the white folks’ camp.

There was the sound of distant thunder to the north. The earth trembled to an aftershock. Micah Knox strolled up, and with an elaborate gesture pulled a large gold pocket watch that was on the end of the chain he’d been wearing. He opened the watch cover, looked at the dial. Bells in the watch played “Claire de Lune.”

“One hour and twenty minutes,” he said. “Pretty efficient, Omar, with so many people who ain’t been trained for police work.” He snapped the watch shut and put it in his pocket. “I think we got some real potential, here. Don’t you?”

“Your people will get more practice at Clarendon,” Omar said. “That’s where we’re going next.” He looked at his own watch. “We’ll have a bite, then get there just in time for their noon meal.” He had less trouble searching the Clarendon camp, but he collected many more firearms. The Clarendon camp, he decided, was going to be more trouble: it was closer to town, and people kept wandering off the camp limits into Shelburne City.

He wondered if he could get the parish council’s permission to fence it off somehow. The parish was a little short of food and hospitality, but there was plenty of fencing material. Hunger burned in Nick as the boy Orville guided him to Rails Bluff. In Rails Bluff there were fourteen people who came off boats from Toussaint two days before, and according to the boy one of them sounded like Arlette.

Yearning filled Nick to the brim. He saw Arlette every time he closed his eyes. Love, your daughter. And a row of hearts.

Orville was twelve years old, and he, his older brother, and his uncle the church deacon had been sent out the day before, after the second big quake, to look for refugees and guide them to Rails Bluff. Orville had joined Jason and Nick as guide, while the others continued their search. He hadn’t looked twice at the firearms piled around the boat. Guns weren’t anything to Orville one way or another, just a part of the background.

The way to Rails Bluff was difficult, but not as difficult as their earlier wanderings had been. Orville’s father had blazed a trail through the wreckage, and though there was still a lot of tree trunks that had drifted back into the channel and needed to be shoved out of the way, it was easier with much of the work already done. And part of the journey was along the Arkansas River, which though flooded and nearly choked with debris was open to movement by small boats.

Jason was quiet, Nick noticed, but he did his job. Nick couldn’t manage to concern himself with the boy’s moods, though, not with his daughter’s presence tingling through his mind. There was a rumble, and the boat tilted to port as something large and solid thundered along its aluminum bottom. Nick cut the throttle and jumped to the stern to tip the outboard up, out of the water, so its prop wouldn’t be sheared off.

“That’s a sawyer,” Orville said. “Log just under the water.” He grinned. “Lucky we’re not in a wooden boat! We’d have a hole punched in the bottom!”

The boat grated as it slid off the sawyer. Nick waited till the boat was clear, then cautiously dropped the outboard back into the water.

“I wonder if Tom Sawyer was named after one of those,” Nick said.

“Who’s Tom Sawyer?” Orville asked, without interest. Then he looked up. “There’s the bluff. We just bear off to the right here, till you get to Rails River.”

The bluff rose gradually above the flooded land. It had been covered by thick stands of pine, but most of the trees had fallen in the quake and lay tumbled on the slope, their torn roots revealing the bluff’s red clay. It looked as if a bulldozer had run mad among the pine groves, leveling everything it could find. They followed the bluff, and Nick found himself in a flooded river. The fallen girders of a venerable iron trestle bridge lay spread across the river’s channel, with the wreckage of an old Lincoln washing around amid the rusting beams.

There was a kind of improvised landing below the broken bridge, a homemade pier supported by oil drums. A miscellaneous collection of boats were moored there, or run up on the bluff, and there were two guards on the boats. Nick didn’t like the look of that, particularly the man who set Nick’s cracker vibe tingling, the big white guy with the homemade tattoo of an angel on his biceps. But the other was black, which was reassuring, and the big man, who said his name was Hilkiah, said that one of their scavenging parties had been shot at two days ago, by some men who Hilkiah thought were probably trying to break into the safe at a rural grocery store.

Nobody had been hurt, the big man said, but the Reverend was being cautious. He wanted armed men posted on anything that anyone might want to steal.

Nick figured he knew who the Reverend was: he’d heard about the situation in Rails Bluff from Orville. A bunch of preachers, Orville said, were running Rails Bluff. Nick reckoned that he’d rather have his daughter in the care of preachers than some rural sheriff or town council.

“I’m looking for the people from Toussaint,” Nick said. He couldn’t keep it in any longer. “They were supposed to have been brought in a couple days ago.”

The black guard nodded. “I drove ’em to the camp myself,” he said. “There was a whole bunch of ’em, right? Three or four families?”

“How were they?” Nick said.

“They spent a couple days in boats, which was hard on the old folks, but they was okay.” The man looked concerned, put a coffee-colored hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Any of ’em family?”

“My daughter,” Nick said. “And… her momma.” Hesitating because he almost said “my wife.”

“They probably just fine,” said the guard. He looked at Hilkiah. “Should I take these folks to the camp?”

“Might as well,” Hilkiah said. He looked down at Orville. “You and your Uncle Tyrus find anybody out there?”

The boy shook his head. “No, sir. But we didn’t get far—too many fallen logs in the way.” Hilkiah nodded, then looked back at Nick. “What do you have in the way of supplies? Food and water?”

“We’re well supplied. We ran into a towboat that gave us provisions.”

“And I see you’ve got three, four gallons of gas left. Well—if you’ll help carry your stuff to the top of the bluff, we can get it in the truck and you on to your family.”

The pickup was an ancient Chevy that looked as if it had been salvaged from some junkyard. It had a bumper sticker reading trust in god and the second amendment. The five of them managed to carry most of Nick’s supplies from the boats, up the slippery red-clay path, to the back of the truck. Jason carried his telescope on his shoulder.

“What’s that?” Orville asked.

“A telescope.”

“That don’t look like a telescope.”

“Well,” Jason said, “that’s what it is.”

“Can I look through it, then?”

“Maybe later.”

Jason put the telescope in the back of the pickup, nestled it safely against the cooler filled with provisions. Nick looked at him.

“You okay, Jase?”

“Yeah. I’m just tired.”

“You can rest up here if you want. We can carry the rest of the stuff up without you.” Jason shook his head. “I can do it.”

“I see you’ve got a rifle and some other guns,” Hilkiah said as they trudged down the path again. “We don’t allow guns in the camp, but we’ll take care of ’em for you.” He nodded. “We take good care of people’s guns,” he said. “In times like these, when the Lord is testing us, people want to know their firearms are being looked after.”

“They’re not my guns, exactly—I picked them up for protection after I found some people murdered.” Hilkiah looked at him. “Wars and rumors of wars,” he said.

Nick blinked. “Murder, anyway.” he said, and thought of Gros-Papa lying on the floor with his watch chain torn from his vest.

Oh God, he thought, I’m going to have to tell Manon.

The earth thundered with an aftershock. The old truck bounced up and down on its springs. Hilkiah remained behind. The black guard, whose name was Conroy, got behind the wheel of the truck. Nick took the passenger seat, and the two boys rode in back.

The road was torn across by fresh fissures, one every few hundred feet; these were rudely filled in with dirt, rocks, and timber, sometimes sawn-up power poles that had fallen and been chucked into the gap. Every building visible from the road was in a state of collapse. The young cotton grew untended in empty fields. The pine trees that lined the road in places had almost all fallen and been shoved aside. The result was that the area’s large population of hawks had very few places left in which to roost. There must have been a lot of vermin for them to eat, because every remaining power pole or tree had at least one hawk sitting in it, each carefully facing away from all the others.

Conroy turned to Nick. “Say, brother,” he said, “you been anywhere near a radio or TV?”

“For a while I was.” They had listened to the radio regularly when they were aboard Beluthahatchie.

“Is it true about what happened to the nuclear power plant over in Mississippi? That it’s poisoned all the country south and east of here?”

“That’s not what I heard,” Nick said. “I heard there was some trouble, with a little radiation released. But that’s all.”

“Reverend says that the plant practically blew up. He says whole states are poisoned. And he says the rivers are poisoned, too.”

“There is a problem with the water, yes,” Nick said. “Pollution from chemicals and fertilizers, oil tanks, that sort of thing. That’s why the Mississippi and parts of some other rivers are being evacuated.”

“The comet Wormwood,” Conroy said. “That’s what poisons the waters. You can read that in the Book.”

Nick didn’t quite have an answer for that, so he fell silent.

The truck crawled over more crudely repaired asphalt. The Church of the End Times was a strangely ordered island in the sea of devastation. The small metal-walled church stood intact, as did the radio station, with its tall tower and the small metal house behind it. In and about the area were ordered rows of tents, awnings, and vehicles. If it weren’t for the gaping rents that scarred the ground, the place would have looked as neat as a military encampment on inspection day.

Two middle-aged white men sat under a picnic table umbrella by the road. They rose to their feet as the Chevy approached, each lifting a rifle. Nick’s nerves jangled a warning as he recognized modern assault weapons, AR-15s, the civilian version of the Army’s combat rifle, the M-16.

Guns, Nick’s nerves jangled, guns and crackers. The combination didn’t look good. Conroy halted the vehicle by the table, and one of the men peered in.

“Heaven-o there, Conroy,” he said. “You got some new folks for us?”

“This is Nick,” Conroy said. “The boy’s Jason.”

“Welcome to God’s country,” the man said, and held a callused hand through the window for Nick to shake.

“Thanks,” said Nick. The jolt of adrenaline that he’d received at the sight of the assault rifles was still jangling through his veins.

A man’s amplified voice shouted in the background, ” is this the day!” it shouted. “Is this the day of the Lord?”

The guard smiled with crooked teeth as he peered at Nick through the window. “Do you have any liquor, drugs, or guns?” he asked.

Conroy answered before Nick could make up his mind whether he wanted to answer the question or not. “A rifle, shotgun, two pistols,” Conroy said. “I put them behind the seat.” The guard nodded. “Me and George have some tags here,” he said to Nick. “We’ll tag your weapons and put them in storage. You can get them out when you leave.”

Nick thought for a long moment while the guard and his buddy George fooled around on their table for a ballpoint pen and their jelly jar of tags. He didn’t want to give the guns up, not in a situation like this, not in some kind of religious camp guarded by men carrying Armalites.

But on the other hand, he thought, how else would he see Arlette? And why should he expect people in a refugee camp to allow guns inside?

The guards scrawled Nick’s name on the tags and attached them to his guns with string. The ammunition went into a plastic bag and was likewise labeled.

Nick, who had spent the first twenty years of his life going past military checkpoints with his father the general, figured he could have shot the guards fifty times over while this was going on. His anxiety over the assault rifles eased.

“Are you ready for judgment?” the amplified voice asked.

By the time the two guards were finished, two more people had hustled up from the camp. One white man and one black. Nick left the truck to greet them.

“Heaven-o,” the white man said. He was a big, burly man and would have been good-looking if he hadn’t lacked a chin. He and Nick shook hands. “I’m Brother Frankland.” His was the voice, Nick recognized, that was shouting from the speakers.

“Pleased to meet you,” Nick said.

“This is Brother Garb from True Gospel Church.”

Garb was soft-spoken and toffee-skinned, dressed neatly in a pressed white cotton shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles. Nick shook his hand. “I heard my family was here,” he said to Garb. “I heard they came in the other day from Toussaint.”

A bright smile spread over Garb’s face. “Is Arlette your daughter?” he said. Relief and joy seemed to float Nick right off the ground. “Yes!” he almost shouted. “Yes, she is.”

“She’s a smart girl, your Arlette,” Garb said. “She said you might be coming.”

“Where is she?”

“In the church, most likely, looking after the children. I’ll take you.” Nick almost danced after the Reverend Garb, but then he remembered Jason, and he stopped. He turned to the boy, who had been standing in silence by the truck.

“You want to come, Jase?” he asked.

Jason seemed uncertain. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all. I’d like you to meet my family.”

Jason brightened, then hesitated again as he looked at the truck. “Don’t worry,” Frankland said. “We’ll look after your belongings.”

“What does the Book of Daniel tell us?” said the amplified voice. A generator roared. Garb led Nick across the gravel parking lot, past the radio station—“Arkansas’ Voice of the Lord, 15,000 watts AM”—and toward the church. Nick saw that big crosses, twenty or more feet long and made from trees or fallen power poles, were scattered through the area, lying on the ground, with the crosspiece lashed or bolted into place.

The sight of the crosses, of the sort that men in white hoods burned on Southern summer nights, sent a shimmer of unease up Nick’s spine. But there were plenty of black people around, he saw, and they and the whites seemed on friendly terms.

“What are the crosses for?” he asked.

“‘The cross shall be your salvation,’” Garb quoted, then laughed. “The crosses are to save lives. You see these big chasms? If a chasm opens up underneath it, a big cross will bridge the gap, won’t fall in. We’re teaching everyone that when a quake hits, they’re to jump onto one of the crosses and hang on till it’s over.”

“That’s interesting,” Nick said. He suspected that it probably would work, too, if the crevasse wasn’t too large.

They passed a sheriff’s department vehicle—nice to know that someone official was present—and then, in front of the church, set up like a kind of wall, Nick saw a pair of banners, all covered with brilliantly colored, astoundingly detailed scenes. Nick saw angels, demons, volcanoes, scenes of violence and fire.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse,” Garb said. “She’s been working on it for years—careful, there.” This last was said to Jason, who had come very close to one of the banners, his nose just inches away from the Antichrist branding the number 666 into the forehead of one of his followers.

“Come here, Jason,” Nick said.

“That’s amazing,” Jason said. “You know, I bet you there are rock bands, heavy-metal types, who would pay a lot of money to put this on their album covers.”

“Well, maybe.” Garb smiled. “You should get Sister Sheryl—she’s Brother Frankland’s wife—to give you a tour of her art.”

Nick was impatient to see Arlette, and he walked faster, giving the others no time to view the banners. Behind Sheryl’s Apocalypse about a dozen children played in the area around the church. Nick craned his neck as he looked for Arlette. Garb led him into the church. The pews had been pulled back against the walls, and the space divided by blankets and towels hung on lines. Mattresses filled half the floor space. The place smelled of babies and disinfectant, and the crying of infants echoed off the metal walls. Nick’s heart gave a leap as he saw his daughter at the back of the church. She was bending over a table, folding laundry, dressed in a cotton shirt and cut-off blue jeans. She wore a kerchief over her hair and a frown of concentration on her face.

My God, she’s grown, Nick thought. Arlette seemed a head taller than when he’d seen her last. And she’d thinned out—at Christmas she’d seemed a little chubby, the way adolescents sometimes get just before a growth spurt. But now she was almost up to his chin, and looked graceful as an athlete. He sprang forward. Arlette looked up at that moment, and for a moment there was a little frown between her brows, as if she couldn’t understand why this strange unshaven man with grimy clothes and matted hair was lurching toward her; and then her face lit up, eyes wide with surprise and delight… “Daddy!” she cried, and ran to meet him.

Her arms went around him and Nick’s head reeled. Arlette had survived the terror of the quake, the hazards of the river, the killers that had followed from her home. She had come through all this, to him. His sense of relief was so overpowering that it almost staggered him. He felt weak as a child, and clung to Arlette as much for support as out of joy.

“Amen, brother,” he heard Garb say. “Amen.”

The timeless moment ended. Nick dropped his arms, then stepped back to gaze at his daughter. “You’re looking fine, baby,” he said.

Her chocolate-brown face broke into a smile. “Thank you, Daddy.”

“I’ve got something for you. A present.”

Nick reached into his breast pocket, pulled out the battered cardboard box that he’d brought from the jeweler’s.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

And there it was, what he’d waited for these weeks, what he’d dreamed about when he touched the box in his pocket—he saw it at last, the shining glow that kindled in her eyes as she gasped and raised the necklace to the light that came through the broken windows of the church.

“It’s beautiful!” she said, and hugged him again.

“Turn around,” Nick said, “and I’ll put it on you.”

She turned and swept hair and kerchief off the back of her neck. Nick worked the clasp with clumsy fingers, and she hooked on the earrings.

When she turned around to face him, her smile was brighter than the gems he’d given her.

“Very pretty, young lady,” Garb said, and suddenly Nick was aware of the other people watching, Garb and Jason, other young girls and nursing mothers and a large number of children, all of whom had nothing better to do than watch Nick’s reunion with his daughter. Nick turned to Jason, feeling suddenly awkward.

“Arlette,” Nick said. “This is my friend Jason. He got me down out of a tree the morning after the earthquake.”

“Hi,” Arlette said. “Thanks for rescuing my daddy.”

Jason mumbled something and shook Arlette’s hand.

Arlette turned back to Nick. “Did you come from Toussaint? Did you see Gros-Papa and Penelope?” Nick felt his exhilaration die like a moth shriveled by flame. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, but I should talk to your momma.”

“She’s working in the kitchens,” Arlette said. She turned to Garb. “Could you spare me for a little while?” she said.

“Ask Mrs. Perkins,” Garb said.

Arlette bounced away, spoke to an elderly black lady—Mrs. Perkins took a moment to admire the necklace and earrings—and then returned.

“She says I can fold the diapers later,” she said.

“Got you working already, huh?” Nick said.

Arlette looked serious. “Diapers are going to be a problem. You can only reuse the Pampers so many times, and there aren’t a lot of old-fashioned diapers around. So some of the ladies are making them out of old clothes.”

“Nick,” Garb said, “I’ll leave you with Arlette, all right? Come look for me after you’ve talked to your family, and we’ll get you a place to sleep and a place to stash your stuff, okay?” Jason was standing there looking like he didn’t know what to do, so Nick put an arm around him as they followed Arlette from the church. Their route took them over a four-foot-wide chasm. Its banks had partly fallen in, which made it even more of a hazard, but the fissure had been spanned by a wooden bridge, stoutly built of fresh lumber and complete with handrails.

Nick had to conclude that the camp was very well organized.

“Seven angels!” shouted the voice over the loudspeaker. “Seven angels with seven plagues!” Nick’s stomach rumbled to the scent of baking bread. The kitchen area was shaded by bright picnic awnings, and featured a number of mismatched gas ranges that looked as if they’d been scavenged from wrecked buildings—mobile homes or RVs, possibly, since they were being run off containers of LP gas. There were also grills that could burn charcoal or gas, and a large black smoker so big that it might have once been the boiler of a steam locomotive. Nearby was the dining area, more awnings sheltering long folding tables and benches that looked as if they’d been taken from the nearby grade school.

“Momma?” Arlette called.

In the shade beneath the awning, Nick could see Manon only in silhouette, and she was among other women, but he knew her at once—knew the way her chin lifted at the sound of Arlette’s voice, knew the arch of her back, knew her familiar pose, one hand resting on her hip. Knew the contralto voice that cried from the shadows.

“Nick! My God!”

Manon rushed from beneath the awning and threw her arms around him. He held her to him and welcomed the moment of bliss before the memory of the house at Toussaint returned to darken his mind. Manon drew back, held him at the length of her smooth mocha arms. “You don’t look too bad,” she judged.

Which was the sort of phrase that she, and her whole family, used instead of compliments.

“This is Jason,” Nick said. “He pulled me out of a tree.” Manon turned to Jason and smiled, pink gum showing beneath her upper lip, the familiar little imperfection that sent a shiver up Nick’s spine. “Welcome,” she said in her regal way, as if the whole camp belonged to her.

“Ma’am,” said Jason.

She looked from Jason to Nick. “Have you eaten? I can sneak you a little food, I think.”

“We had some canned stuff,” Jason said.

“If you’ve actually eaten,” Manon said, “I guess I shouldn’t give you something till mealtime. Food isn’t—it’s kind of scarce, to tell the truth.”

“Unclean spirits like frogs!” called the loudspeakers. “Frogs from the mouth of the dragon!”

“Manon,” Nick said, and then a lump came up in his throat, and he had to start again. “Manon, are there any more of your family around? Because I need to talk to them. I’ve come from Toussaint and… there are things you need to know.”

The men, it turned out, were all away from the camp, assigned to gangs scavenging for supplies or looking for refugees. The women were present, either in the kitchens or working elsewhere, and Manon brought them together under the awnings, at one of the dining tables. Nick looked at the faces of the women that circled him, saw the queenly bearing of the three David women, and the less assured faces of the two others, born into less exalted circles, who had married David men.

“It’s bad news,” Nick said, and for a moment he hesitated. “The people at Toussaint,” he said finally.

“Gros-Papa, Penelope, Gilly—they’ve been killed.”

He looked at them, saw the shock and pain move in waves across their faces. Saw tears tremble in Arlette’s eyes. He took his daughter’s hand.

He and Gros-Papa hadn’t been friends—the old man had made it clear from the start that Nick wasn’t good enough to marry his youngest daughter—but Gilly and Penelope had been kind to him when he and Manon traveled to Toussaint for the obligatory David family reunion every August. But the old man was such a fixture, a kind of immovable pillar of firmness and probity and old-fashioned righteousness. A world without Gros-Papa was a different world, even for Nick.

“What happened?” Manon asked. “Was it the big quake the other night?”

“No.” He looked at her. “I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “They were killed. Murderers, robbers—I don’t know.”

The women looked at him in horror. “No!” Manon’s sister turned away with a sob.

“It looked like the—the killers were following you down the bayou,” Nick went on. “I was trying to catch up—either to protect you or—or fight them off, somehow.”

My God, Nick thought to his own immense astonishment, he had been chasing after murderers, in an open boat, armed with guns he’d swiped from the general store. Now that he’d actually spoken his intentions aloud, it sounded like the most insane thing in the world.

“That was good of you, Nick,” Manon said. Then her eyes brimmed over with tears, and she reached for the stunned Arlette, drew her daughter’s head to her shoulder.

And then the wailing and crying began, the spontaneous flood of grief and mourning that swept over the David women and their kin. Nick watched helplessly, unable to think of anything that would help, anything that would com-fort them—anything except to hang onto Arlette’s hand, to let his daughter know that she mattered to him.

At least they were together, he thought. At least they were a family again, even if they were a family in mourning.

Jason was surprised by the intensity of the grief, by the way that Nick’s family—or ex-family, he supposed—gave way to tears and cries and utter misery. After a while he began to feel uncomfortable. He wanted to be sympathetic, but he didn’t know these people, and it looked as if they weren’t going to stop anytime soon. He quietly told Nick he would go check out their belongings, and slipped away. Jason crossed the chasm on the wooden bridge. The Reverend Frankland’s voice bellowed out of loudspeakers, but between the loudspeakers’ distortion and Jason’s ignorance of the subject matter, he couldn’t make out what the reverend was talking about. Whatever it was, Jason wished Frankland would save it for Sunday.

He returned to the highway to find that Conroy and his truck were gone. The guns had been taken to wherever guns were taken here, and the food had been added to the food store. The rest of their belongings, such as they were, had been laid on the grass by the side of the road. The two armed men at the entrance, loafing under their picnic umbrella, were presumably standing guard over their possessions. The earth shivered with an aftershock. Jason balanced warily, then began to breathe again.

“The Reverend’s assigned you to the young men’s camp,” one of the men said. He rose from his lawn chair. “I’ll take you there when you’re ready.”

Jason shrugged. “Might as well go now,” he said. All he had to take with him was the Astroscan, a blanket, and some mess gear. He took the spare bottle of sunscreen and left behind other medical supplies like aspirin and bandages, figuring that Captain Joe had given them to Nick. He slung the Astroscan over one shoulder.

“Son?” the man asked. “I’ve been meaning to ask. What is that thing?”

“A telescope.”

“It don’t look like a telescope.”

Jason sighed. “I know.”

He followed the man over some planks thrown across a pair of fissures—not the elaborate plank bridges he’d used before, but then these fissures weren’t as impressive, either—and to an area marked off with string. Inside were rows of tents and awnings, and one large awning, with a plastic ground cover beneath it, where bedrolls, blankets, mattresses, sheets of plastic, and pillows had been piled.

“That’s where the boys put their stuff in the daytime,” the guard said. “You can put your gear there, and it’ll be all right. When people get back, you’ll be given a place to sleep.” Jason looked at the site, at the trampled grass and orderly rows of tents. Welcome to your future, he thought.

“Thanks.”

“Ain’t any boys here right now,” the man said, looking around. “They’re out on a work party.” Jason frowned. “What kind of work party are we talking about, exactly?”

“The boys your age mostly work at salvage. Sorting through rubble, getting food and other useful stuff out of ruins. Some are working with livestock or at planting food crops.” The guard rubbed his chin, looked down at Jason. “I don’t suppose you know much about farming?”

“I’m a city boy,” Jason said. “You want an Internet connection, or a computer upgraded, you talk to me.”

“Uh-huh.” The man looked blank, as if he’d never heard the word “computer” in his life. He hawked and spat onto the grassy ground. “Well,” he said, “I’ll do that. In the meantime, you just make yourself at home till the other boys come back.”

“Right. Thanks again.”

The guard made his way back to the gate. Jason walked under the big awning, plastic crinkling under his feet, and he found a place for his belongings in the shade. Then he went for a walk along the lines of empty tents. Frankland’s voice boomed out from loudspeakers. Large wooden crosses were set out at intervals in case of earthquake.

There was nothing to do and no one to talk to. During a moment when the reverend paused in his address, Jason heard a girl’s laugh on the breeze, and he remembered that even if there were no boys here, he could maybe talk to a girl or two. He walked toward the borders of the camp, then thought about his telescope. He didn’t want to leave it behind in an unguarded place. So he picked it up by its sling, then headed toward the church.

There were a series of camps, he found, laid out along the highway, each with posts and string as boundaries, with wide grassy lanes between them. He passed through another camp, also deserted, that was much like his own, then entered the one with women and children, around the church. The other camps, Jason thought, were set out as if to protect this one.

He wondered if Arlette was back to folding laundry, and looked into the church by one of the side exits. There she was, at the end of the aisle, her eyes focused on her work. The smell of ammonia and the cries of children almost sent Jason back to the camp, but Arlette looked up at that moment and saw him. She gave him a smile, though it was clearly an effort, and Jason stepped into the church, and put his telescope under the table where she was folding laundry.

“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” he said. “And the others.”

“Thank you.” Her eyes were puffy with weeping. “It was a surprise.”

“My mother died,” Jason said, “in the first quake.”

Arlette pressed her lips together, smoothed a child’s T-shirt on the table. “Daddy said you’d had a bad time.”

“Shall I help you with the folding?”

“If you like.”

He folded a pair of blue jeans, added it to the pile. Arlette picked another shirt from a plastic laundry basket, laid it out on the ironing board. Jason looked up at her, at the necklace and earrings she still wore, the strange contrast to her plaid shirt, blue jeans, and kerchief.

“Your dad’s been great,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d have made it without him.”

“He said the same about you.”

“He did?” Jason felt a rush of pleasure. “Sometimes he seemed to get pretty impatient with me.” Arlette nodded, her lips set in a private smile. “Yes,” she said. “He does that.” The voice on the loudspeaker rose to a chorus of “Amens,” and then there was a click and the sound died away. Arlette gave a sigh of relief.

“Sermon’s over?” Jason said.

Arlette leaned close to Jason, a conspiratorial glint in her eyes, and lowered her voice so that no one could overhear. “The mothers here convinced Brother Frankland that the loudspeakers had to be turned off for an hour in the mornings, and in the afternoons, so that the children could have their naps.” Jason leaned closer to join Arlette’s conspiracy, lowered his own voice. “So.” he said, “what’s it really like here?”

Arlette hesitated. “Well,” she said finally, “it’s Brother Frankland’s camp. Brother Frankland’s food. So we play by his rules.”

“And what are they, exactly?”

Arlette looked uncomfortable. “I’ve only been here for two days. I really shouldn’t judge, but I think he and the others are doing their best.”

Jason considered. “I suppose it beats being out in the wilderness in a boat,” he said. Arlette looked up at him, nodded. But her eyes, he saw, were troubled.

“Brought you some more clothes,” a voice intruded. Two more girls entered, both white, both in their mid-teens. They carried a plastic laundry hamper between the two of them, and set it next to Arlette. They looked at Jason, then at Arlette.

“Throw him back, girl,” one of them advised. “He’s too small.” Jason flushed. The girls, laughing, bounced back to their work. Arlette tried to conceal her smile.

“Well,” she said, turning to the pile of laundry, “looks like we’ve got our work cut out.”

TWENTY-SIX

The radio calls were confused. Officer in trouble. Shots fired. But it was David calling. Omar recognized his voice.

Omar spun the wheel of his cruiser and mashed the accelerator to the floor. Turned on the flashing lights as acceleration punched him back into his seat. There was a jar and a cry of metal as the car bottomed out on a partly-filled-in crevasse. Omar didn’t slow down.

In front of the A.M.E. campground he found a half-dozen vehicles with flashing lights, all casting long evening shadows across the highway. A big car, an old 1972 Oldsmobile with one primer-gray fender, had crossed the highway and was nose-down in the bar ditch. There were bullets stars in the windows. The driver’s door was open and a body lay by the door.

David stood nearby, his arms akimbo and his cap tipped forward over his eyes. There was a smile on his face. Omar saw him unharmed and felt his racing heart begin to ease.

A knot of deputies, some of them Omar’s specials in civilian clothes, stood around him in a knot. One skinny black man was seated on the asphalt at the rear of the car, his hands cuffed behind his back. Omar parked and almost vaulted from his car. He ran to his son.

“Are you all right?” Omar called.

David looked at him, his smile broadening. “I’m okay, Dad. Just shot a guy, is all.” He gave a little laugh.

“It’s martial law, right? It’s okay.”

Omar looked at the dead driver, saw a young black man, maybe twenty, with splashes of bright Technicolor blood all over him. Then he glanced at the camp, saw the wall of men, the hostile black faces, the stony eyes.

The smell of food floated on the air. The camp had been served their supper just before this happened, and Omar saw plates being carried by some of the onlookers, but nobody seemed to be eating. Reverend Morris stood among them, his face long, a brooding in his eyes. And for some reason the calm sorrow on Morris’s face seemed more frightening than fury on the dozens of faces that surrounded him. Omar looked at David again. David, standing easy, smiling among his friends, among the neighbors who’d known him since he was a boy.

“Okay,” he said. “We take pictures of the scene. Then bag the deceased and send him to Tree Simpson.” He took David’s arm, drew him aside. “And you tell me what happened.” And then we work out what to tell everyone else, he thought to himself.

An amateur cop, son of the King Kleagle of Louisiana, had just killed some black kid. Omar knew that there would be consequences to a story like that, whether David was justified or not, whether there was martial law or not.

In fact, he couldn’t think of any good consequences at all. Which was why it was important why David’s story had to cover all the bases, and why everyone else had to tell the same story as David. Omar was relieved when David’s story sounded okay. A couple bad boys had got stir-crazy in the camp, decided to go for a joy ride even though there was no place to go. Were in their car before anyone knew they’d got into the parking lot. And then ignored shouted orders to stop, until David drew his firearm and shot the driver.

“Everyone here saw the same thing? They’ll all back your story?”

David shrugged. “Sure. It’s what happened.”

Omar nodded. “Good,” he said. “Now what I want you to do is give me your pistol, then go to my office at the courthouse. We’ll do the paperwork.”

David looked at him in surprise. “I don’t get to keep my gun?”

“Not one that’s been used in a shooting, no. And you’re off-duty until Tree Simpson rules the shooting was justified.”

Omar collected David’s gun and sent him off to Shelburne City. He sent the handcuffed boy in another car. He told the deputies they’d each have to give a statement at the end of their shift. He sent one of the deputies back to Shelburne City for a camera, then told the deputies who had rushed to the emergency, and who weren’t normally assigned to the camp, to go about their normal business.

“Boss.” Merle’s voice quiet in his ear. “I need to tell you something.” At Merle’s hushed tones Omar felt his heart sink. His son, he thought, trembled on the edge of the abyss.

“What is it,” he said, and the words almost failed to leave his throat. Merle drew him aside. “David got a little carried away, there,” he said quietly. Omar licked his lips. “Tell me.”

“The kid drove off, okay? David drew and fired, and the car went across the road and into the ditch.”

“It’s martial law,” Omar managed. “That was justified.”

Merle nodded. “Sure, Omar. But what David did next was maybe a little, I don’t know, dire. See, that Negro wasn’t dead when he crashed the car. David pulled him from the car and shot him twice when he was lying on the road.”

Omar’s mouth went dry. He took off his hat, wiped sweat from his forehead.

Merle put a hand on Omar’s shoulder. “I’ll stand by your boy, okay? We’ll look after David. He’ll be all right.”

“Any witnesses?” Omar said.

“Some of the other deputies. They’ll be okay.” Merle looked sour. “But some people in the camp, yeah. They saw it. And Morris, he saw it, too.”

“Reverend Morris,” Omar repeated.

“Yeah. Morris. He was in his car, about to leave the camp just when the whole thing happened, got a bird’s-eye view.” Merle nodded toward the camp. “There he stands, with the others. Watching us like a black buzzard settin’ on a power line.”

Omar closed his eyes, felt himself sway like a willow in the wind. Even with his eyes shut he could feel the touch of Morris’ hooded gaze.

“I’ll talk to him,” Omar said, “and we’ll see what he says.” He crossed the road and took a long stride across the bar ditch and walked through the grass where the people at the camp had parked their cars. As he came closer he could see the tension grow in the knot of people around Morris, see the shoulders hunching as if against a blow, the fury blaze brighter in the stony eyes.

There were white people in the camp, Omar knew. A few, anyway. Where were they?

Omar politely touched the brim of his hat. “Reverend Morris?” he said. “I understand you may have been a witness to the shooting?”

The preacher’s eyes did not leave Omar’s face. His words were enunciated with care, with great precision. “I saw the crime,” he said. “Yes.”

The crime. Not the accident or the pursuit or the shooting. The crime. Omar felt his face prickle with heat. Kept his voice under control, kept his hands calm, thumbs hooked over his belt.

“Do you want to come to the courthouse and make a statement?”

“Possibly,” Morris allowed. “Possibly I will make a statement. Possibly I will reserve my statement and give it to the federal authorities at a later time.”

Omar’s head swam. He licked his lips, managed to speak. “Why would you do that, Reverend?” he asked.

Morris hooded his eyes and pretended to consider. Black bastard was enjoying it, Omar thought. He couldn’t beat me in the election, but he’s got me whipped now. Whipped like a cur dog in a hailstorm.

“I saw your son shoot that boy,” Morris said. “He put two bullets into him without reason. What would be the point of giving a statement to you?”

“You tell him!” a woman called from the back of the crowd. “You tell him!” There was a chorus of assent. Omar stiffened. Behind his sunglasses he looked at the faces in the crowd, tried to memorize them. The faces he already knew he was going to need to remember. The hostile masks swam before his gaze. His heart fluttered in his chest.

“If you want to make a statement,” he told Morris, “you can make it any time.” Omar turned his back carefully and walked away through the grass and between the parked cars to the highway. He had turned his back on more than the camp, he knew; he had turned his back on his life, his position. Every thing he’d achieved, every advancement to which he’d clawed a path. His future.

“Is there anybody else from Shelburne City in the camp right now?” Omar asked Merle.

“There were some church people in there, but they left before the shooting. Morris is the last.”

“Nobody leaves the camp,” Omar said. “Nobody but Morris.” He got in the car and got on the radio. He got ahold of Micah Knox, and told him that he and the rest of the Crusaders were relieved from their regular duty and should meet him on the highway by the John Deere dealership north of the Corp limit.

Omar knew that his own life—that everything he’d built and stood for—was already lost. But if he had to move heaven and earth to do it, he was going to save his boy.

Trucks began rolling into the compound in late afternoon, bringing people back to the men’s camps. Jason was introduced to the leader—“guide”—of his unit, a lanky red-haired man named Magnusson. Mr. Magnusson had a band on one arm that had probably once been white. Though he looked and for the most part smelled as if he’d been working in the hot sun for days, his chin was shaven blue and there was an alert look in his eyes. He called everyone by their surnames, as if first names were too much to bother with.

“We’ll be heading in to dinner when we’re called by the PA, okay?” he said. “We’re the Samaritans.”

“Samaritans,” Jason said. “Right.”

“Thing to remember is, you don’t leave the camp unless you’re working, or unless you’re called. People are doing important work out there, and they don’t need you bothering them.” Jason didn’t like the sound of this. Everyone was supposed to stay behind a fence made of string?

“When can I see my friends?” he asked.

“Morning and evening services.” Mr. Magnusson squinted as he looked down at Jason. “What denomination are you, by the way?”

Jason hesitated. He had a suspicion a truthful answer—his mother’s belief in pyramid power and Atlantis, and his father’s lack of any religion whatever—would not be received well.

“What kind do you have around here?” he asked.

“Well, Reverend Franklin, he’s sort of his own denomination—or he’s multidenominational, depending on how you look at it. He’s Charismatic and Fundamentalist, anyway. We’ve also got Baptists and Pentacostals, okay? Lots of Lutherans, but our pastor was killed in the first quake, so we’ve kind of split up among all the others. The Catholics—uhh, the same. Not that there were so many Catholics to begin with.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at Jason. “You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“I’m Presbyterian,” Jason said.

“Well,” Magnusson said, “we ain’t got any of those. So I guess you’ll just have to pick a congregation from the ones we got.” A gleam entered his eye. “I’d recommend Brother Frankland’s,” he said. “He saved me.”

Jason had hoped that Presbyterianism might leave him out of this issue altogether. “I’ll pick the one that my friends join,” he said.

Mr. Magnusson nodded. “Fine. Any questions?”

Jason pointed at the man’s arm. “What’s the white armband mean?”

“It means I’m in charge. Any more questions?”

“I guess not.”

“Good,” he said. “I want you to buddy up with someone who will show you the ropes and keep you out of trouble. And that someone will be Haynes over there.” He pointed to a skinny, freckled boy in a baseball cap. He lowered his voice, bent to Jason’s ear. “Now Sam Haynes lost his parents in the quake, okay? So what I want you to do is look after him, all right?” He put a hand on Jason’s shoulder.

“Okay,” said Jason, confused by this brisk, over-efficient manner of intimacy. Mr. Magnusson straightened, shouted out. “Haynes! Heaven-o! I want you to meet Jason here.” Sam Haynes was a few years older than Jason. Jason shook his hand. Haynes didn’t seem to have much to say. “I want you to show Jason the ropes,” Mr. Magnusson said. He picked up a roll of large-sized plastic garbage bags, tore a bag off the roll, then handed it to Jason. “This is your ground cover. You sleep on this.”

Jason looked at the bag. “Right,” he said.

“You two go have fun now.”

Jason slung his telescope over his shoulder and prepared to follow Haynes to whatever fun might be found in this place.

“Hey!” Mr. Magnusson called after him. “Adams!”

Jason turned around. “Yes?”

“What’s that thing on your shoulder?”

Jason looked at the Astroscan and decided he was already fed up with this place. “It’s a portable nuclear reactor.” he said.

Mr. Magnusson hesitated. His eyes narrowed, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to size up Jason for a liar. Jason tried to assume an expression of earnest good intentions.

“A nuclear reactor, huh?” Magnusson said. “Like the one in Mississippi that blew up?”

“Well,” Jason said, “not as big.”

Mr. Magnusson hesitated again. He propped his wiry arms on his hips. ” That one ain’t going to blow up, right?”

Jason tried to exude authority. “Not if people don’t mess with it,” he said.

“Well.” Mr. Magnusson chewed his lip. “You don’t let anyone touch it, then.”

“I won’t.” Jason decided he’d better ease away before his guide had time to think about this, so he gave Mr. Magnusson a little wave and headed into the camp.

Haynes wasn’t much company. He didn’t seem interested in whether Jason had a nuclear reactor, or indeed in anything else. He just pointed out a place under an awning, near his own, where Jason could stretch out his plastic bag to sleep on.

“Or you can pick any place that’s empty. Plenty of empty places.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “I noticed that.” The camp seemed more than half-deserted, as if it had been laid out and equipped for a much larger group of people.

“When do we eat?” Jason asked.

“Soon, I hope.” Haynes dropped onto the grass, then flopped onto his back. He pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes. “Let me know when we’re called.”

There were about a dozen Samaritans altogether. They and another group called the Galileans were called to dinner a couple hours later. The meal consisted of a modest piece of baked fish, some mixed vegetables out of cans, and a large scoop of white rice, all served on a compartmented plastic tray that, Jason suspected, had been plundered from a local school. Water to drink, though younger kids got a small glass of milk. During the meal a gospel choir practiced beneath a nearby awning, sometimes swinging into a gorgeous mass harmony before the conductor, dissatisfied with something, stopped them and made them start again.

Jason ate his meal in less than five minutes and asked the others if he was allowed more. He wasn’t. He had eaten better when he was a refugee.

Mealtime lasted fifteen minutes, after which the Samaritans took their trays to a galvanized trough, washed the trays, rinsed them in another trough, and stacked them for the next shift. After this, Mr. Magnusson marched them back to the young men’s camp.

After that it was another long wait, till it was time for church.

It was a long empty road between the A.M.E. camp and Shelburne City. Reverend Morris’ old Ford could be seen for half a mile, even in the fading light, and that was enough. Micah Knox pulled in front of Morris in a pickup truck he’d borrowed from Jedthus. Another one of the Crusaders pulled out behind the Ford, then tapped its bumper from behind. And then, when everyone had stopped to examine the accident, Omar drove up in his cruiser, parked opposite the Ford, and stepped from the car.

Most unexpected was the lack of surprise in Morris’ eyes. There was a strange silent confirmation in those eyes, as if Omar was only attesting to the truth of the reverend’s opinion of him when he raised his pistol and fired it five times through the window.

After that, the pickup rammed the Ford broadside until it tipped over into the bar ditch and rolled onto its roof. Gasoline was poured into the interior and set alight.

An accident. That’s what would go on the report. Failing light, an old man in an old car, on an old earthquake-torn two-lane blacktop. He must have lost control.

Omar would let someone else find the wreck, report the accident, fill out the papers. He would be miles away.

“Beautiful!” Knox said. He stomped up and down the asphalt in his heavy boots, uneven teeth bared in a grin. “Just like in Hunter.”

“There are more witnesses in the camp,” Omar said.

“Beautiful!” said Knox. Firelight danced in his shotgun eyes.

Omar arranged for charges to be dropped against the boy who had been in the car with the driver David had killed. He turned him over to Knox and one of his friends to be driven back to camp, and he was never seen again.

No one would miss him. He’d been released from jail, the camp wasn’t expecting him back, and that was that.

He had gone where the woodbine twineth.

Omar used the shooting incident that day, plus the earlier shooting at Ozie Starks’, as leverage with the parish council and got permission to fence off the two refugee camps. That night he arranged for chain link and barbed wire, fence post diggers, and extra personnel. Extra cars. Extra guns. They would start the ball rolling first thing in the morning.

Nick spent the rest of the afternoon floating. A glorious sense of well-being had fallen on him, and he felt almost free of gravity, bounding over the torn surface of the Arkansas bluff like an Apollo astronaut skipping over the surface of the moon. He had come through fire and water to find Manon and Arlette, through snakes and a hail of buckshot, past madmen armed with guns and a city choking on poison gas. They were alive, and he was alive, and they were alive together.

He had seen Manon’s smile and the glow in Arlette’s eyes when she looked at her birthday present. He was happy, and he wanted to bask in his happiness.

But he couldn’t. Manon and her family were in mourning, and Nick had to conceal his joy, had to pretend that sorrow flooded his heart instead of delight. His was a difficult happiness to conceal; he had to try to remember not to let a ridiculous grin break out on his face, or make too light-hearted a remark. He helped Manon with her work, happy just to be around her. Supper had to be prepared, in an improvised kitchen, for something like a hundred and forty people under the instruction of an elderly white lady who had once been in charge of a school cafeteria. The old woman was very careful of her calorie counts: she ordered rice, vegetables, and fish to be weighed out very carefully.

“Twenty-two hundred calories per day for everyone except the people who have work assignments,” Manon explained. “Five thousand for nursing mothers, or for folks searching the swamps, raising food, or toting bricks. Milk only for growing children, since we don’t have many dairy cattle in the area.”

“That’s not a lot of calories,” Nick said.

“It’s enough to get by, they tell us. But we’re all going to be fashionably thin when we get out of this.” Nick looked at her, and his hand twitched with the impulse to pat her butt. “I always thought your weight was fine just where it is.”

A smile twitched at her lips. “That’s one of the things I liked about you.” Nick hadn’t told anyone that he and Manon were divorced, so he’d been given a place to sleep in the married men’s camp. Married men were assigned to the same work units as their wives and their children, which allowed families to meet during meals. The group that Nick shared with Manon, rather oddly called the Thessalonians, ate last of all, after the lady Thessalonians fed everyone else. Even the late, scanty meal did not dim Nick’s joy. He was with his family. That was all that mattered. After supper was over, just as the sun was touching the western horizon, the PA called everyone to a religious service. The church was too small to contain everyone, so they all sat to one side of the steel church building, on the grassy sward between the church and the young men’s camp. The chorus—massed voices combining the choirs of all the local churches—opened with a rousing version of “Lord Help Me to Pray.” Arlette and some others bounced up to clap along, but most people seemed too tired.

After the song ended the Reverend Frankland bounced up on a box, beaming left and right. “Heaven-o!” he said, and his people chanted “Heaven-o!” right back at him. He thanked the massed choir, promised more music for later, and began by welcoming Nick and Jason to Rails Bluff, and asked them to stand so that people would know who they were. Nick rose, feeling awkward, and saw Jason standing about a hundred feet away. People shouted out, “Welcome!” and “Glad you could make it, brothers!” Nick waved, mouthed the words “Thank you,” and sat again.

Then Frankland spoke of the deaths of Gros-Papa and the others, murdered in Toussaint just a short distance away, and asked for a moment of silence to pray for them.

“Who told him about your daddy?” Nick whispered to Manon after the silence ended. “I never mentioned it.”

“Someone else in the family, I suppose.” Manon said. “Or maybe your friend Jason. You’d be surprised how fast word spreads in this place.”

“What’s he saying now?” Nick wondered, because what Frankland seemed to be saying was that Gros-Papa’s death had been predicted in the Bible, specifically in Matthew, Chapter Twenty-Four.

“Did he really say your papa was in the Bible?” Nick whispered.

“Hush,” Manon said.

“Which means we must beware!” Frankland proclaimed. “The world outside Rails Bluff is becoming a more and more dangerous place. The other day some of our people were shot at, and now we receive news of a mass murder almost on our doorstep. We must venture out only with care, brothers and sisters. The earthquake predicted in Revelations Six has come to pass. And following the earthquake, as predicted in Revelations Chapter Eight, has come the poisoning of the waters—even the President of the United States admits that the waters have been poisoned—and has commanded the people to flee the lakes and rivers.

“‘Woe!’” Frankland said, pitching his voice a little differently to make it clear he was quoting, “‘woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth.’” He looked at a list in his hand. “Let me give you the news of the Last Days.”

He then gave the day’s headlines—the evacuation thrown into chaos by earthquake, cities knocked flat, homeless people wandering the earth in search of food and shelter, the stock market dropping into a bottomless pit, investment and savings wiped out, radiation drifting over the South, armies poised in the Middle East, ready for war.

And to each piece of news Frankland related another piece of the Bible, discussing each of the day’s events in connection with prophecy.

Nick listened in amazement. He turned to Manon to ask if this happened every night, but her sharp glance warned him not to speak. So he looked out over the crowd, to see if they were as astonished by this as he was. Some were listening with great attention, but most seemed only tired and bored. Jason, sitting amid a group of strangers, had a scowl on his face.

Frankland finished with a lengthy prayer for the well-being of loved ones outside Rails Bluff. “We’ll have lights out in twenty minutes,” he said. “Everyone please be in their beds by then, except for those who are on guard duty.”

The choir cut in then, moaning out a melancholy arrangement of “I Don’t Know Why I Need to Cry Sometimes” as everyone stood to leave. “Is that normal?” Nick asked Manon, pitching his voice low so that strangers couldn’t hear him over the sound of the massed choir.

Manon glanced around before answering. “Normal for this place,” she said.

“The man’s off his rocker.”

Manon bit her lip, then took his hand between her two hands. “Baby,” she said, “whose food is your child eating?”

Nick looked at her, then gave a slow nod. He looked down at Arlette, standing between them, and put his arm around her.

They were safe, they were together, they were getting their calories. For this, Nick could put up with an eccentric interpretation of current events.

He saw Jason approach them through the dispersing crowd. The boy seemed more amused than anything.

“Boy,” Jason said, “that was pretty trippy.”

“Ssh,” Manon said, and gave him a look. “Not so loud.”

Nick put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look,” he said, “we’re eating the man’s food. So we take his sermons seriously.”

“If he wants me to be all that serious,” Jason said, “he can give me bigger portions.”

“Hush,” Manon said. Her look was severe, all that commanding David heritage gazing down her nose at the boy.

Jason hesitated for a moment, then said, agreeably enough, “Yes, ma’am,” though his response seemed more a result of calculation—perhaps even politeness—than intimidation.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Arlette give Jason a shared look of—of what? Not encouragement, exactly, but complicity. The alliance of a pair of adolescents against the absurdities of the adult world.

Nick was more sympathetic to Arlette and Jason than they knew.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re guests here, okay. We just do as we’re told till we figure out what’s what.” Jason shrugged. “I won’t make trouble,” he said.

“Good,” Nick said. “Make sure you don’t.”

There are crackers with guns here. Due caution is necessary. That was the message he tried to put into his voice.

Jason said goodnight and made his way to his camp. Manon and Nick walked with Arlette to the string boundaries of what Frankland called the young ladies’ camp, and kissed her goodnight. Her arms went around Nick’s neck.

“Goodnight, Daddy. I’m so glad you’re here.”

A bubble of happiness rose in Nick’s heart. “Happy birthday, baby,” he said. “Sweet dreams.” He kissed her cheek and sent her off into the soft May night. The voices of the choir hung magically in the air. Joy whirled through Nick’s senses. He looked at Manon, saw on her face a thoughtful little smile.

“Yes?” he said.

She shook her head. “Nothing, baby.”

“Are you all right?”

She took a long breath, let it out. Shook her head. “I guess so.”

Nick put his arm around her waist, a motion that felt so easy, so natural, that he was almost surprised at himself. She accepted it, rested her head briefly against his shoulder, then gently detached herself.

“Married women’s camp,” she said. “It’s right here.”

“Can we talk?” he asked. “About what’s going on here? Why is this camp so empty? Where did everyone go?”

“One of the ladies told me there were many more people here after the first quake. But the government evacuated most of them.”

“Leaving only Frankland’s hard core?”

“I suppose so.” Manon looked uncertain. “But more people came in after the second big quake, including my family. So now it’s about fifty-fifty.”

“Can we talk about what we’re going to do?”

Her eyes were serious. “Not yet,” she said. “Wait till you’ve been here a day or two.”

“Okay.”

“Sleep well, Nick.” She reached out, touched his hand for a moment, then withdrew, walking into the married women’s camp.

Nick stood for a moment and savored the touch on his hand, the memory of Arlette’s kiss. The choir’s distant chant quivered in his soul.

And then he made his way to the plastic sheet that served as his bed.

The aftershock jolted Jason awake. He woke with his heart in his throat, eyes staring wide into the darkness. Then someone screamed, screamed right in his ear.

He sat up, felt the earth shudder under him. It wasn’t a bad shock—he knew, he was from California, and besides he’d become an expert on aftershocks by now—but why was someone screaming?

The screamer was Haynes, the buddy Mr. Magnusson had assigned him. The boy was sitting up and uttering one terrified shriek after another, full-blown animal screams vented into the night. They rang in Jason’s ears.

“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey, it’s all right. It’s not bad.”

Boys ran past, sprinting for the big wooden crosses that had been stretched at intervals on the ground. Jason wanted to tell them not to bother, that the aftershock was fairly mild. But Jason couldn’t be heard because Haynes kept screaming, one wail after another, pausing only to fill his lungs. Jason could see tears on his face. He patted Haynes’ back. “Hey. You’re dreaming. It’s okay.” Other boys were screaming, Jason now heard. Boys all through the camp, and through the little kids’

camp next door. The shock had jerked them into the world of nightmare, into memories of the loss of their homes, their property, and sometimes their families. The eerie sounds bubbling up in the darkness around him made Jason’s hair stand on end.

“It’s okay!” Jason shouted, patting Haynes on the back.

Haynes stopped for breath, gulped in air. Then he turned away from Jason, dropped to the ground, and began to cry.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Jason repeated. He couldn’t tell if Haynes was awake or not. He might still be stuck in some nightmare.

Jason was awake now, that was for sure. The wails and sobs echoing through the dark scared him more than the aftershock.

Haynes seemed to calm down a bit, and Jason tried to get back to sleep. That didn’t seem likely. Seemingly at random a boy would wake up shrieking, and someone else would answer from across the camp, and soon there would be a chorus of cries and sobbing and wailing. Jason began to feel a kind of pressure on his mind, the pressure of dread, slowly increasing. He didn’t want to be like these other kids, wailing in the night, desperate for the touch of comfort, desperate to live in a world where the earth did not move.

Jason yearned for dawn.

The wails and cries didn’t stop. Jason took his plastic sack and his blanket to another part of the camp, away from the awning and out under the stars, and there he stretched out on his back, his head pillowed on his hands.

The stars wheeled overhead, beautiful and implacable like all nature. He gazed up and tried to remember their names.

He must have closed his eyes, because next thing he knew it was dawn, and the PA system was booming out instructions for all groups to report to the church for services.

“I was a pornographer! I made a profit out of poisoning the minds of children!” Mr. Magnusson’s voice boomed through the still morning air. The man walked back and forward, holding the microphone to his lips. The dawn glinted on his thin red hair. There was a strange, strained smile on his face, as if he knew he was supposed to be happy but couldn’t recollect why.

“I did my best to destroy my community!” he said. “All I cared about was the money!” There was a regular section of people who cheered and applauded. “Tell it!” they yelled, and “Praise God!” Among those cheering was Frankland.

Jason sat crosslegged on the beaten grass and watched in amazement. He had just dragged himself from the young men’s compound, and hoped that breakfast wouldn’t be too far away. Frankland had started off with some announcements. Jason, still trying to crank his eyes open, hadn’t paid much attention to these, and the next thing he knew the repentant pornographer was strutting out before his cheering section.

Magnusson couldn’t have been in the pornography, Jason decided. He couldn’t feature anyone paying money to see Magnusson naked.

“But then the earthquake happened, and my business was destroyed!” Magnusson said. “And soon I learned that God was sending me a message!”

The burden of the message, it appeared, was that the man had to stay clear of pornography. As this message was elaborated at length, Jason believed he could see tears on the former pornographer’s face.

This guy is in charge of me, Jason thought. He is my guide.

Everyone applauded when the message ended. Some of the applause seemed more enthusiastic than others. Frankland stepped forward and thanked the pornographer for his contribution. Then he looked into the audience and called on someone named Jonathan.

Jonathan was a boy about Jason’s age, one he’d seen around the young men’s compound but not spoken to. The boy said that he used to worship Satan, and listen to Satanic music and do Satanic things like animal sacrifices, but now he knew that Jesus was Lord and not Satan, and he trusted Jesus to get him through the Last Days. Frankland hugged Jonathan when he was done, and almost everyone applauded. After Jonathan came a volunteer, a weathered-looking woman named Cora, who said she used to run around and do drugs, and hang around with people who ran around and did drugs, and she had the tattoos to prove it!—there was laughter at this—but now she was clean for Jesus, and if there was a single man out there who believed in the Lord, monogamy, and the Harley-Davidson motorcycle, she would like to meet him. There was more laughter, but Frankland seemed a little embarrassed by this solicitation, and he announced that they were out of time, and sent everyone to breakfast. Omar had the camp surrounded at dawn, deputies and special deputies and Knox’s Crusaders. All were conspicuously armed, shotguns or rifles displayed. Merle carried his little submachine gun slung under his arm. Once everyone was in place around the silent camp, the fence-builders moved in and started putting up chain link in a long shimmering curtain around the camp, starting with the north and east perimeter, where the camp backed onto an area of hardwood forest.

“It’s a good thing, the fence,” Knox said with his feverish grin. “It’s psychological. It divides us from them. The mud people from the real people.” He nodded. “The fence is a good thing,” he said, as if trying on the concept one more time. “A good thing.”

Omar didn’t answer. A dull ache throbbed in his head, and a sharper pain griped in his stomach. It felt like the worst hangover he’d had in his life, even though he hadn’t been drinking. It was the heat, he figured. He’d just got too used to air-conditioning.

When the fence builders started work there was a lot of movement in the camp, people rushing about in and out of the outlandish shelters they’d made of cotton wagons. People stared and pointed at the circle of deputies with their guns. There was a lot of noise, a few angry voices raised above the others. It was time for the inmates’ morning meal, but the volunteers from the A.M.E. church, who usually prepared the meals, had been stopped outside town at a sheriff’s department roadblock. Omar would just as soon have given the refugees their meal—if that would have kept them quiet—but he didn’t want anyone in the camp telling the A.M.E. people about David and the shooting, because once any version that wasn’t Omar’s version got out, there would be all manner of hell to pay.

Omar planned to keep Hell strictly behind that chainlink fence.

“See, what you want to do,” Knox said, “is alternate random rewards with random punishments. It’s all about behaviorism.” He looked up at Omar from under the brim of his cap. Sweat covered his face with a silver sheen. “You heard about behaviorism,” he said, “right?”

“I have a feeling I’m about to,” Omar said, and wished Knox would just shut the hell up. Knox bounced up and down on the steel-capped toes of his boots. “Behaviorism’s science, see,” he said. “Real science. They worked it out with rats. See, Omar, people—and rats, I guess—they assume that when something happens, there has to be a reason. If something good happens, there has to be a reason for it. And the same with bad things. So if you reward people for no reason, other people will figure there has to be a reason for it, and they’ll try to behave, so they can earn a reward. And if you punish people at random, for no reason at all, then the other people think there has to be a reason, so they’ll be extra-careful not to do anything to piss you off.

“So what you do, see—” Knox grinned “—is give some little girl a box of candy. And then you beat the shit out of her big brother. And anyone who sees it will think that the little girl and her brother both deserved it, somehow. They’ll start to blame the brother for what you did. They’ll say it’s his fault. They’ll say, ‘Why are you making trouble? Why can’t you be more like your sister?’” Knox cocked his hat onto the back of his head and grinned at Omar again. “That’s how you control a big group of people, like you got here. You use science and turn them against each other.”

“Really,” Omar said. His headache throbbed behind his eyes.

“I read about it in a book about the Holocaust,” Knox said. “The Nazis used behaviorism on the Jews. They’d punish Jews at random—beat them, shoot them, whatever—and the other Jews would say, ‘Oh, it’s all the fault of those trouble-making Jews, the Jews who aren’t like us! They’re making trouble for everyone.’ Did you ever see Schindler’s List?”

“Nope,” said Omar. “It’s propaganda, anyway.”

“It’s got a great scene of behaviorism at work. There’s this SS officer named Amon Goeth, and he’s in charge of a prison camp. Every so often he gets up on his balcony with a rifle, and he shoots some Jew at random. Just guns him down!” Knox’s grin turned admiring. “So then the other Jews start working faster and harder, because they figure that Goeth shot the first Jew for being lazy, and the shooting was the dead Jew’s fault. It’s a great movie! I practically had an orgasm in that scene.”

“Uh-huh,” Omar said, and gave Knox a suspicious look. Didn’t he know that the movie was made by a Jew?

“Amon Goeth was a kind of tragic figure,” Knox went on. “He was on top of the world. He could kill anybody he wanted, all the women wanted to fuck him, and everyone was paying him money for privileges. He was like a king! An Aryan king! But then he fell in love with this Jewish girl, and his whole life was destroyed.” He looked solemn for a moment, but then brightened. “But he returned to the true faith in the end. He shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ before the Mongols hanged him.”

“Mongols?” Omar said, surprised.

“You know. Russians.”

“Oh.”

“A great movie, Schindler’s List. Sort of an instruction manual for the Holocaust. Shows you everything you want to do, and all the mistakes you want to avoid.”

Omar felt sweat trickle down his temples. The sun was burning a hole in the top of his head, right through his hat, and it was barely morning.

“Of course,” he said, “everyone knows the Holocaust didn’t really happen.” Knox looked at him in surprise. “You think that?”

“Don’t you?”

“No! I mean, I know we have to say we don’t believe it, because that’s the way politics work and we don’t want to frighten the bourgeoisie, but I think the Holocaust was real! I think it was the greatest thing in human history!”

Omar felt a shock running along his nerves, almost a physical shock. He’d never heard anyone say something like that before.

“I’d like to go to Auschwitz,” Knox said, “and just roll around in the dirt. It’s holy ground, man! I’d like to take some of the dirt back with me and put it on an altar and worship it. Auschwitz was real science, Omar. The Kraut-eaters had their act together there. Real science.” He tapped Omar on the arm, stared up with his strange green eyes. “That’s what you need here, Omar. Science.”

“I guess.” Revulsion for Knox shivered through him. Even if the Holocaust actually happened, even if it was a good thing, Knox was carrying it a mite far with all this worship of Auschwitz dirt. The sun burned Omar’s head and shoulders. The metal barrel of his Remington shotgun, resting against his shoulder, was beginning to scorch a hole in his flesh. He shifted the gun, rested the butt on his hip. He couldn’t understand how Knox could stand it in his long-sleeved flannel shirt. The shirt was dark with sweat stains, and Knox had a strange chemical-bog odor, but he refused to wear anything more suitable to the climate.

“Snake!” Knox screamed, and jumped six feet. Adrenaline jolted through Omar and he leaped to the side himself, his eyes scanning the grass near Knox to find the poison monster.

“Snake! Snake! Snake!” Knox said, doing a frantic dance in his heavy boots. Omar spotted the snake whipsawing its way through the grass, and breathed easy.

“That’s just a little ol’ bullsnake,” he said. “It won’t hurt you.”

“Oh God, I hate snakes!” Knox said, still dancing. “I’m getting out of here.” He marched away. Omar wanted to laugh.

Some Aryan superman, he thought. Scared of bridges, snakes, and who knew what else?

Omar strolled away on a walk along the camp perimeter. His deputies had kept the inmates away from their vehicles, which were parked on the grass parking lot and along the highway, and he walked along between the row of deputies and the cars. Crowds of people were moving in the camp, he saw, and there was a lot of murmuring and gesturing going on.

They hadn’t found a leader yet, though. No one to tell the others what to do, no one to speak for them. Omar looked for the people he’d marked the day before, the ones who had witnessed David shooting the runaway and who would have to go where the woodbine twineth. He thought he saw some of them, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Hey. Hey, Sheriff.”

A man called to him from the verge of the invisible perimeter between the camp and the line of deputies. He was a middle-aged white man, bespectacled, nervous-looking. Somehow he’d been mistaken for an African Methodist Episcopal and put in here, or maybe he’d come with a black person or something.

“Get back there!” said the nearest deputy.

“I want to talk to the sheriff. Please.”

“That’s okay,” Omar said. “I’ll talk to him.” He strolled up to the white man. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering,” the man said, and then hesitated. He lowered his voice. “Can you put me someplace else? Someplace with—” He lowered his voice even more. “Someplace with more Caucasians?” Omar grinned. And then his amusement faltered, because he realized that the man was a witness to what David had done. Or a potential witness, or at least someone who he couldn’t sift out from the real witnesses.

He would never sort them out, he realized with a chill. He hadn’t thought that out before, not in so many words.

Nausea shivered along Omar’s nerves. He looked at the nervous white man and knew him for doomed. You are doomed, he thought at the man, but his thoughts lacked conviction.

“I’m afraid not, sir,” he said. “There’s no other place to put you.”

“Please, Sheriff!” the man blurted. “I know who you are! I’ve seen you on television. Can’t you—can’t you help me?”

If the man had only asked yesterday, Omar thought, before dinner.

“Sorry,” Omar said. “There’s no better place than this.” Not for you, he added mentally.

“They took my fountain pen!” the man said.

Omar looked at him. “Your what?”

“Someone stole my fountain pen! It was a Diplomat! German! It had a lifetime warranty!” Omar couldn’t entirely suppress his grin. “Would you like to file a report?” he asked. Filing a report would keep the man busy, anyway.

“I’ll loan you my Bic,” he added.

The white man gave Omar a disgusted look. “Never mind,” he said, and stalked away. You are doomed, Omar thought at his retreating back. It was easier thinking that, after he had made the man so ridiculous.

He looked right and left, saw the fence-installers working fast.

Fences are a good thing, he thought.

“Here.” His guide, Martin, handed Nick a blue bandanna. “You’ll be needing this.” Nick took the bandanna from his team leader’s hand. “What for?” he said.

“Tie it around your mouth and nose. We’re going to be digging out bodies.” Nick looked at the bandanna for a moment, then felt his stomach turn over as he remembered Helena. He put it in his shirt pocket till it was needed.

Martin had clerked in an auto parts store before the quake had made him “guide” to the Thessalonians—the Second Thessalonians, actually, since the team had been divided into two. Martin was around thirty and white and very blond, with pink skin flaking from sunburn and what looked like a permanent angry red stripe across his nose. He had a wife back in the camp, and four kids. There was a dirty armband on his left arm, a whistle on a chain around his neck, a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, and in the small of his back a holstered semiautomatic pistol of a businesslike aluminum shade. The pistol, he explained, was for snakes or mad dogs. He and Nick were riding in the back of a pickup truck to the town of Rails Bluff, where they would be scavenging items from the remains of the town. And digging out bodies. Nick wasn’t ready for that.

Whose food is your child eating? Manon’s words rose in his mind. His job was to preserve his family. If he had to do it by watching former porn salesmen humiliated, or by digging dead people out of ruins, then that was what he would do. He would be a good soldier, do his duty, and keep his head down, because he owed it to Arlette.

Rails Bluff was a desert of fallen power lines, dusty piles of brick, cracked concrete, shattered glass, torn trees. The pick-up pulled up before a largish ruin in what had been the downtown section. A fallen marquee, tumbled letters and broken bulbs, showed that the place had been a theater. Piles of bricks, timber, roofing material, and tools showed that people had been working here.

“The people who weren’t staying at the Reverend’s camp were mostly in here when the second big quake hit,” Martin explained. “The Reverend wants to give them a Christian burial. There might be medical supplies and food in there, too.”

Martin dropped the tailgate and Nick lowered himself out of the truck. Glass crunched under his work boots. The First Thessalonians and some other crews rode in, and Martin and the other guides began to organize things. Nick tied the bandanna over his face, put on the gloves he’d been given, and began his work.

The morning’s breakfast—a largish lump of oatmeal, served with a spoonful of raisins—sat like a stone in Nick’s stomach, at least until some of the First Thessalonians uncovered the first body, and then the oatmeal began to turn cartwheels. The body—an elderly white lady, starting to bloat—was pulled from the ruin, wrapped in plastic, then covered with a sheet. Nick turned away from the scene and concentrated on tossing bricks into a wheelbar-row and keeping his breakfast down. Aftershocks rumbled continually through the earth.

Martin was cheerful and encouraging as he led his crew. During the course of the morning two more bodies were recovered, and precious little else beyond a few blankets and some battered kitchen gear. At noon a truck arrived from the camp, with peanutbutter-and-jelly sandwiches on homemade bread, two for each worker, and a wheel of white cheese off which the men carved chunks with their pocket knives.

“Hey,” one of the Second Thessalonians said, peering into his sandwich. “At least we got jelly today.” He looked at Nick. “Sometimes it’s just peanut butter.”

“I don’t think we’ve met, officially,” Nick said. “I’m Nick.”

“Tex.” Tex had deep black skin and broad shoulders, with grizzled hair under a tall-crowned straw cowboy hat. The two men sat on the tailgate of the pickup—facing away from where the three bodies lay on the broken street—and began to eat their sandwiches.

“I been hoping to ask,” Tex said, “if you heard ’bout what was happening on the outside.” On the outside. It sounded like the language a man might use in prison.

“I listened to the news on radio until a few days ago,” Nick said. Be cautious, an inner voice warned.

“We could listen to the news on the truck radio,” Tex said, “but Martin won’t let us.” He chewed his sandwich thoughtfully. “Is it true about the nuclear plant that blew up over in Mississippi?”

“They had some problems,” Nick said, “but it wasn’t Chernobyl. A very small amount of radiation released, nothing of any great concern.”

Tex wrinkled his eyes in thought. “You sure it didn’t blow up, and the government covered it up?” Nick looked at his sandwich. “Earthquake or no earthquake, we still have a free press. There must be a hundred reporters with radiation detectors camped out around that plant. If there were even modest amounts of radiation released, it would have been on the radio twelve hours a day.” Tex scratched his jaw. “We’ve all been sort of wondering, you know, where the reverend gets his news.”

“There’s been no big nuclear accident,” Nick said. “That’s for sure.” Tex nodded. “And the poisoned waters?”

“Well,” Nick said, “the quake threw a lot of bad stuff in the water. Jason—my, uh, friend—Jason and I went through a lot of it on our boat, and some of it has to be pretty nasty. The government is evacuating places that get their drinking water from the river, but if you get your water from wells, you should be all right.”

“So we safe here, from the poison.”

“From the poison,” Nick said, “yeah.” He sipped from his cup of water and cleared the peanut butter sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“We can’t listen to the radio?” he asked.

“The reverend collected them all when we came into camp. Cellphones, too, though none of those were working. He said that the noise would upset the children, and it was better if he just told us what was happening.”

Nick looked at Tex cautiously. “What do you think about that?” he said. Tex chewed thoughtfully. “What I got, see,” he said, “is a farm that got destroyed three nights ago, and a momma who just lost her husband, and four kids who just lost their grand-daddy. And if the man who feeds my family don’t want me to listen to the radio, then I guess I don’t listen to it, and I don’t think much about it, neither.”

Nick nodded. “I understand,” he said.

“Besides,” Tex said, and shrugged his big shoulders, “where is there to go? The roads and bridges are gone. We got poisoned water and floods north and east. South and west we got the piney woods—pines was so close together you could barely get between ’em anyway, and now the quake knocked ’em all down, so it’s nothin’ but a big tangle that people can’t get through. I can’t get through it with my family, that’s for sure.”

Nick nodded. The quake had knocked the middle part of the country back two hundred years. With transportation and communications gone, each little community might as well be an island all to itself.

“Do you know,” Nick asked, “if the reverend, or anyone else, is trying to communicate with the outside?” Tex just shook his head.

“Hey.” Martin walked around the truck. There was a grin on his face, but a wary determination in his eyes. “Y’all don’t need to talk about this.”

Be cautious, Nick’s inner voice said. “Well,” he answered, “I’m new here. I’m just trying to work out the rules.”

“That’s good.” Martin nodded. “But if you need to know things, you should ask the guides. That’s what we’re here for, to guide you.” He hitched up his belt, and Nick remembered the holstered pistol he wore behind his back.

“I wanted to know if we can call our families outside Rails Bluff,” Nick said.

“No communications,” Martin said. “There’s no way.”

“There’s a radio station,” said a new voice. “If the Reverend Doctor Brother His Holiness Frankland could just be persuaded to use his radio station to call for help, we could have food and fuel and medicine brought in.”

Nick looked at the new man. He was a red-faced, balding man with a large stomach and a loud voice.

“We got all that now, Brother Olson,” Martin said. “People were worried about things like insulin, but it turned out that Reverend Frankland had a whole refrigerator of the stuff. Every time food supplies start to run short, he opens another bunker, and there’s the food. The reverend’s been preparing for this for years.”

“So why are we digging in the ruins for beat-up old cans, if we have so much?” Olson asked. “And why can’t we just send a message, on Brother His Holiness Frankland’s radio station, to let our families outside the area know that we’re okay? I’ve got a sister in Mississippi that must be worried sick about me and my whole family.”

Martin shook his head. “Take that up with Brother Frankland. But if I were you, I’d just give thanks to the Lord that you’re with us, where it’s safe.” He looked at his watch, clapped his hands together. “You guys better finish. We need to start workin’.”

Olson kicked a chunk of brick fifty feet, then stalked away. Nick washed the last of his sandwiches down with water and began clearing rubble. The truck that had brought their lunch left with three bodies in its bed.

A couple hours after lunch Martin blew his whistle. He’d got a call on his walkie-talkie: there was a situation near the camp.

Someone had died. There was an emergency. And now everyone had to catch fish. Trouble began at mid-morning, when the fence-builders began to assemble the fence that would cut off the people in the camp from their vehicles. Several clumps of refugees surged forward, shouting and gesticulating. The deputies waved them back. And then people among the crowds began to throw things, first whatever they had handy, and then fist-sized whitewashed rocks that were used to line the campsite’s fire circles. The fence-builders retreated. The deputies looked nervous and clutched their weapons as they dodged the rocks being flung at them.

At the first sign of trouble Omar had made his way to Ozie Welks, who stood in the parking lot. Since the destruction of his bar he had been working full-time as a special deputy.

“I need you to shoot me a rioter,” Omar said.

Ozie shifted his plug tobacco from his right cheek to his left. “You got it, Omar.” He raised his .30-’06, sighted briefly over the iron sights, and squeezed the trigger.

Omar saw the bullet hit, strike right in the chest of a young black man with a stone in an upraised arm. There was a splash of dust and blood and the stone-thrower fell.

There were shouts. Screams and curses. A thrashing of tents and awnings as people fled. Though a few people unloaded a stone before they ran, Omar heard most of the rocks thud on the ground as the crowd rolled back.

And then there were more shots, bang-bang-bang, as a man in dreadlocks—a huge black man, tall and broad-shouldered and amazingly fat—came running from the crowd, firing a pistol as he ran. His cheeks and stomach and dreads bounced with each step. Deputies dived for cover as bullets sang in the air around them.

“Him, too,” said Omar.

Ozie sighted, fired. The bullet hit the fat man in the hip and dropped him to the ground, but the man still thrust out his pistol, still fired until the slide locked back on an empty magazine; and then Ozie shot again and hit again in the center of the man’s naked chest, and the man kicked twice and died.

“Semper fi,” said Ozie.

None of the deputies had been hit, despite the man who had managed to fire off a full magazine. Shooting a handgun while running full-tilt toward an armed enemy was a terrifying sight, but not the most tactical thing the gunman could have done.

A shriek came from somewhere in the camp, the sound of a woman in terror. The sound raised the hackles on Omar’s neck. “What the hell?” he muttered.

He moved forward, across the line of the uncompleted fence, gestured his deputies forward. “Get that gun!” he said, pointing to the dreadlocked man. The crowd shrank from the advancing, armed line, receding like an ocean wave to reveal a young woman sprawled across a three-year-old child. The child was wailing, too, her face so contorted by pain and fear that the tears almost leaped from her eyes. There was blood on the child and on the mother. One of Ozie’s bullets had gone through the target and struck the little girl.

In the arm, Omar thought. The wound couldn’t be that critical if the child had so much strength to scream.

“My baby!” the woman wailed. “My baby! Oh Jesus help my baby!” Omar stopped dead as he stood over them. Give her a box of candy, he thought inanely. Yes. Yes, that made sense.

“My baby! My baby! They shot my baby!”

He bent, encircled the mother’s shoulders with his arms. “We’ll get your girl to the doctor,” he said.

“Come along, now.”

He rushed her out of the camp. Beckoned to Merle. “Take the girl to Dr. Patel,” he said, then added, in a low voice, “Don’t let the mother talk to anyone else.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Bring them back when the doctor’s finished.”

When Merle had raced off, siren crying and lights flashing, Omar called Jedthus.

“I want you to go to town,” he said, “and bring me a bag of candy. Here’s five bucks.” Jedthus looked thunderstruck. “Omar? A bag of candy?”

“Yeah.”

“Now? With a riot going on?”

Omar looked at the silent camp, the people huddled in whatever kind of cover they could find on the flat ground. Huddled as far away from him as the fence would allow. “Do you see a riot going on, Jedthus?” he asked.

Jedthus sighed. “What kind of candy?”

“Milky Way. Snickers. Whatever’s in the Commissary.”

After Jedthus departed, Omar had the two bodies dragged out of the camp and covered with plastic sheeting. This was bad police procedure, to take the two bodies away from where they’d been shot before they could be photographed and seen by the coroner, but Omar figured the riot excused his actions.

Besides, he didn’t give a damn about the two dead people and he figured no one else would, either. He let them lie in plain sight, where the refugees could see them, while he called the fence-builders back to work.

This time there wasn’t a riot.

Omar watched the silent, resentful people in the camp, and he thought about what Knox had told him. Use science, he thought, turn them against one another. There were over two hundred people in that camp, and they had to be kept quiet and obedient and isolated.

Science, he thought. Science would save his son.

The sun hammered Omar’s head. His stomach churned. He wished he had sent Jedthus for Alka-Seltzer as well as candy. He went into his police cruiser and turned on the air-conditioning, and the cool and silence helped him to think. By the time that Jedthus returned with Omar’s bag of candy, he thought he had his plan worked out.

The heat and the lack of food combined to keep the camp quiet. People splayed out under awnings and in the camp’s shaded picnic areas, trying to stay out of the heat. Aftershocks shivered the tops of the trees. By one o’clock in the afternoon the fence was finally finished, a shimmering twelve-foot barrier of chain link with only a single gate that led out into the parking lot and the highway. The fence-builders began stringing razor-wire along the top.

“Five hours, twenty-two minutes,” Micah Knox said, looking at his big musical pocket watch. “Pretty neat, considering we had a riot and everything.”

Omar got his bullhorn from his car and advanced to the gate.

“Now you saw what happened when there was trouble,” he said. “Three people got shot, and one of them was a little girl. So I don’t want any more trouble, any more rocks or guns, because the folks who will end up paying for it will be the families here.

“So here’s what I want. I want you to choose a council to help run the camp. Responsible folks, family folks. Ten will do. And I and the parish will deal with the council, and the council will deal with the rest of you.

“The council will arrange for y’all’s distribution of food. I am going to leave now to get you some food supplies, and when I come back, I hope you’ll have chosen some people that I can turn this food over to.”

He left them to think about that for a while. The two bodies were loaded into the back of a pickup truck to be carried to Tree Simpson, and Omar arranged for the fat man’s pistol—a boxy-looking Glock 9mm, weapon-of-choice for gangsters and gangster wannabees—to be bagged for evidence and brought along with the bodies.

“I’ll be along to see Tree in just a minute,” Omar told his deputies, and sent the truck banging on its way. He himself stopped by the Reverend Morris’ wrecked California bungalow, where he found the church people waiting with the shipment of food they’d brought in for the camp’s meals. When Omar pulled into the driveway, he saw them assemble in the area between the house and the church, surging around his car before he could get it parked. They were stiff with barely suppressed hate and anger. Omar got out of his car and tipped his hat to Morris’s widow. “I’m sorry about your husband, Miz Morris,” he said. “He was a good man.”

“Thank you.” Mrs. Morris’ tone was strained but not impolite. “But when may we bring the food into the camp?”

“Yeah!” one of her supporters said. “The food!”

“There are babies in the camp,” Mrs. Morris continued, “and they need their milk.”

“There’s been trouble at the camp, Miz Morris.” He frowned at her. “And I need to ask you—do you have any reason to believe that someone may have wished your husband harm?” Mrs. Morris looked surprised. She raised a hand to her wrinkled throat. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“He was last seen in the company of a young man from the camp,” Omar said. “And now Dr. Morris is dead and the man is missing.” He waited for that to sink in, then added, “I will have Tree Simpson take a good look at your husband’s body, and we’ll see if there is any reason to suspect foul play.” He looked at Mrs. Morris, then lifted his eyes to the others, her family, and some of the church workers.

“I didn’t see the accident site myself,” he said, “so I didn’t have any reason to be suspicious, but after what happened at the camp this morning I began to wonder. There was a riot, you see—a real riot, and my deputies were shot at, and two people were killed. And a little girl was wounded. A little girl!” He raised his voice, tried to sound outraged. “Maybe you saw my deputy taking her and her mother to the doctor.”

He saw barely perceptible nods from several of the group.

“There are bad folks at the camp, Miz Morris,” Omar said. “Drug dealers, thieves, gangsters. I suspect one of them killed your husband. I don’t think I can allow civilians like yourselves into that camp anymore. It would only put you in harm’s way.”

Mrs. Morris absorbed this slowly. Her lips trembled, either with emotion or words that she hadn’t quite formed.

“I will have the parish take over delivery of the food,” Omar said. “It’s government food anyway. You people have been good enough to volunteer to prepare and distribute it, but I can’t put you in danger any longer. Not once they start shooting at us.”

He got on the radio and gave orders for his deputies to take possession of the food, then drove to the courthouse to meet with Tree Simpson.

“Give Ozie a chance,” Tree said with a weary grin, “he’ll put an end to the population explosion single-handed. What is it—three dead men so far?”

“I’m not here to talk about Ozie,” Omar said. “I want to talk about Dr. Morris.” Tree looked surprised. “What about him? I was going to send the body to the funeral home.”

“There may have been foul play there,” Omar said. “Could you give the body another look?” Tree looked dubious. “It was burned pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know if I could find much on my own. Normally we’d send the body to Baton Rouge for a proper autopsy, but I don’t know if we can do that in the circumstances.”

“Just give it a look. There may be something there. An exit wound, a shank left in the body. Something.”

“Exit wound?” Tree frowned dubiously. “The back of the head was gone, but that could have been because the brains boiled in the fire and the head exploded.” He shrugged. “I’ll see what I can find.” Omar left Tree’s office with a quiet triumph singing in his blood. Things were working out. He would blame Morris’ killing on someone who was already dead, the runaway boy that Knox and his people had killed yesterday, sent where the woodbine twineth. And then what he’d tell Spottswood Parish was that the boy was still at large, still armed, still murderous. And that would end any kind of friendly relations between the local community—particularly the local black community—and the refugees in the camps.

What Omar intended to do next was to divide the people in the camp from one another. On his way out of town he stopped by the Commissary and bought some Alka-Seltzer, and he dropped it in a bottle of water that he also purchased and drank it off. It didn’t help. When he returned to the camp, he met with the council that the refugees had chosen to represent them. All black, mostly middle-aged people, more women than men.

They had no experience, he guessed, at organizing and feeding hundreds of people. It would all go wrong—not enough cooked, or too much, or it would be badly distributed. And when the inevitable screw-ups came, when people got angry, it would be against their own leaders. While the food was being carried into the camp and delivered to the camp committee, the little girl who had been shot was delivered along with her mother to the camp. The bullet had hit the fleshy part of the upper arm, but it hadn’t broken the bone, and the girl was fine now that Dr. Patel had given her some stitches, some painkiller, and a tetanus booster.

The little girl was sleepy with the painkiller and the after-effects of her fright, and her mother carried the girl in her arms as Merle walked her into camp. Omar followed with the bag of Three Musketeers candy that Jedthus had brought him, and waited till the mother was in plain sight of the people gathered around waiting for their meal.

He tipped his hat politely to the mother, and addressed himself to the sleepy little girl. “This is for you,” he said, and handed out the candy. “You be sure to share it with your friends, okay?” The little girl took the candy and looked at it with an air of incomprehension.

“Thank you, Sheriff,” the mother said.

Omar smiled and tipped his hat again. “All in a day’s work, ma’am,” he said.

“Pretty slick, Omar,” Knox said admiringly as Omar left the camp. “You’ve been paying attention, huh?” Omar ignored him and went to his car and turned the air-conditioning on high. He felt like hell.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The President stared at the coffin that softly gleamed in the subdued lighting of the East Room, nestled beneath a huge bouquet between the Eliphalet Andrews portrait of Martha Washington and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of her husband. For a moment, a weird, wild grief struck him, and the President wanted to fling himself onto the coffin and wail and tear his hair. Then, just as suddenly, he was again himself, the President of the United States, standing on the polished floor in the silent solemnity of the Executive Mansion. In the morning, the gates of the White House would be opened and the public would file through the East Room, thousands of people sharing in the ritual of mass mourning. More than the First Lady would be mourned tomorrow. Many thousands had died across the middle of the nation. Some were buried beneath unexcavated rubble; some were buried anonymously in mass graves; and many would never be found.

Tomorrow’s funeral of the First Lady, here in the White House and taking place under the universal eye of television, was only the most public of the funerals for earthquake victims. All those who lost loved ones, or who waited in gnawing uncertainty, would now have a chance to participate in the rite of public mourning. In the public mind, this funeral might come to stand for them all. That was why, over the strong objections of the President’s security detail, the public funeral had to be held in the White House, the tragedy brought fully into the national home.

And—though even Stan Burdett was too tactful to say so—the President was enough of a politician to know that this was something of a public relations bonanza. In the past, the nation had presidents who, as in the cliché, claimed they shared the citizens’ pain. Now the tens of thousands who had lost so much in the quakes knew that the President was one of them. He, too, had lost a loved one in the tragedy. The President expected that his next set of approval ratings would be at an all-time high. He would have prodigious coattails. The Party would stand to gain in the next elections.

The President, however, had not yet made up his mind whether he really cared about this or not.

“Sir?” The Marine colonel who had been put in charge of the funeral arrangements stood by, the subdued lights gleaming on the buttons of his blue full-dress jacket. “Mr. President? Is everything suitable?” The colonel, the President remembered, had been reviewing the arrangements for the funeral, talking all this while. The President hadn’t heard a word.

Well. It probably didn’t matter anyway.

The President cleared a particle of grief that seemed to have lodged in his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s fine.”

The President walked across the gleaming parquet floor to the coffin and laid his hand upon its smooth surface. He made the gesture only because he knew it would have seemed odd if he hadn’t. Whatever was actually in the coffin, the burnt offerings that had been raked from the remains of Air Force Two, bore no resemblance to the woman with whom he had shared his life. For some reason the President found this a comfort. He would have been far more disturbed had he thought of the First Lady—the woman who had shared his life, his career, his bed—lying cold, still, and recognizable, in her familiar blue suit with its familiar corsage, all locked in the mahogany-and-bronze box.

Also because it was expected, he bent his head for a moment, and clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. In reality his mind was pleasantly numb. Whatever of the out-side world intruded on his thoughts, it seemed to come through a layer of cotton wool. Since his wife’s death he had been operating largely on automatic pilot, making decisions in a world that seemed strangely devoid of consequence or purpose. Yet he managed to make decisions. Most of them did not require a lot of thought—most situations had obvious enough answers, and when they didn’t, he was resigned to the fact that decisions taken in an emergency were necessarily taken on the fly, with incomplete information, and that consequences would have to be dealt with as they occurred.

I say come, he thought, and they cometh; I say shove off, and they shoveth. And in the end, the world seems to spin on its axis whether they cometh or not.

He looked up at the tactful sound of a throat being cleared. It was one of his aides, reminding him of the meeting of his foreign policy working group. He finished his prayer—his public, nonexistent prayer, his dumb-show for the peace of mind of the Marine colonel and any other onlookers who wanted the President, in his grief, to behave “normally,” whatever that meant—and as he made his way out he stopped by the colonel to thank him for the care he had taken with his arrangements, and said he would see him tomorrow. Then he walked with his aide down the length of the Jefferson Pavilion to the West Office Wing and the Oval Office.

The foreign policy working group consisted of the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and various representatives from the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce.

For once, the President thought, he was able to attend a meeting without Boris Lipinsky droning on at his elbow.

The President greeted the working group in the Oval Office, accepted their condolences on the loss of the First Lady, and seated himself behind Rutherford B. Hayes’ desk. He turned to the Secretary of State. “What’s on the agenda?” he said.

“Firstly, Mr. President,” the Secretary said, “I’m relieved to report that Israel, Syria, the Palestinians, and Iraq have been persuaded to reduce their state of military alert.”

“Good work. Thank you, Darrell.”

The Secretary smiled in acknowledgment. “We’ve got alarming news from the Balkans, sir. We are receiving bulletins on the persecution by Macedonia of its Albanian minority.”

“Which Macedonia?” the President asked. The Greeks held onto the view that their Macedonia was the real one, with the state that called itself Macedonia being made up entirely of imposters. The Greeks were more or less alone in this view, but still the distinction created a degree of uncertainty in the terminology.

“The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” the Secretary clarified. “Though the Greek Macedonians would probably be happy to persecute their Albanians as well, come to that.”

“And what form does the Former Yugoslavs’ persecution take?”

“Attacks on villages by paramilitaries. Minor ethnic cleansing.” The Secretary sighed. “I regret to say that minor ethnic cleansing, unless checked, often turns into major ethnic cleansing.” And, he did not need to add an ethnic cleansing that would further destabilize a region that was already one of the most explosive places on earth. If Macedonia became unstable, Greece might very well intervene against the small nation that dared to usurp the name that Greece considered its own. The Serbs, friendly with the Greeks, might seize the opportunity to restore their hegemony in Bosnia and Kosovo. Turks might view any larger conflict as their chance to adjust their borders with Greece. The Serbs were loathed by the Bosnians, Croatians, Kosovars, and Albanians, and the Montenegrins didn’t think much of them either. All of these might view with favor the chance to reduce the influence, territory, or army of Serbia.

The Balkans had already graced the planet with the First World War. A certain degree of concern, the consensus considered, was definitely in order.

The President, swathed in his strangely congenial mental habit of cotton wool, had difficulty summoning any degree of concern whatever. But he was aware that the President ought to be concerned about such things, and he made the appropriate responses.

“What can we do about it?” the President asked.

“There are already NATO soldiers in Macedonia,” the National Security Advisor said. “Patrolling the borders of Kosovo and Albania at the request of the Macedonian government. But they are lightly armed, dispersed through the countryside, and vulnerable to retaliation should they attempt to intervene in any local matters.”

The National Security Agency had been created as an activist organization by President Kennedy, frustrated by the cautious diplomacy of the career diplomats at State. Traditionally the NSA was interventionist, willing to charge into any crisis with any amount of force; while the woolly minded diplomats at Foggy Bottom preferred caution, more caution, and endless talk.

The two men in the Oval Office reversed this tradition. The Secretary of State was a bouncy activist, a kind of muscular missionary for American values who was willing to take troubles by the neck and shake them till their teeth rattled. The National Security Advisor, a military man, had always been far more cautious. The President had the impression that the general did not want to commit force anywhere in the world unless he had a million armed men, bases and supplies prepositioned, a resolution from the UN Security Council, and a forecast predicting six weeks of perfect weather. The President often thought of his Security Advisor as his General in Charge of Saying No.

No, as far as the President could discern through the strange inconsequential mist that seemed to envelop him, seemed the proper response to this situation. “Let’s dump this in the Europeans’ lap,” he said.

“Sir,” said the Secretary of State. He bounced with impatience on his Federal period armchair. “The Europeans have shown themselves consistently unable to deal with ethnic conflicts on their own continent.”

“Well,” said the President, “let them learn.”

“Without us,” Darrell persevered, “they have no leadership. They’re a committee without a head—you can’t run a crisis by committee. Not with a dozen or fifteen countries all having an equal vote with Luxembourg.”

“If they need leadership, then lead them,” the President said. “Give them orders, if you like. But don’t commit American resources. They will understand the reasons.”

The American people, with their economy in ruins and a large percentage of their population living in camps or wandering for an indefinite period as refugees, would not look kindly on an administration that committed its forces to the defense of the Albanian minority of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. If the President tried, Congress would go berserk.

Albanians would die—die horribly, tortured and raped and bludgeoned—but the President knew that most congressmen would rather see fifty thousand Albanians publicly tortured to death on CNN than to have a single serviceman from their home district come home in a box. Probably most of them, like their constituents, could not even find Albania or Macedonia on a map.

It was the Albanians’ loss that the planet’s only remaining superpower was so pig-ignorant of the world, but there you were. Those who did not know history, the President thought, were doomed to watch it being made by other people. He smiled to himself in appreciation of this little private witticism. The President became vaguely aware that the Secretary of State had shifted to another topic. “Russian paramilitaries, sir,” the Secretary of State. “Infiltrating into Georgia in large numbers—infiltrating, hell,” he added scornfully, “they’re taking buses and planes. Mercenaries, former Spetznaz men, old Gamsakhurdians, Russian Mafia, South Ossetian and Abkhazian separatists…”

“Aiming at what?” the President said, interrupting because he saw no point in the list going on. It was one of the facts of post-Cold War geopolitics that he knew who these people were, that a revolt of Gamsakhurdians and South Ossetians was something for which he was intellectually prepared. The Secretary shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they’re after control of the new oil pipelines, maybe they just want to keep the Georgians running scared. Maybe they want to annex Abkhazia. Who knows if the Russians even know what they’re after? It’s a way of keeping the pot stirring in the Near Abroad. If things turn chaotic enough, they may be able to find some advantage. Or loot, that being what a lot of Russian generals are after these days.”

“And our options?”

“Our soldiers in Georgia are few and highly specialized,” said the National Security Advisor. “They are certainly not prepared to intervene in any Georgian civil conflict.”

The President blinked. He turned his gaze on the advisor. “We have military assets in the Georgian Republic?” he said.

“Certainly. Special ops people, trainers and advisors, and communications specialists listening in on communications in Russia, Ukraine, and other areas of interest.”

The President supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. He’d probably been told this at one time or another, and forgot.

“Well,” he said, attempting something that was half a joke, “I suppose it would be unwise to start a conflict with Russia.”

“We can’t do anything for Georgia other than let the Russians know we’re paying attention,” the Secretary agreed. “The Russians would go ballistic if we interfered with their arrangements in the Near Abroad.”

“Which does not include Latvia,” the National Security Advisor added. The President looked at him in surprise. “Joe?” he said. “Latvia?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” the Secretary said. “I must have been unclear. The paramilitaries are also moving into Latvia. We presume they will attempt to cause civil disturbances which the Russians can profitably exploit. A few years ago the Russian military ran war games in the region of the Baltics, in which they simulated taking over a small country. They called it ‘Operation Return.’” The President tried to focus on this problem. It seemed to require more than his current level of concentration could quite absorb.

“Latvia is only a little more than fifty percent ethnic Latvian,” the National Security Advisor said. “The rest are mostly Russians or Belorussians. We presume that the Russian infiltrators will attempt to provoke conflict between the Latvians and the minorities, who will then ask for Russian protection…”

“Latvia and the other Baltics are within the West’s sphere of influence,” the Secretary said. “They’re candidate NATO members, and the only reason they are not fully within our defense umbrella is that we have tried not to offend Russian sensibilities. The Baltics were part of the USSR, and the Russians would be very sensitive about these nations being made part of a Western military alliance.”

“The Baltics are militarily indefensible,” added the advisor. “Latvia’s nothing but a plain with rolling hills—Russian tanks could be in the capital in a matter of hours. I have to question whether NATO

should commit itself to defending that which cannot be defended.”

“Enrolling the Baltics in NATO is the best way of protecting them,” the Secretary countered. “Let the Russians know that if they roll their tanks over that Latvian plain, there will be consequences, that they’ll have to take on all of Europe and the U.S. at the same time…”

The President’s head whirled. The Secretary’s vehemence was making his head ache. He pressed his palms to his temples. “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a little late to debate the NATO issue now. The question is, what can we do in the current situation?”

“Sorry, Mr. President,” the Secretary said. “But this is a clear challenge to the West and to your leadership. They want to discover whether we still possess the will to defend our commitments in light of the tragedy that has befallen us.”

Will seemed to the President a perfectly absurd thing to want to possess. What did will matter in a world that could wipe you out without thinking? That could open a crevasse in your path and leave you a burnt cinder on the runway?

Will was meaningless. An absurdity. It flew in the face of Nature. And for a nation to possess will—that notion was even more ridiculous.

Still, the holder of the office of the President was presumed to possess something called will. The President supposed that he was obliged to pretend that something like will existed. And then an idea occurred to him.

“Do you suppose the Russian President knows what his people are up to?” he asked. He himself, after all, hadn’t known there were American soldiers in Georgia; perhaps the Russian President was similarly uninformed. Or indifferent.

The Secretary seemed interested in this idea. “It’s very possible,” he said. “The Executive over there has uncertain control over some of its departments, let alone things like paramilitaries. It wouldn’t be the first time some ambitious minister or general blindsided his own leadership.”

“Perhaps you should tell our ambassador to inform their President on the QT,” the President said. “Point out what a PR disaster the whole thing could be if it went wrong, like in Chechnya.” He turned to the Secretary. “It was Chechnya where they really screwed the pooch, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell them that this isn’t a public issue yet,” the President free-associated. “But that it can be. Tell him, hey, his people have already screwed up their little operation, everyone’s onto them, if he acts quickly, he can save face.”

“But if the Russian President is the person behind it…”

“It won’t make any difference,” the National Security Advisor said quickly. “It’s a way of saving his face whether he’s a part of it or not. Just tell him the jig’s up. There’s no need to make a public issue of it.”

“Not unless we need to,” the Secretary said. Calculation gleamed in his eyes. The President rose from behind the desk. “Let me know what the Russian President says,” he said. “I’m interested.”

I’m interested in knowing why he cares, he thought.

The others, startled, rose from their seats. “I have a big day tomorrow,” the President said. “I’ll leave the details to you gentlemen.”

Maybe his idea was useful. Maybe it wasn’t. He would probably never know.

The world could open at his feet and swallow him up, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anything. He left the room, made his way out through the West Office Wing into the White House proper, and went up carpeted steps to his own private apartments. He sat on his bed for a long while and tried to decide whether or not he really wanted to lie down.

He really couldn’t tell. So, after thinking about it for a while, he did nothing. Jason hadn’t had a good day. Most of it was spent cleaning out a feed store. The roof had fallen in, but a team of grownups had cleaned up some of the wreckage, and propped up the roof so that it was safe to go inside. The Samaritans were employed in hauling out fifty-pound feed sacks, twenty-pound sacks of dog food—Jason hoped he wouldn’t be eating it later—and sacks of useful seeds, which apparently people hoped to plant for food. Most of the Samaritans were older, bigger, and stronger than Jason, and the work was easier for them. Sweat dripped in his eyes and he panted for breath in the humid air. The roof creaked and groaned to aftershocks. By the time lunch break came, all he wanted to do was throw himself to the ground and try to sleep. Mr. Magnusson had to badger him into eating his peanut butter sandwiches.

During the lunch break, three of the other Samaritans asked him if he’d brought a nuclear reactor into camp with him. They pronounced it nu-cu-lar. He always told them yes. After lunch Jason went back to hauling sacks, but shortly thereafter a call came on Magnusson’s radio, and everyone was loaded into the truck to go somewhere else and harvest fish. Whatever a fish harvest consisted of, Jason thought, it had to be better than hauling feed sacks.

The fish emergency was across the road from Frankland’s camp. When Jason stepped up the earth embankment onto the edge of the catfish pond, he looked at the pond in stunned surprise. There were acres of still water glinting silver in the sun, all divided into smaller ponds by earthen barriers. All of the water was choked with fish, tens of thousands of them.

And all the fish were dead, floating belly-up. They were so closely packed in places they formed shoals. A number of adults, Jason saw, were gathered around a man who lay on the earthen bank by one of the ponds, next to a large, bright blue machine that looked like an oversized outboard motor. Jason was sufficiently exhausted that he didn’t realize right away that the man was dead.

“Right,” Magnusson said. “We’ve got to harvest all the fish, okay? So we can eat them, okay?” He grinned. “Big fish fry tonight!”

Jason’s head reeled. The fish were dead. He were supposed to eat poisoned fish for dinner?

He raised a hand. “Mr. Magnusson?” he said. “What killed these fish?” Magnusson looked at him, grinned. “It wasn’t anything that’ll kill us, okay?”

“What was it?” Jason asked.

“Oxygen starvation,” Magnusson said. “They weren’t poisoned, they strangled to death. So we can eat them, okay?” He went on to explain that if the temperature and humidity were right, algae could grow in the catfish ponds. The algae used up all the oxygen, so the fish would die unless they could get oxygen. Joe Johnson, who owned the ponds, had died attempting to save his fish. The blue object was, in effect, a large blue outboard motor, electrically powered, with a propeller on the end. It was called an aerator, and its propeller acted to thrash air into the water so that the catfish wouldn’t die. When algae began to grow in his catfish ponds, Mr. Johnson had tried to start his aerator, but had electrocuted himself by accident, and his catfish had died before anyone noticed.

Stupid way to get killed, Jason thought through his weariness. But then, he thought, what was the intelligent way to die? Get blown up by your star?

Jason looked from the dead man to the acres of dead fish. “We’re not going to harvest them by hand, are we?”

Magnusson grinned. “Not exactly, no. We’ve got other plans for you.” In a few minutes a truck arrived, with a crane on its bed. A net was strung from the crane, and a team of men deployed the net along the far side of the pond. Then the crane hauled in the net, brimming with dead catfish, and dropped the fish into the back of one of the pickup trucks that had brought the work crews to the site.

“Right!” Magnusson called, and clapped his hands. “Everyone get on the slime line!” Jason realized with a certain listless revulsion that he was not expected to rescue the dead fish from the ponds, he was going to have to clean them afterward.

“Ten tons of fish!” Magnusson shouted. “And we’re going to save every pound, glory hallelujah!”

“Omar,” Tree Simpson said. His voice crackled over the radio in Omar’s police cruiser. “Omar, I’ve got some information for you. About Morris.”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know, I thought I should maybe get the body X-rayed, to see if there were any bullets in it. But Dr. Patel’s little X-ray machine is out of commission, so what I did—I’m kinda proud of this, actually—was to borrow Joe Roberts’ metal detector. And when I passed it over the head, it started beeping. So I probed into the skull, and I came out with a deformed nine-millimeter round.”

“I took a nine millimeter into custody today,” Omar said. “From one of the rioters.” The gun would test negative, of course, because the pistol that killed Morris was sitting on Omar’s hip, but that didn’t signify. All that meant was that there was more than one armed bad man in the camp: more information with which to terrify the good people of the parish.

“It may be a while before we can send it to the state police to test it.”

“It’ll wait,” Omar said. “Thanks a bunch, Tree. This is real helpful.” Now he would tell Mrs. Morris that someone from the camp had killed her husband. He would put out a murder warrant for a man already dead, send out a bulletin, and then he would send deputies to everyone who lived around the camp, warning them of armed, murderous refugees. Don’t talk to anyone from the camp, they would say, just call the police and we’ll deal with them.

And then Omar would do what was necessary. He didn’t want to think about it yet, because it would mean the end of everything he had worked for.

But he knew he would face it when the time came.

Jason was given a knife and instructions on the filleting of a catfish, a task more difficult than it sounded. The dorsal spine had to be avoided, and the tough skin, which had no scales, had to be peeled off rather than scraped. The easiest way to accomplish this was to nail the fish’s head to a plank, then peel the skin off with a pair of pliers. Jason repeatedly demonstrated his incompetence at this task, so Magnusson reassigned him to another group that gutted the fish before the stronger, more experienced boys peeled them.

Others were getting the big smoker ready to smoke fish on an industrial scale, other fish were being salted, drying racks were being readied, and the kitchens were frying and baking fish as fast as they could be delivered.

Dinner was fried fish served with a ball of rice. For once Jason ate as much as he wanted. He suspected this generosity wouldn’t survive the current emergency, and though the fish half-nauseated him, he made himself eat as much as he could. The work went on after dark, by floodlights strung up on the poles that held the PA speakers. Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse, the weird artwork with its iridescent, hallucinatory rendition of biblical scenes, glowed in the light of the floods and provided an eerie backdrop to the toiling workers. The Reverend Frankland’s tones boomed from the speakers, either old recorded speeches about the upcoming Apocalypse or genial encouragement to everyone on the slime line. An exhausted cheer rose from the camp as the last of the fish was cleaned about one in the morning. Jason’s clothes were covered with blood and fish guts. He smelled like offal and his head swam with exhaustion. He’d cut his hands with the filleting knife, and no bandage would stick to him in the slime, so he just bled onto the fish until the wounds closed. He washed in a galvanized horse trough and threw himself onto the first piece of level ground that wasn’t already occupied by a stunned figure. If boys cried that night, Jason didn’t hear them.

“It’s been lovely,” Wilona said. “Hard work, but lovely. I almost fainted when I helped Dr. Patel set that broken leg, but afterward Mrs. Ashenden said I was very brave.” She smiled. “And all the patients are so understanding. So kind. Even the ones who are in pain. They know we’re doing our best.” Omar listened to Wilona in silence while a headache beat through his temples. He had picked her up at the Clarendon camp and was driving her home for the night, after which he would drive back to his office and continue his planning session with Micah Knox.

“We’ve got about a dozen cases of diarrhea,” Wilona said. “There’s some kind of stomach bug going around. That’s the most disgusting thing we’ve had to deal with.” She gave a little laugh. “We had that with Davy when he was little, of course, but I’m out of practice. Look out!” she called. Omar swerved to avoid the figure of old Cudgel, off tramping the road alone at night. Omar caught a glimpse of the hermit’s yellow eyes in his lined, black, bearded face beneath his big hat. Cudgel carried a stick over his shoulder with some kind of dead animal dangling from it.

“Poor man,” Wilona said.

“He’s probably happier than most of us,” Omar said.

Omar and Knox had been discussing the situation at the A.M.E. camp when Wilona got off shift. Knox had been full of ideas. Knox really knew his stuff, Omar thought. Omar would never have thought of half those notions in a million years.

As Wilona spoke of her day, Knox sat in the back of the police cruiser without speaking. Omar could hear the faint sound of Knox’s fingertips tapping on his knees. Some part of Knox was always in motion, tapping to the furious speed of his mind. His distinctive scent—not just sweat from wearing flannel in hot weather, but maybe some weird kind of cologne, too—floated faintly to Omar in the front seat. Knox was like a weapon, Omar thought. It was as if he was purpose-built. Knox had nothing but his cause: no property, no family, no job, no hobbies, no one to love. He hardly seemed to sleep at night. It was as if God had made Knox solely for Spottswood Parish.

Or maybe, Omar thought, it was the other way around.

“And the people who were there!” Wilona said. “Mrs. Hall. Jamie FitzWalter. And Judge Moseley’s daughter, the middle one… Amanda! Everybody from Mrs. Ashenden’s bridge club.” It was as if she’d attended a garden party at Clarendon, not spent a day tending the wounded. “There we were, all working together!” Wilona put her hand to her heart, looked at Omar. “Do you think I’ll be invited to join the bridge club after this is over?” she asked. “Do you think that might happen?”

“You already belong to a club,” Omar said.

“Oh, that!” Wilona said. “That’s not the same thing.”

Wilona wanted to play bridge, Omar thought, and drink tea off the Wedgwood and eat pastel-colored petit-fours with tiny ladylike bites. Instead her club played poker on Wednesday afternoons, drank beer, and met in Lillie Hutley’s double-wide trailer on the highway north of Hardee.

“Won’t none of Miz LaGrande’s ladies ever vote for me,” Omar said. “I’d keep visiting Lillie Hutley if I were you.”

“I would not drop any of my friendships,” Wilona said. “I never drop my friendships, though sometimes they drop me, like Amy Vidor did when her husband got his new job with Allstate and didn’t have to depend on your pull with the parish. But I don’t see anything wrong with making new friends.”

“Well,” Omar said, “if any of your new friends drop any information about who they’re going to run against your husband in the next election, you let me know.”

Wilona sighed. “Oh, darling,” she said, “do we have to talk politics?” Omar drove to their house in Hardee and drew the car up in front. David’s car was in the driveway, parked carefully out of the reach of any falling branches from the magnolia. Knox waited in the car while Omar went inside with Wilona.

David sat on Omar’s easy chair, a can of Bud in his hand. There were some empties on the table next to him and an open case of Coors by his feet. He looked up. “I helped Ozie shift his stock this afternoon. He gave me a reward.”

“So I see,” Omar said. Wilona ruffled David’s hair and kissed his cheek.

“Nothing much else to do,” David said, “since Ozie ’n me are both off duty for shooting people. For doing our jobs.” David’s tone was resentful, his face sullen. Omar felt a warning tingle run down his spine.

“Might as well just take it easy,” he advised. “Or if you get bored, you could work with one of the groups that’s cleaning up.”

“Oh,” waving a hand, “let the niggers do the sweeping.” He grinned up at Omar, eyes lazy with drink.

“Dang it, I was starting to get a taste for law enforcement. You want a beer?” The thought of beer made Omar’s stomach queasy. He’d spent the day living on Akla-Seltzer, but it wasn’t doing him any good.

“I’ll have a dope instead,” Omar said. He got a Coke from the fridge—the electricity was back on, finally—and took another for Knox.

When he returned to the front room, Wilona was telling David all about her lovely day at Clarendon. Omar watched them for a moment, then let himself out and rejoined Knox in the car. He gave Knox his Coke and turned the car around to drive back to Shelburne City.

“That was interesting, listening to Mrs. Paxton,” Knox said. “I guess everybody in this parish knows everybody else, huh?”

“Pretty much,” Omar said.

“The thing that really surprised me is how blacks and whites mix down here.” Omar frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I thought this was the land of segregation!” Knox said. “But you people mix with blacks a lot more than we do up North. Back home in Detroit, folks who hate the niggers don’t have nothing to do with them. We don’t live with ’em, don’t talk to ’em, don’t hire ’em, run ’em out of our neighborhoods if they poke their noses in. But you Southerners—you say you hate the Mud People, but you got ’em everywhere!

You live right alongside them. You talk to ’em like they were people. You hire them instead of whites!

You let them in your house! You let them raise your children!”

“I don’t,” Omar said.

“Well, that’s because you have vision, Omar! You know how things can be made better for the white race. But the others—I bet that Miss LaGrande lets the Mud People right into her home.”

“She’s got servants.”

“I wouldn’t trust a black in my home! My God, and she’s a leader in this town. What kind of example is that?”

Omar gave a little smile. “Miz LaGrande and I have never seen eye to eye.” Knox’s busy fingers tapped a rhythm on the car seat. “That’s cause you’re a man of vision, Omar. You fight for the race.”

I fight for my son, Omar thought.

“This is going to be famous, Omar,” Knox went on. “This is going to really wake people up. Just like in Hunter. I wouldn’t be surprised if this started the war to liberate America.”

“No one’s going to hear of it,” Omar said. “Nobody’s going to hear of it ever. I’m going to bury it all right here.”

Knox considered this for a long moment, his only sound the tapping of his fingertips on the car seat. “I don’t see it, Omar,” he said finally. “There are a lot of people in this county—parish. I don’t know how you’re going to keep the lid on this thing.”

“Let me worry about it,” Omar said. “You just help me do the necessary.” Omar suspected that Knox had no real idea why Omar was doing what he was doing. Omar was defending his family, not his ideology. But Knox had no way to view actions other than through his beliefs, or through fantasies like Hunter or The Turner Diaries. Knox wanted a revolution, a race war throughout the U.S. Omar figured that was desirable, just not very likely. The cause of the white race was lost. Omar just wanted to suppress a killing. If keeping David safe meant killing other people, that was okay. And if word got out, he’d take the rap himself rather than let David take the fall.

Omar wondered if Knox had a family, if he even knew what a family was.

And then he thought, who would miss Knox if he were to vanish? Who would miss any of the Crusaders?

Maybe Omar wouldn’t have to take the fall. Knox, he thought, was made for this.

“Well, Omar,” Knox said. “You know the territory. You’re the Kleagle.” Omar only hoped that being Kleagle was going to be enough.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The day after the fish cleaning was devoted to cleaning up. Nick shoveled offal into trucks, to be carried off and used as fertilizer on the food crops that Frankland’s people had planted, after which Nick was then carried off with the rest of the Thessalonians to the Rails River for a bath. He was given soap, but it was intended more to clean his clothing than himself. Feeling like a Stone Age villager, he cleaned and pounded his clothes with a stick, then laid them out on grass to dry in the sun. Then he and the others washed the truck, after which Nick returned to the river to wash off the sweat. The smell of dead fish still clogged his nostrils. He felt as if he’d never get rid of it. After riding back to the camp, the Second Thessalonians were given the rest of the day off.

Nick went in search of his family. The cooks had been up most of the night and hadn’t been excused their duties for the daytime, so he found Manon in one of the cook tents, wearily frying fish in a skillet. Stock pots full of fish bones bubbled on all sides.

“Well,” she said, “at least we’ll have plenty of catfish to eat.” She looked up at Nick and lowered her voice. “I overheard some of them yesterday morning. Before the big fish kill, they were thinking of cutting way back on our calories. Except for nursing mothers, down to fifteen hundred a day. That’s over the line into slow starvation.”

“And now?”

“Now we’re okay. But it’s catfish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” I’ve got to get my family out of here, Nick thought. He didn’t like what he was hearing about the place from people like Tex and Olson, and he especially didn’t like what he was hearing from Martin, his so-called guide.

There were too many guns in this camp, and too little sense.

“The problem with massacres,” Knox said next morning, “is that they always have survivors. Always. Even if you set up machine guns outside and start mowing people down, some people will escape. It doesn’t stand to reason they should, but they always do. Somebody’s going to get away. Look at history.”

Something twisted inside Omar’s gut. He put a hand to his stomach, grimaced. He needed more Akla-Seltzer, he thought.

“What you’re telling me,” he said, “is that it’s hopeless.”

“No, not at all. You can’t kill large numbers of Mud People all at once, that’s all I’m saying.” Knox flashed his jittery grin. “You have to sneak up on ’em. Just clip ’em in small groups, and with as much cooperation from the victims as possible.”

They stood on the highway within sight of the A.M.E. camp. Omar had set up a roadblock here, and another farther down the highway. Any traffic between the two would move only under escort from Omar’s special deputies.

Not that there was much traffic on the road to worry about. With the highway washed out to the north, there was no reason for anyone to travel in this area unless they were one of the half-dozen or so families that lived between here and the Floodway; and their movement was restricted, because there was so very little fuel remaining in the district, and any additional gasoline had to come in by helicopter. The roadblocks were Knox’s idea. He remembered something the Germans had done during the Holocaust. There was a Jewish ghetto in some big city, Warsaw or Prague or someplace, and an important tram line ran through the ghetto. The Germans couldn’t shut down the tram, because people needed it to get to their jobs, so they just painted the tram windows so people couldn’t see out, and made sure that soldiers were on board the trams to keep people from looking. What the people couldn’t see couldn’t bother them.

Omar’s roadblocks operated on the same principle. People would pass the camp only when he wanted them to. He couldn’t paint over the windows of their vehicles, but he could keep them moving down the highway, under escort, at a brisk enough clip to keep them from seeing much.

“You’ve got to control the information,” Knox had said. “Whatever story gets out, it’s got to be your story.”

Omar’s story was that the camp was full of dangerous, armed felons. Camp inmates had shot a little girl and killed a local preacher who was only trying to help them. The killer of the preacher was still at large somewhere in the parish. People who got away weren’t refugees, they were escapees, or possibly even murderers. And for the good of the parish, these people had to be corralled by armed force. That was Omar’s story. And so far, no one had heard any other.

A sudden pain clamped down on Omar’s midsection. He winced, put a hand to his stomach.

“You okay, Omar?” Knox asked.

“It’s the heat,” Omar said.

“Hey, it’s only morning! That air-conditioning’s made you soft.”

“I guess.”

Knox looked at the camp again. “The question is, who’s going to be the most trouble,” Knox said. “It’ll be the young, healthy, unmarried men.” He grinned wolvishly. “Like me,” he said. “I’ve always been trouble. So what you do, see, is you separate the young men from the rest.”

“How?”

“Put them out on a work detail. And then when they don’t come back, you just tell everyone that they’re staying on site.”

“It’s pretty boring in that camp,” Omar said. “Bet we’d get plenty of volunteers.”

“You make sure none of your volunteers have family in the camp, and they won’t be missed.”

“Tell them we’re building another camp,” Omar said. “For single men.”

“That’s good,” Knox approved, “that’s good!”

And send them, Omar thought, where the woodbine twineth.

He would use Knox and the other Crusaders for that. Afterward Knox and his people could disappear. Either wherever they came from, or—if Omar needed a scapegoat—they would be found dead, killed in a gunfight with the last of the camp inmates.

And David would be safe. Safe. Which was the only thing that really mattered.

“Hi,” Jason said.

“Hey there,” said Arlette. “Qa va?”

He’d just come back from the river, and his clothing, the stains of which he had been mostly unable to remove by pounding, were still damp from having been washed. The crotch of his jeans was particularly damp and uncomfortable, and the wet seams scraped painfully along his thighs. At least he thought he smelled okay.

Arlette sat crosslegged on the grass on the shady side of the church, supervising a group of small children at play. She wore a blue kerchief over her hair. Her birthday-present earrings dangled from her ears, though she wasn’t wearing the necklace—too valuable, he supposed, for a place like this, or too showy.

“Locusts!” shouted Frankland over the PA. “Locusts with the faces of men! Right there in Revelations Nine!”

Arlette’s eyes widened. “What happened to your hands?”

Jason looked down at his wounds. “I never cleaned a fish before.”

“That looks awful. Didn’t your guide help you?”

“He didn’t seem to care.”

“Cochon. Let me get you some bandages.” She rose smoothly, without using her hands, from her crosslegged position, took one of his wounded hands, led him into the back door of the church. There was a small storeroom there, free of the smells and sounds of the infants in the main body of the church. The room was filled with items taken from the church when it was converted to a refugee center: boxes of Sunday School texts, files, religious literature, a dusty box of sheet music atop an old upright piano. Arlette walked to a small table behind the side door, dropped Jason’s hand, and found a plastic box marked with a red cross under a small table.

Jason watched as she browsed through the contents of the box. Frankland’s amplified voice went on about locusts going about the earth slaughtering its inhabitants.

“At least you didn’t ask me about my nuclear reactor,” Jason said.

“Mais non. Je reconnais des telescopes quand j’en vois un.” She raised her hands to mime a telescope, peered at him through her curled fingers for a laughing moment, then dropped into the box again.

She began to apply dressings to his hand. “Why are you talking French?” he asked.

“I’m supposed to be in France right now, at school. I don’t want to get out of practice.” She watched as he tugged at the inseam of his jeans with his free hand. “You don’t look too comfortable in those clothes.”

“They’re still damp from washing. Hey.” A thought occurred to him. “Don’t you have washing machines here? You were folding clothes yesterday—why did I have to wash my clothes in the river?”

“We don’t have that many machines in working order—we have to pour the water into them with buckets—all we try to do is keep the towels and diapers clean. When eighty men get catfish all over themselves—” She grinned. “It’s the river. Give me your other hand.”

“Where do the girls wash?”

“The same place. When the men aren’t there.”

Arlette peeled tape off the roll, eyed it, and cut it precisely with a small pair of scissors. “I don’t understand,” said a loud grownup voice, “why I can’t leave.”

Arlette and Jason fell silent as the voice boomed through the side door. Jason caught Arlette’s eye, saw her surprised look, then a confirmation of his own first instinct.

Listen. Be silent. If you don’t call attention to yourselves, maybe they’ll forget you’re here. Jason and Arlette knew these things. How to listen, how to hide, how not to be observed. Jason shuffled sideways, put the open door between himself and the outside. Arlette slipped farther into the storeroom to make room for him.

The voice that answered was Frankland’s. “I never said you couldn’t leave, Brother Olson. What I said was—”

“What you said was that me and my family couldn’t have any food! And that’s after we brought a trunk full of canned goods and a box of vegetables into this camp!”

Jason looked at Arlette. We brought food into the camp, he thought.

“That food is gone, Brother Olson,” Frankland said. “It was gone within a couple days of your getting here. It is my job to feed the people in this camp, and with God’s help I will do that. But it is not my responsibility to feed the people who leave.”

“I have kin in Mississippi,” the first voice said. “They can look after us. And if you can just give us a few pounds of that catfish—heaven sake, you got tons…”

“Mississippi!” Frankland said. “You’ve heard the news! The place is a poison desert!” Olson’s voice was stubborn. “All I need is take my boat down the river. Won’t take more’n two, three days. All I ask is food and water for that time. My guns for protection. The boat’s my own. That’s less’n I came with, and you won’t have to feed us forever. It’s a bargain for you.”

“Think of your children, Brother Olson!” Frankland said. “You’re going to expose them to—”

“Reverend,” Olson said, “I’m a Lutheran, okay?”

“I understand, brother, but—”

“Lutherans don’t do the end of the world,” Olson said. “I think what happened is an earthquake, not the Apocalypse. My family will be a lot safer once they get out of the earthquake zone.”

“I will not let you endanger your family! I won’t!”

“What are you telling me?” Olson roared.

“I won’t let you kill your children!” Frankland shouted. “I won’t let them go!” Olson was beyond words. A chill shivered up Jason’s spine as he heard Olson give a low growl just like an animal, and then there was a chiming metallic thump as something heavy hit the steel wall of the church. Frankland was shouting something incoherent, but Jason couldn’t make it out because Frankland’s recorded voice had just reached a crescendo in its sermon on the giant locusts of Revelation. Then other people were shouting, and there were more thumps.

Jason felt Arlette’s hand close around his. He looked into her wide eyes as turmoil raged outside. He could feel a drop of sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

“Cast him forth!” Frankland’s voice was raised in rage. “Take him outside! Let him wander in the wilderness!”

“He’ll take your children, too!” Olson shouted as people hustled him away. ” He’ll take your children!”

Jason and Arlette stood frozen in the storeroom. Arlette’s grip was like steel bands wrapped around his hand.

Jason licked his lips. “I’m getting out of this place,” he said.

Arlette’s eyes were wide as they turned from the open door to Jason. “How?”

“I don’t know yet. But there’s no way I’m going to stay here. That’s for sure.” Frankland’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “And thus do the locusts do the will of Abaddon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit.”

The camp was abuzz after Olson’s ejection. A hundred and fifty people had nothing else to talk about. Nick heard details from Jason and Arlette. He also heard the campwide rumor that Olson had just been driven in a truck to the far side of Rails Bluff, then set free to wander without food, water, or weapons. Olson’s wife and children, in the married women’s camp, were at the center of a weeping, wailing cluster of friends and kinfolk. Nick led Manon, Arlette, and Jason away from the sight, wandering out of the camp onto the borders of the field beyond. The cotton had been plowed under here, and food crops planted, but only a few tiny green shoots had risen from the thin soil. The loudspeakers’ words were reduced to a distant rumble.

“I’m going to get out of here, Nick,” Jason said. “I’m getting back on the river.” Nick frowned, scuffed at the soil with his shoe. “We need to work out a plan,” he said. Jason looked at him in surprise. “You sound as if you want to come along.”

“Yes.” Nick frowned. “I don’t think this place is stable. I don’t think it’s healthy.” He looked over his shoulder in the direction of Sheryl’s artwork. “Have you seen those banners? The people here think all that stuff is going to happen, and happen real soon. And what I’m afraid of is that if it doesn’t happen on its own, they’re going to do their best to make it happen.”

Arlette looked up at her father. “What about Aunt Sarah and Uncle Louis and—” Nick looked at her. “I think it will just be Jason and me, baby,” he said. “You and your mother are safe here for the present. What we need to get out is a message, not necessarily people. If Jason and I can get down the river—Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, a towboat with a working radio, somewhere—we can tell the authorities what’s happening here, and they’ll start shipping in food and medicine, and put someone other than a crazy preacher in charge.”

“Nick.” Manon’s tone was grim. “You’ve seen all the guns around here. What if Reverend Frankland decides he doesn’t want the government putting him out of business?” Nick looked at her in surprise. He had been concentrating so hard on plans to get away that he hadn’t considered what might happen once he got his message to the authorities. “Do you really think he would?”

“The government have been here already. They took hundreds of people out of this camp. But my guess is that Frankland didn’t want them to go, and he’s decided that no one else is going to leave. Not even the ones who aren’t his hard core, like Olson and his family. Olson came in because his business was wrecked after the second big quake, not because he was a believer.”

Nick nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see that.”

Manon bit her lip. Anxious worry glimmered in her eyes. “And besides,” she added, “I don’t think the government has a very good record when it comes to dealing with religious fanatics.” The deadly litany rolled through Nick’s mind: Jonestown. Waco. Ruby Ridge. He thought about Manon and Arlette caught in a crossfire between cops and Frankland’s guards, and he gave a shudder. Manon stood straight-spined in the field, her chin tilted high. A princess in exile. “I want you to get your daughter out of this place,” she said. Or, most likely, commanded.

Nick pressed his lips together, felt determination well up in his soul. We are going to put together one hell of a plan, he thought.

“All right,” Nick said. “From now on, what we do is keep our eyes open. We need to find out how everything is done here. Find out where the supplies are kept. The guns. Food stores. Work out schedules for the guards.” He nodded. “We’re going to put together the best escape plan in the history of the world.”

Because the best plan, the most flawless plan ever, was the only thing that would keep Arlette safe. Apparently Brother Frankland wasn’t talking much after Olson clouted him in the jaw, because the morning service was run by Garb, one of the other preachers. The service ran on for almost two hours, not counting a space of time that was taken up with a long, rumbling, but nondestructive aftershock. Garb made a lot of announcements about how Brother Amos’ baby was feeling a little croupy and could use some prayers; and how Sister Felicity’s arthritis was much improved after the congregation had sent a little of Jesus’ healing power her way. Jason drowsed through it but woke up to enjoy the music. Garb’s actual sermon, when he got around to it, had to do with “God’s marching orders,” and the penalties inflicted for “falling out on the march,” especially during wartime. At present, Jason gathered, it was wartime. Jason didn’t remember enlisting.

After another hymn, ominously entitled “Marching with Jesus,” Garb made an announcement that after today most of the salvage jobs in the area would be discontinued. After finishing today, all the salvagers were to bring their tools and equipment back to the camp along with any useful items they may have found.

Jason would have to tote feed sacks only one more day. That was a relief.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught Nick’s frown, and he realized that with the work details ended, they’d have no reason to be out of the camp. It was going to be a lot harder to escape if their movement was restricted.

Finally there was breakfast. “Religion,” Jason said over his beans and fried fish. “I don’t get it.” Nick, sitting opposite Jason at the long table, seemed surprised by the question. “Say what?” he said.

“What’s the point?” Jason asked. “What’s it for?” Nick exchanged glances with Manon and Arlette. “I’m an engineer,” he said. “I only have an engineer’s answer.”

“Tell me,” Jason said. He was aware of Arlette’s nearness, of the warmth of her sitting only a few inches from him on the bench.

“Religion is to help people behave better,” Nick said. “The whole point is—” He searched for a phrase.

“Moral instruction. Moses taught duty. Jesus taught goodness. The rest—Heaven and Hell, the miracles, all that—is just to get people to pay attention. Some people won’t listen to instruction unless you give them a show along with it.”

Manon, sitting by his side, rolled her eyes and gave a kind of snort. “You men,” she said. Nick gave her a tolerant look. “I said it was an engineer’s point of view.”

“Religion’s about community, you fool,” Manon said. The fool was affectionate, Jason thought, or meant to be affectionate anyway, though at the sound of the word there was a flicker in Nick’s eyes that suggested he didn’t much like hearing it.

Manon leaned toward Jason. “It’s about sharing,” she said. “It’s about a group of people being happy together, and grieving together, and praising God together, and experiencing all of life together. That’s the point of all those announcements that Brother Garb made, so that everyone would know what was happening in the community.” She nudged Nick. “It’s not as if we get together every Sunday for a lecture. About our morals, for God’s sake.” She looked at Jason. “It’s fun. We always had a big meal beforehand. Big meal afterward, with all the family for miles around. The preacher was our Uncle Joe till he retired, and he came for dinner with his wife.”

“You go to church because it’s family,” Nick said. “I went because it was a duty. The same reason I was an Eagle Scout. It was something a general’s son did.” He shrugged. “Scouting was more fun.”

“Your daddy turned every damn thing into a job,” Manon said.

“Do you believe it?” Jason asked her. Suddenly he was desperate to know. “Do you believe in God?

Adam and Eve? Noah? All that?”

Manon seemed a little surprised, so Jason went on. “My mom believed anything, see. She believed in reincarnation, in astrology, in Buddha, in Jesus, in the Tao. She believed in a woman in California named Pharaoh Nepher-Ankh-Hotep who had a spirit guide named Louise from Atlantis. Someone once told her that the UFO people had a huge city on the back side of the moon. I remember she once told my dad about this—this was before the divorce—and he went, well, the astronauts went around the moon, they would have seen it. And my mom went, see, they did see it, and they had pictures, but there was a cover-up. And my dad asked her why they covered it up, and she went, well, they always cover up the flying saucers, just like they did at Roswell, everybody knows that. And my dad asked why, and she said it was because the government was secretly working with the UFO people and letting them abduct people in return for scientific knowledge. And my dad went, the government would never be able to keep a secret like that, it’s a huge secret, it’s the most important thing ever, and the government can’t even keep their five-thousand-dollar toilet seats secret, or the itching powder they tried to put in Fidel Castro’s beard…”

Jason ran out of energy. Manon gave him a curious look.

“What did your momma say?” she asked.

Jason looked at her. “She said, ‘That’s why they killed Kennedy.’”

Manon looked surprised. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“I don’t either. I don’t think my mom really understood what she was trying to say. She was making it up as she went along, I think, once she heard about the moon base. The point is, she’d just heard about the flying saucers on the moon, and if she was going to believe in that, she had to believe in all the other stuff, too. That was the way she was.” He looked down at his plate. “My parents got divorced right after that.” Manon reached over the table, took his hand. “I’m sorry, Jason,” she said. Jason shrugged. “Not your fault.”

She looked at him. “You had a question, though. And I forgot what it was.”

“It’s about whether you believe it all. Or whether it’s just, like, community.” Manon’s voice was gentle. “Well,” she began. “You know that the church is important to black people, right? Because for a long time we weren’t allowed to meet anywhere else. They were afraid that if we got together we’d start a rebellion or ask for our freedom, or for the right to vote or something. But they couldn’t keep us out of church, because it was their religion, too. So the church was the only place where we were free to be ourselves.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jason said. If that had ever been mentioned in class he hadn’t been paying attention. He hated history. But they probably hadn’t mentioned it. They never seemed to teach anything that mattered to people.

“What I meant to say,” Manon went on, “is that the part of church that is community is very, very important. But there’s community with the Deity as well.”

“So you believe in God?”

“Oh yes.”

“And Jesus?”

“Certainly.”

“And Adam and Eve? Jonah and the whale? Noah?”

Manon hesitated, looked at Nick. “Well. I don’t know.”

“If an engineer can interrupt, here,” Nick said, “I think stories like Noah and Adam have a different purpose from some of the other Bible stories. They were intended for moral instruction.” He looked at Manon pointedly. “Those stories were to teach us how to behave, and to make us think, but I don’t know that they were intended to be taken literally.”

“I don’t think I believe in God,” Jason said.

There was a moment of silence. He felt Arlette stir on the bench next to him.

“Why not?” she said.

“Because,” Jason said in swift anger, “if God exists, he killed my mother. And your Gros-Papa. And lots of other people rolling along the bottom of that river.”

Suddenly Jason couldn’t stand to sit there any longer, looking into the others’ shocked and concerned faces, so he rose and mumbled an apology and almost ran from the breakfast tent. He wandered out into the parking lot in front of the church, where the empty trucks waited to carry the Samaritans and the other teams to their final days’ work. Waves of heat were already rising from their metal as they baked in the morning sun.

Jason stalked around the trucks as anger simmered through his veins. Then he opened the door of a cab and sat behind the steering wheel. Keys dangled from the ignition, and for a wild moment Jason considered starting the truck and roaring away, fleeing the camp and the people in it. But no. There was no place to drive to. That was why the key was in the ignition—there was no point in locking a vehicle when there was no place for a thief to drive it.

He was stuck in Rails Bluff, until Nick figured out a way to escape.

Words boomed from the loudspeakers: “Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house.”

Jason swung his legs out of the truck cab, slid onto the grass. His anger had passed, had turned to a dull throbbing ache in his throat.

He turned around the back end of the pickup truck, with its Tommy Lift tailgate down, and found Arlette standing there, a bit awkwardly, off-balance with one ankle crossed over the other. Jason stopped dead. He felt his ears flush with the memory of his rudeness.

“I thought I’d see if you were okay,” Arlette said.

“I’m, uh, tres Men,” Jason said. “I’m sorry if I was angry.”

“I brought you the rest of your breakfast,” Arlette said. She held up a bundle wrapped in a handkerchief.

“I thought you’d need it if you’re going to be working today.”

“Thanks.”

He approached her and took the bundle. Beans and fish all mashed together.

Well. It was a nice thought. And probably he would be hungry enough, sooner or later, to eat it.

“I’m sorry you’re mad at God,” Arlette said. She took a step forward, her hip resting against the tailgate of the truck. “I think I need God, myself. I want to think that there’s something that connects me with the rest of the universe. Some spirit. Something.”

Jason thought about galaxies whirling in the velvet dark. Threads like lace glowing in the sky. A cluster of a million stars that he could hold in his hand.

Arlette looked at him with almond-shaped eyes. “Haven’t you ever felt something connect you with everything else?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jason said. His pulse was a roar in his ears. “You,” he said. He took her in his arms and brushed her lips with his. Her slim waist burned against his palms. He kissed her again, and again, and then for a long time.

Arlette drew away.

“No,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

Her lips tilted in a delicate smile. “There must be twenty people watching us. And if we go on any longer there are going to be a hundred.”

“I want to be with you,” he said.

“Later,” she said. The smile turned mischievous. “Maybe.” She turned, looked at him over her shoulder. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said, and skipped away. Jason stood for a moment, then looked toward the camp.

Twenty people, he thought. More like fifty.

Let them watch, he thought.

“Looks like your daughter’s getting down with the white boy,” Manon said. Nick watched from under the kitchen awning as Arlette and Jason embraced by the pickup truck. Anxious-father vibes bounced around in his head, and he told them to be reasonable. They didn’t listen.

“Well,” he said heavily, “I’m not going to worry too much about it.” And failed to convince even himself. Manon turned to him, fire snapping from her eyes. “Not worry?” she said. “You know what kids are like at that age. Hormones going crazy, and there’s nothing to do in this camp, nothing but… Damn it, Nick!” She blinked out at the sunlit field, where Arlette was drawing away from Jason.

“Arlette’s too young for this,” Manon said. “She’s my baby.” Her eyes were shiny.

“You were going to send her to France for the summer,” Nick said. “Did you figure she’d only meet nuns over there?”

“She’d be chaperoned,” Manon said.

“She’s chaperoned here, honey,” Nick said. He couldn’t resist smiling. “She’ll never be more chaperoned in her life.”

“Nick,” Manon said, “that boy is white.”

Nick said nothing. Anxious-father voices sang an aria in his head. It’s not about race, Nick told himself, it’s really not. It’s about a boy touching his daughter, that’s what it’s about.

“Oh hell, Nick,” Manon went on. “This is Arkansas, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I know.” And if it was a black boy kissing a white girl, there would be fifty people here ready for a lynching, whatever Reverend Frankland might say about it. And even as things stood, there might be hell to pay, anyway.

Arlette turned from Jason and began to move away across the field. The tension in Nick’s chest eased a trifle.

“Certain things you don’t do here,” Manon went on. “Not where a hundred people can see you. Not if you’re young and—” She blinked tears. “Not even if you’ve been raised to think these things don’t matter.”

Nick stepped closer to her, put his hands on her shoulders from behind. Her muscles were taut as wire.

“I’ll talk to Jason if you like,” he said. He had the sensation that he was arguing with himself as much as with Manon. “And you can talk to Arlette. But Arlette’s an intelligent girl. I think we can trust her.” He began to massage Manon’s shoulders, trying to break the tension he felt in the muscles.

“Besides, baby,” he said, “here’s what’s going to happen. One way or another, we’re going to get out of here. Then, for a while, we’ll be in a boat, and Arlette can’t be any more chaperoned than in a sixteen-foot boat with both her parents. And after we get back to civilization, Jason will go home to his daddy, and Arlette will be in Arkansas, and that will be that.”

He felt Manon’s sinew resist his fingers, and then Manon gave a long sigh, and he felt her relax, lean back against his strength. “Oh, why’d you have to bring that boy here?” she murmured. “He’s going to be nothing but trouble.”

“That’s the truth,” Nick said. He studied the nape of Manon’s neck, the loose tight curls that had escaped the kerchief in which she’d bound her hair. The sheen on her fine mahogany skin, supple as the day they were married. He leaned close to her ear.

“Jason’s only thinking what’s natchel,” he said. “He’s not thinking anything I’m not thinking.” He felt Manon stiffen. “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said, and then, after a moment’s resistance, she relaxed again, her head lolling back against one of his hands. “Not now, Nick,” she murmured. “I can’t deal with this now.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” Nick smiled. “We’re chaperoned.”

There was a honk from the speakers, and then Frankland’s voice telling all work parties to assemble to the trucks.

“There,” Nick said. “See what I mean?”

Jessica stood with Larry Hallock next to the Auxiliary Building. Stood on dry land, her boots covered with dry dust, not river mud. A hundred feet away an Army brass band, gratefully reunited with their instruments after days of debris removal, were exercising their callused fingers on “Hail to the Chief.” Operation Island was a success. The twenty-four-hour air-lift of earthquake debris had finally produced a plausible island of twenty acres raised six feet above the river’s current flood stage. The last loads consisted not of debris, but of gravel to provide a safe surface to walk on. Army bulldozers were currently grading the surface flat. More material would be added later, but right now it was more important to get Larry’s people into the business of getting spent reactor fuel out of the Auxiliary Building and then out of the earthquake zone.

A channel had been carved into the island just for this purpose. A little canal, wide and deep enough for a fully laden barge, ran from the edge of Poinsett Island to the end of the Auxiliary Building. There, a barge could be loaded with flasks of spent fuel, then towed to safety downriver. A barge was now being towed into place by a pair of bulldozers. Its rust-streaked hull rode high in the water, ballasted only by the three huge steel flasks into which fuel units could be loaded. Jessica felt good knowing that at least one thing had gone right. With Nature stomping on her every effort to control the river, with the evacuation she’d recommended shattered by a second major quake, this, at least, was something she could point to with pride.

Her very own island. Built of much more solid material than anything else in the river, Poinsett Island might well last hundreds of years.

“Looks good, General,” Larry said. “Nice piece of work, here.”

“Thank you,” Jessica said.

“I like the shiner, too.”

Jessica raised a self-conscious hand to her black eye. “My husband thinks it’s kind of dashing,” she said.

“Makes you look determined as heck.”

They both glanced up at the sound of a helicopter. They had both grown so used to copters in Army green or Navy blue that civilian white seemed a little startling against the cloudless blue sky.

“Here comes the press,” Jessica said without enthusiasm.

“Bet they like the black eye, too,” Larry said.

Despite the media’s voracious twenty-four-hour-per-day demand for information—or, in the absence of information, baseless rumor, innuendo, and sensation—Jessica had managed to keep the press at arm’s length till now. She had appointed a press officer in Vicksburg to manage the information flow—the information went not just to the media, but to politicians demanding information about their districts—and Jessica had stopped by the briefings at least once per day to add a little personal, calming dimension to the day’s news riot.

Much of her work with the press consisted of stamping out one terrifying, sensational rumor about Poinsett Landing after another. Stories about giant poisonous radioactive clouds floating over the South, or a river of pure liquid plutonium burning its way down the Mississippi, continued to persist in the face of any data to the contrary. The biggest earthquake in human history isn’t enough for you, Jessica wanted to say, you have to have Chernobyl, too?

As if that weren’t enough, she had to be very careful with place names. Foreign journalists had demonstrated an understandable difficulty in separating the Mississippi, a river, from the State of Mississippi, a political entity, and the Mississippi Delta, a geographical feature. As if that weren’t confusing enough to information-saturated foreigners, it was also necessary to keep straight the State of Arkansas, the Arkansas River, and the Arkansas Delta, the Missouri River and the State of Missouri, and bear in mind that much of Kansas City was not in the State of Kansas but in Missouri. Compared to that, Operation Island was simple. Operation Island was Jessica’s showpiece. The press were going to stand on the island, prove to themselves that it existed, that the panic they’d been broadcasting was baseless and that the Corps of Engineers could work wonders. Jessica didn’t know about civilian morale, she supposed, but it would sure as hell do her own morale a lot of good.

The press landed, and were shown to their reserved area by their liaison people. Secret Service, conspicuous in neat summer-weight suits, had stationed themselves around the island. More Secret Service, equipped as snipers, stood atop the Auxiliary Building.

The sound of helicopter rotors chopped through the air. Big Marine copters appeared over the treeline to the east.

“Here comes your boss,” Larry said.

Jessica looked down at her BDUs, brushed dust off the pants legs and the toes of her boots, then made sure her helmet was square on her head. The commander-in-chief was coming to give her work on Poinsett Island the official presidential seal of approval.

The Army brass band did some last-minute tuning, almost inaudible in the helicopter roar. Jessica made a smart turn and marched across the gravel to the place where the presidential helicopter was expected to land.

Offer condolences before you say anything else, she reminded herself. The poor guy’s lost his wife. Try not to talk every single minute, she told herself as the presidential party circled the island. Let the man get a word in edgewise.

He’s a politician, she reminded herself. He’ll want to talk.

The fact was, Larry thought, that a presidential visit lasts only a few minutes. But cleanup is a task that lives forever.

The afterglow of the presidential visit, the presidential handshake, and the presidential compliments had lasted all of maybe twenty minutes. After that, it was back to policing the power plant. Larry stood on the fuel handling machine and watched Jameel as he rolled the big crane along its tracks. Floodlights gleamed in the murky river water of the fuel holding pond. The crane came to a stop.

“This is where you wanted us, Mr. Hallock.”

“Test the turret,” Larry said. “Let’s make sure everything works.” Electric motors whined. Larry, hanging his head over the edge of the platform, saw the turret rotate beneath his feet. Nothing shorted out on the instrument panel.

“Waall.” Larry grinned. “Let’s find us a fish in this ol’ pond.” He watched as Jameel expertly lowered the pincerlike grab on the end of its double chain. The first snatch came up empty, and Jameel made modest alterations to the turret position and tried again. A light shifted from green to red on the plywood display.

Jameel’s laugh boomed from beneath the brim of his Chicago Cubs cap. “Got ourselves a fish here, skip.”

“Better reel her in, then.”

Electric motors whined. Brown river silt, by now disturbingly radioactive, floated upward as the chain retracted. In the midst of the rising brown mushroom Larry could see the silver glint of a fuel assembly. An older one, fortunately, one that had cooled considerably in the decades it had been sitting in the holding pond. Larry had dropped radiation detectors into the pond to locate areas of radioactive tranquility, and this was one of them.

With the fuel assembly still held safely below the surface of the borated water, the machine skimmed back on its tracks to the fill bay on the far end of the building. There, after three tries, Jameel managed to drop the fuel assembly into one of the slots on a thick-walled steel transport flask. The flask, when full, would then be passed out of the Auxiliary Building onto a barge, and then carried down the river, with other flasks, to the holding pond of the Waterford Three nuclear plant in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Waterford Three was a new reactor, had only gone online in 1985, and had reserve space in its holding pond.

Which would soon be full. But there were other nuclear facilities in the country, other holding ponds. All of Poinsett Landing’s dangerous children would find a home in the end.

There was a little click as Jameel activated the solenoid that released the fuel assembly, then a whine of electric motors as he raised the grab on its chain.

“Get us another fish, sir?” he asked.

“You bet,” Larry said. “I want another dozen before the day is over.” The President sat in his suite at the rear of Air Force One and watched the clouds through his window. The clouds were far below, very white, and danced an interesting pas-de-deux with their shadows on the green land below. The President was returning to Washington from having made his inspection of Poinsett Island, and he was doing what he preferred to do nowadays, which was to stare at unexceptional things in a perfectly tranquil, uninterested way.

The visit to Poinsett Island had been entirely symbolic, he understood that. He hadn’t a thing to do with rescuing the power station, and his presence made no difference at all to the level of safety at the plant. His appearance was just a way of telling people not to panic. If the President wasn’t scared of the big, bad nuclear plant, the public shouldn’t be, either. His appearance assured the people that things were in hand. It associated the President with a specific way that things were getting better, and therefore led to increased confidence in the country and in the economy, and of course higher approval ratings. It was his first trip out of Washington since the death of the First Lady. That had symbolic value, too. The trip told the nation that he was putting his personal sorrows behind and getting on with the business of the country.

His visit to Poinsett Island had been both meaningful and meaningless. It was nothing in itself; it was a waste of time and jet fuel and didn’t contribute to the solution of the national crisis one iota, but on a symbolic level it stood for a great deal.

What the President hadn’t quite worked out yet was what it all meant to him. He was beginning to suspect, however, that it didn’t mean much of anything.

It was all clouds, floating past his window. Earthquakes, swallowing the world. Clouds and earthquakes, he thought, were almost the same thing. Sort of. Weren’t they?

There was a knock on his door. “Come in,” he said.

Stan Burdett’s bespectacled face peered around the door. “Urgent phone call, sir,” he said. “The Secretary of State.”

The President looked idly at the battery of communications apparatus with which his suite had come equipped. Stan entered the room, picked up a phone handset, pressed some buttons, and handed the handset to the President.

“Secure line, sir,” he said.

“Oh, good,” said the President.

“Mr. President?” The Secretary’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I’ve got a situation here.”

“Right, Darrell. What can I do for you?”

“The Chinese have just announced that in three days they will test-fire a number of their medium-range ballistic missiles over the island of Taiwan, to land in the Pacific.”

“Oh,” the President said. “Oh my.”

“This is an overt military threat, Mr. President. This is a direct challenge to our resolve and to our overseas commitments. The Chinese are testing us.”

“Best not flunk, eh?” the President said.

There was a buzz from another handset. Stan picked it up. “Stan Burdett.” he said. Then he looked at the President and told him the call was from the National Security Advisor.

The President realized that the Secretary of State had been talking nonstop while his own attention had been directed toward the other phone, and said, “Hold on, there, Darrell, I have another call.” He put the second phone to his other ear and said, “Joe, I’ve just heard. Darrell’s on the other line.”

“We cannot afford to lose Taiwan, sir,” the National Security Advisor said. “It is too completely integrated with our own economy. They produce countless small electronic components that are incorporated into American brand-names. If Taiwan is lost, a lot of American manufacturing goes with it.” Well, the President thought, his hawkish Secretary of State and his dovish Security Advisor actually agreed with one another. This was a no-brainer. “Better not lose Taiwan, then,” the President said into both phones.

“Those bastards!” the Secretary was shouting into his other ear. “They’ve been planning this for weeks!

I’ve got it figured out! Remember just before the big quake, when the Chinese sold a lot of dollars and sent Wall Street into a tumble? They were making a point! They were trying to show that they could fuck with our economy, and that we had better think twice before we tried to interfere with their attempt to intimidate Taiwan!”

While this speech was going on, the President looked at Stan and said, “Stan, could you arrange a conference call? This is giving me a headache.”

“We should mobilize the Seventh Fleet!” the Secretary said finally, when they were all on the same secure line. “Send our ships into the area of the Pacific where their missile will land, and dare them to try anything!”

The Advisor cleared his throat. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mr. President. What if the Chinese actually fire? That would be a shooting war.”

“They wouldn’t dare!” shouted the Secretary.

“If we dare them to shoot, that puts ammunition into the hands of their people who would want to shoot. And our military options are extremely limited in that eventuality. For one thing, our nearest real base is Pearl Harbor. And for another, we won’t be able to fly sufficient sorties off our carriers, not with the shortage of jet fuel that we’re experiencing.”

“Jet fuel?” the President said in surprise.

“Mr. President,” the Advisor said, “we’re been flying so many relief supplies into the disaster areas that there’s a worldwide shortage of aviation fuel. The refineries are cranking it out as fast as they can, but our reserves are very low.”

“What you are saying,” the President said, “is that we have to keep the Chinese off Taiwan, but we can’t fight a war over it because all our planes would fall out of the sky.”

There was a moment of silence. “That wasn’t quite…” the Advisor began.

“I think you have summed things up very well, Joe,” the President said. “Now how can we accomplish what we need to do?”

It was very interesting, the President thought, doing his job without being attached to it. He had decided he would be President when he was nine years old, and he’d worked toward that goal with every conscious moment since, until he’d finally succeeded in his ambition. He used to care so very deeply about every aspect of being the President, of working out every angle of every situation. He had loved it all, the brainstorming, the defeats, and victories. He had given it his all. His ego had been involved. But now his ego was gone. Just… gone. He was doing the same job, making the same decisions, but it just didn’t have much to do with him anymore. This situation would be fascinating, at least if he were capable any longer of being fascinated.

In the end, he sent two carrier battle groups into the Western Pacific, though was careful to keep them out of the area where the Chinese missile was supposed to land. Both the Secretary and the Advisor seemed reasonably content with the situation.

“By the way,” he asked the Secretary. “What are the Gamsakhurdians up to?”

“Sir?”

“You know. Last week’s crisis. Georgia and Latvia.”

“Oh. Sorry. I was going to brief you, but—”

“I know, Darrell. We’re all very busy.”

“The Russian President told our ambassador that he was shocked at what his people were up to.”

“Do we believe he didn’t know?”

“As long as it suits us to. Right now it suits us to the ground. At least some of the paramilitaries have been recalled. The rest seem without direction. We are assured that heads are rolling in the Kremlin.”

“Latvia is safe,” the President smiled.

“For the present, sir. Yes.”

“The thought of a safe and free Latvia shall warm my cockles on frosty mornings. I’ll talk to you later, Darrell.”

He handed the phone to Stan Burdett, who put it on its cradle. The President turned, looked out the window at the clouds far below.

“China is attacking Taiwan on a symbolic level,” he told Stan. “By firing missiles over it. We are defending Taiwan on a symbolic level by sending two carrier battle groups. The symbols will clash harmlessly somewhere in the Western Pacific, and no one will be hurt. It’s all very dreamlike and in its way profound, isn’t it?”

Stan looked at him, adjusted his thick spectacles. “May I join you, sir?” he said.

“By all means.”

Stan sat across from the President, put a hand on his knee. “Are you all right, sir?” The President looked at him. “My wife is dead, my oldest friend is dead, the country just had its guts ripped out, and the Chinese are shooting missiles in the direction of our ships. Other than that, all is well with myself and with the world. How are you, Stan?”

“You’re not…” Stan licked his thin lips nervously. “You’re not depressed?”

“Depressed? No. I am strangely placid. And you?”

“Because—you know—it would be understandable if you were depressed. If you were, say, feeling tired and rundown all the time, if all you wanted to do was sleep…”

“I don’t sleep much,” the President said. “You people won’t let me. Why do crises always seem to happen at two in the morning?”

“I just meant depressed, you know,” Stan said unhappily. “In the—you know—clinical sense.”

“I’m not depressed in any sense,” the President said. “I eat well and I sleep well, at least when I have the opportunity. I do my job. You just saw me deal with a major international crisis without pulling my hair out or going into a crying jag.” He peered at Stan. “Are you depressed, Stan?”

“No, sir. I’m concerned.”

“That’s kind of you.” The President patted the hand that Stan had left on his knee. “But you don’t need to worry.”

“Sir, I—”

“Do you know, Stan,” the President went on, “I have inquired three times as to your wellbeing, and you have not answered at all?”

“Sir?”

The President leaned toward Stan. “How are you, Stan? That’s what I was trying to get at. How are you?”

“Oh. I am—okay. I guess. Sir.” Stan smiled nervously. “The thing is—Mr. President—you seem, I don’t know—unengaged.”

“Ah.”

“As if you—as if you’re just going through the motions, as if your real thoughts are elsewhere.” The President ventured a mild frown. “And why should that be a problem, Stan?” The press secretary seemed startled. “Sir?”

“What’s wrong with a president who’s detached? Who—” The President made a stirring gesture with his hand. “Who goes through the motions. As long as they’re the right motions, what difference does it make?” He looked out the window again, at the clouds below. “If I send two carrier battle groups to Taiwan, does it really matter to the carrier groups if my heart and soul are in it? Will it matter to the Chinese? Will the Chinese be able to look into my soul and determine whether or not the carriers matter to me? Or will the Chinese decide that what matters is the carrier groups?” The President patted Stan’s hand. “I think they’ll decide that it’s the Seventh Fleet that matters. Not my level of engagement with the Seventh Fleet.”

He turned, looked back at the window. “After all, when you’re dealing with an earthquake, you don’t inquire as to the earthquake’s state of mind. You just deal with the earthquake. The Chinese will deal with the reality of the Seventh Fleet. I don’t expect a problem.”

Stan looked deeply unhappy. He took a deep breath. “Mr. President, I think that perhaps you should talk to somebody.”

The President peered at him. “I’m talking to you. I talk to people all the time. Practically every minute.”

“I mean a professional, sir. A psychologist. After all, you’ve been going through a lot. You—” The President returned to his cloudscape. “I talk to enough people as it is, Stan. Now, what I need you to do is work out what you’re going to tell the press about the Taiwanese crisis once we return to D.C. You heard what we’re going to do, and I’m sure you know how to spin it. Unless you’d rather have Aaron Schwarz down at State give the briefing…?”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Stan said quickly. He rose from his seat. He did not seem to have been comforted in the least by this conversation.

The President’s eyes tracked the clouds. “Don’t worry, Stan,” he said. “I’m not asleep at the switch. I’m doing my job.”

“Yes, sir.” Stan made his way out, closing the door securely behind him. The President looked down at the clouds, skating brightly above the warm green earth. Clouds that were the same things as earthquakes. Sort of. Weren’t they?

Omar rented a backhoe from Judd Criswell to make certain the graves at Woodbine Corners were properly set up. As a man with a career in law enforcement, he very much appreciated the dangers of shallow graves. He chose a very remote part of the parish, in old Bart Cattrall’s back sixty acres near the bayou. Bart used to plant the field in cotton, but two years ago he’d had a crippling stroke, and he’d let his land lie fallow two seasons now. He kept claiming he was going to plant it, but he never did. By noon Omar figured he had things well in hand, but by one o’clock everything had gone to hell. The dozen or so cases of diarrhea that Wilona had mentioned in the Clarendon camp had turned into a hundred. And the day after that, three hundred.

All emergency personnel in the parish were mobilized to deal with the situation. Three hundred people on the neat Clarendon grounds, enhancing the charm of the gardens with uncontrollable diarrhea and intermittent vomiting. Omar would have laughed, except that he was hip-deep in the action along with everyone else, trying to keep the patients hydrated and alive with Dr. Patel’s emergency solution of glucose and salt.

Thirteen people died. Six were elderly, and five were children. The remaining two, healthy adults, were just unlucky.

Miz LaGrande got sick as well. Omar hoped she’d croak, but the old lady hung on. Omar figured she was too worried about her guests stealing the silver to actually die.

Omar wasn’t feeling so good himself. Some days he could barely drag himself out of bed. Sometimes his stomach pained him so much that it felt like a wolf eating his vitals. He tried Alka-Seltzer, Maalox, and aspirin. Nothing seemed to help.

There were certain advantages to the emergency. Omar pulled all his regular deputies into town to deal with the situation. He could only keep a skeleton crew of special deputies at the A.M.E. camp, because everyone else was trying to treat the outbreak of dysentery. It gave him a plausible excuse for not being around the A.M.E. camp, for not knowing officially what was going on there. He put the whole place in the charge of special deputies, all Klan or Crusaders. The only actual Spottswood Parish deputy he placed there was Jedthus, whom he instructed to rely on Micah Knox’s advice.

Jedthus, Omar reckoned, was his most expendable deputy.

The outbreak at Clarendon was traced to the water supply. The Emergency people had sent water purifying equipment, but this had been taken to the municipal water supplies of Shelburne City and Hardee for the use of the taxpayers. Since the city main that led to Clarendon had been wrecked, Mrs. Ashenden had uncovered a pair of old wells on the property in order to keep her refugees in water. But neither she nor anyone else had been careful about keeping the camp’s latrines at a safe distance from the wells, and now they were all paying the penalty.

It was just, Omar thought, like the War Between the States.

TWENTY-NINE

“Heaven-o there, Jason.”

Jason—sitting crosslegged on the ground, resting his muscles after a day of hauling feed sacks, and waiting for the Samaritans to be called for dinner—looked up at the Reverend Frankland. “Uh, hi,” he said.

“I want to talk to you for a minute, boy,” Frankland said.

A shiver of fear ran up Jason’s spine. He wondered if the Reverend had heard about him talking to the gate guards about where the weapons were stored. Or others about how the guards were set, and who set them, and whether they walked regular rounds or just wandered at random.

Maybe he was just going to get chewed out for kissing Arlette. He had got the impression, from what some of the other boys in the Samaritans had said, that they took race pretty seriously here in Arkansas. Maybe as seriously as they took religion.

A smile beamed down from Frankland’s face, its effect marred by the split lip and bruising that Olson had inflicted on him. That and the lack of chin.

“There’s a story, Jason,” Frankland said, “that you brought some kind of nuclear device into the camp.” A nervous laugh broke from Jason’s throat. Looking into Frankland’s searching gaze, he concluded that this was no time to stretch the truth.

“It’s a telescope,” he said. “But if I told the other kids it was a telescope, they’d play with it and break it. So I made up something to keep them away from it.”

Little amused crinkles broke out around Frankland’s eyes. “That’s a good one, son!” he said. One big hand patted Jason on the shoulder.

“Uh, thanks,” Jason said.

“But you shouldn’t tell stories that scare people,” Frankland said. Jason looked up. Tried to make his face vulnerable. “It’s the only thing I have to remember my father by,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose it.”

Sympathy settled into Frankland’s bruised face. He patted Jason on the shoulder again. “If your telescope is valuable, bring it to me when I’m free, and I’ll lock it up for you in the big storeroom. You can get it back any time you like.”

“I’ll do that, sir,” Jason said. “Thank you.”

“And maybe some night you can bring out the scope and give a show for the boys and girls. It’ll be good to keep their minds occupied with so much time on their hands.”

“I don’t know much about the stars yet, ” Jason said. “But I’ll tell them what I know.”

“Great!” Frankland was already rolling away. “Heaven-o, Jason!”

“Uh,” Jason said, “bye.”

Jason thought for a moment. He didn’t want to let his telescope go, but on the other hand it would be interesting to see what was in Frankland’s storerooms, and how it could be got to. And it wasn’t as if he’d been stargazing much, anyway.

Jason told Nick about Frankland’s offer later that evening, after supper, as they were walking by the perimeter fence with Manon and Arlette prior to Garb’s evening service. It was about the only encouraging news Nick heard all day.

He’d spent the previous day sweating and sorting through the rubble at the Bijoux along with the rest of the Thessalonians, and talking to Tex and the other workers when their guide Martin wasn’t listening. All he’d managed to find out was how tight Frankland had Rails Bluff sewn up.

The guns Nick had come with, and all those belonging to the others in the camp who weren’t part of Frankland’s clique, were all in a concrete-walled bunker, with a concrete slab over them. A tripod and tackle were required to lift the slab, so there was no reasonable hope of getting firearms from anywhere in the camp before they made their run for freedom.

Nick had spent today at the camp. Work details were over, and very few people were allowed out. Nick had talked to a number of people who had been here awhile—he said he was looking for a suitable job here in camp—and none of the news had been encouraging.

Food supplies were guarded. There was a guard on the improvised boat jetty at the Rails River. Nick had seen a Chevy Suburban with heavily armed men drive out in that direction just that morning. The only cause for optimism was that the guard on the camp itself was lax. The guards’ training was nonexistent, or dated from years ago in the military, and lack of calories and proper supervision made them lazy. There were no pass-words, no proper checks, and the perimeter was chiefly defined by twine strung from wooden posts.

Nick imagined the guards were all good shots, though. They all had the ease of country people who had been raised around firearms and were comfortable with them. The question was whether they would fire at another human being who was only trying to get away, who wasn’t trying to harm them. He suspected that most of them wouldn’t shoot. But Nick didn’t want to risk his daughter’s life on that supposition.

It would probably be relatively easy to slip out of the camp, he concluded—but then what? If they stole a vehicle they’d give themselves away the second they keyed the ignition. They didn’t know the country. And if they were missed, people would probably go out looking, and the guards would be alerted. Manon might sneak some food from the kitchen, but it wouldn’t be much. The boat slip was guarded by two men.

Nick wondered if he could fake a message from Frankland to the guards. You are needed at the camp. Nick here will guard the boats.

Would they believe that? Did they have some way of communicating with the camp to check? Probably they did, if the walkie-talkie that Martin wore was any indication.

Even if they didn’t, he thought, he couldn’t trust the guards to be as stupid as he’d hoped. He’d have to be prepared to take them out.

Take them out. One of his father’s expressions.

Daddy, what would you do? he wondered. How would you get your family out of this?

Get a weapon. Nick could almost hear his father’s voice. Kill the sentries on the boat from cover, without warning, much safer than trying to fool them or bluff them. If you can’t get a gun, get up close to them with a knife and attack without warning. Slash a throat. Cut an artery. Stab a kidney. Get their guns and a boat. Sabotage all the other boats, or steal all the fuel, then head for open water. Nick’s mouth went dry when he thought of it, and his knees went a little weak. They’re just people, he thought. They aren’t the enemy, they’re just old boys with funny notions about the end of the world. But it might come to that, he thought. It just might.

“Should I take the scope to Frankland?” Jason asked.

Nick nodded. “Might as well get a look at that storage place,” he said, without any real hope it would make a difference. “Might as well. Maybe we can liberate something that will be of use.” Maybe. He looked at Manon and Arlette. Helplessness sighed through his blood. How do I keep you safe? he asked. How?

After two days of chaos, the dysentery at Clarendon had begun to get under control, and Dr. Patel had a few moments to collect his thoughts. He decided that he wanted to inspect the sanitary facilities at the A.M.E. camp. “We do not want this type of lamentable event to occur in both places,” he told Omar. The lamentable event was one that Omar had been hoping for all along. It had occurred to him that a nice epidemic could break out on the A.M.E. campgrounds and solve a lot of his problems, but it hadn’t happened. The place had been intended for large camp meetings, and its sanitary facilities were properly laid out at safe distances from the water supply.

“Let’s plan your visit for this afternoon,” Omar said. “I’ve got to put on some extra guards so you don’t get your throat cut the second you walk through the gates.”

Patel gave him a thoughtful look. “Very well,” he said. “Certainly.” The more Omar thought about it, the more he considered that perhaps Dr. Patel shouldn’t be the only person to inspect the A.M.E. camp. Perhaps it was time to reinforce the notion that the camp was full of dangerous people who had to be confined behind barbed wire before they sacked Shelburne City like the Goths sacked Rome.

“Whatever story gets out,” Knox had said, “it’s got to be your story.” So he invited various members of the local establishment to join Dr. Patel on his inspection tour—a couple members of the parish council, Tree Simpson, one of Miz LaGrande’s harpies who happened to run the local Red Cross, and Sorrel Ellen the reporter. Then he drove out to the corp limit and called Jedthus to a meeting.

“I want you to get on the bullhorn,” he said, “and tell everyone in the camp that the Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K. is coming to pay them a visit tomorrow morning. Tell them we expect them to provide the Wizard with a real courteous Southern welcome, just like they were white people.” Jedthus looked puzzled. “Is this our Grand Wizard, you mean? Or is this someone from another Klan?” You really are expendable, Omar thought wearily. And he explained, carefully, what he wanted Jedthus to do and why.

So that when the inspection party turned up next morning they were met by a full-scale riot, swarms of angry niggers howling and stamping and throwing garbage. And no one, not even Dr. Patel, even got near the gate. Miz LaGrande’s bridge partner, the Red Cross lady, looked ready to have a stroke.

“Hell a mile, Omar!” Tree Simpson said, as he stared wide-eyed from the shoulder of the highway at the rioters howling for his blood. “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with these people?”

“They’re a bad lot, I guess.” Omar shrugged. “At least they ain’t acting like they’re sick. I figure we can let them look after their own dang bowels.”

So the inspection party headed back to town and left the A.M.E. camp to Omar. Omar hoped that from this point they’d deal with the diarrhea at Clarendon and leave everything else to him. Frankland had barely swung into his morning announcements when a loud voice called out from the audience.

“Reverend!” A voice. “Reverend Frankland!”

A young man in the crowd waved a hand. Studs Morgan, Frankland saw. The day before the quake, he’d bailed out on that assault charge.

A Catholic. One of Robitaille’s flock, and before he’d got out of jail he had worked for Magnusson, at the video store. The rest of his family had evacuated to Hot Springs, but Studs had remained, looking after the family farm, because he and his family didn’t get along. After the second big quake, the Morgan place had burned down, and Studs had come to the camp.

Frankland tried not to scowl. “Later, please, Studs,” Frankland said. “It’s not time for questions.”

“What’s being done about staying in touch with the out-side?” Studs called. “I’m sure it would comfort a lot of people here to know that their families down in Hot Springs were safe.” And dang it, Frankland heard people in the crowd agreeing with him.

Tension sang along Frankland’s jawline as he deliberately donned his brightest smile.

“Well,” he said through the smile, “I’m afraid there isn’t much of an outside to talk to, properly speaking. It’s a real mess out there, Studs. You’ve heard the bulletins. We should all be thankful that—”

“You’ve got a radio station!” Studs shouted. “All you have to do is call for help!”

“There are other people worse off than we are,” Frankland said. “Much worse off. We have food, we have adequate shelter. Other people should be first in line…”

“We need a doctor!” Studs said. “What if we get sick? What if someone gets hurt?” Frankland saw Hilkiah out of the corner of his eye. Hilkiah sort of puffed, like a cat confronting a growling dog. All his muscles swollen, his neck taut, the prison tattoos ready to pop off his flesh with the tension that swelled his arms.

“I’ll take care of this, Reverend,” Hilkiah growled.

No, Frankland thought. That would be a disaster. He’d have to win them over; he’d have to convince them. Force would make enemies of them all.

He was right. All he needed was the rush, the feeling of the Spirit flowing into his body. And then he could convince them, convince them as he always did…

Frankland held the microphone away from his face, turned to Hilkiah. “No,” he said. “Not now. I’ve got to—”

And then Hilkiah’s head exploded, a huge splash of red and white superimposed for a brilliant second on Frankland’s retinal image of his aide. As the big body fell, as the crowd reacted in shock, Frankland heard the voice calling across the highway, from the deserted catfish farm.

“Send me my family!” the voice shouted. ” I want my children, Your Holiness, and I want them now!” The concussion slapped Nick’s ears. He watched Hilkiah’s body fall, and he thought rifle. As he turned and lunged to his feet in one strangely seamless motion, he knew in an instant what he had to do.

“Up!” hauling at Arlette’s arm. “Up! Keep down and run this way!”

“Send me my family!” a voice called.

The crowd was reacting, stirring like leaves in a slow wind. There were screams and shocked looks. Nick had hauled Arlette to her feet by one hand under her arm. He reached with the other hand, slid under Manon’s armpit.

“Up!” he said.

Oh God, he thought, don’t let the guards start shooting back.

Those people wouldn’t have any kind of fire discipline at all, he knew, they’d just start blazing away. The more bullets in the air, the more danger for everybody.

He had Arlette and Manon up and moving through the crowd. His hands were on their backs, pressing them down into a crouch to make a smaller target. Jason was scrambling to his feet, a wild look on his face.

There was a scramble at the head of the congregation, Frankland falling as if he’d tripped over something, the choir stampeding off their risers. Feedback shrieked over the speakers. And then one of the guards cut loose, a crackle of fire from one of the Armalites. It wasn’t automatic fire, but it might as well have been, the rifle snapping away as fast as the guard could pull the trigger.

Another shot, a single deep boom sounding over the rattle of the Armalite, and the crowd screamed as Dr. Calhoun fell, clutching at his midsection.

“Run!” Nick shouted. He hauled at Manon as she tripped over someone’s legs. “This way!” There was more chattering fire from Armalites. “Stop!” Frankland’s voice, an anguished shout over the loudspeakers. “Stop that shooting!”

“This way!” Nick panted. “Quick!” He tried to put his body between Arlette and the shooter, but he figured it was useless. A single bullet could tear through them both.

Another boom. There was a raw scream of agony, a sound that sent claws tearing along Nick’s nerves, and one of the Armalites stopped firing.

A scoped rifle, Nick thought. A sniper just picking his targets with all the deliberation in the world, and he was probably well concealed by the earthen bank surrounding Johnson’s catfish pond across the road. There was no way the guards were going to stop him, not the way they were using their weapons, firing fast and almost at random.

“Stop the shooting!” shouted Frankland.

The crowd was screaming, picking itself up, scattering in flight. To Nick they were just obstacles, slow-moving, stupid things blundering between him and his objective. He moved through them like an Olympic skier charging down the slalom slopes. Nick alone, of all these people, knew where he was going.

“This way! This way!”

Nick ran for the parking lot. Arlette, Manon, and Jason were with him. Manon’s eyes were big as saucers, and she clutched at Arlette, trying to shield her. They leaped a four-foot crevasse rather than queue up for a plank bridge.

The firing, a part of his mind observed, had died away. But the noise level had vastly increased as over a hundred people screamed and shouted and ran like panicked animals for cover. But this was an old field, plowed flat over scores of years and still rutted from the last time it was sowed with cotton, and there was no cover really, nothing but the buildings and a few trees and the dangerous crevasses left by earthquakes. Not enough to shelter everyone.

There were also the vehicles parked by the road. But you couldn’t run away to the parking lot, you had to angle toward the sniper to get there. Nick hadn’t led his group straight to the parked vehicles, he first took them parallel to the highway until there were plenty of cars between him and the sniper, then led them into the shadow of the Reverend Doctor Calhoun’s old bus, then on to a truck parked just beyond.

“You wait here,” Nick said. He pressed Manon and Arlette down behind a big tire. The truck body itself would provide little protection against a high-powered rifle, but the engine block would, and the engine block was behind the front tire.

“Send me my family!” The sniper’s high-pitched voice could barely be heard over the shrieks of the crowd.

“Just stop the shooting!” Frankland begged over wild feedback shrieks. Nick opened the truck door, checked to see if there were keys in the ignition. There weren’t. He passed a quick hand over the top of the dash, then over the top of the sun shade to see if the driver had stashed his keys there.

No luck. He needed to find another truck.

He herded the others to the next truck, checked there, found nothing. Moved everyone to the next. Frankland and the sniper were shouting at each other, trying to negotiate.

Olson, he remembered. The sniper’s name would be Olson. The loud, red-faced, blustering man. Now his bluster was backed by a large firearm, which elevated the bluster to a new level.

“We’re going?” Manon gasped, realizing at last what Nick intended. “We’re leaving the camp?”

“No better time,” Nick said as he groped for keys.

“That one,” Jason said, pointing to another truck. “I was in it yesterday.” Nick led the others to the truck Jason indicated, opened the door and saw, gleaming in the ignition, the dangling keys. He turned back to Manon and the others.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m going to start the truck and get it moving. I don’t want you in the truck just yet!

You move alongside the truck, okay? Crouch right down! Keep the engine block between you and the shooter. And when I give the word, you just pile in the cab next to me, and keep your heads down. Understand?”

Nick saw a series of nods. He looked in the wide eyes for comprehension and saw it. Adrenaline flamed through his veins. Nick crawled into the cab of the truck and slid across the bench seat to the driver’s side. He slammed down the clutch so hard that it hit the floor-boards with a boom. His hands shook so much that it took him two tries to get a proper grip on the ignition key. He pumped the accelerator, twisted the key.

And the engine started. By God, it started.

Nick blinked sweat out of his eyes as he jammed the shift lever into first and let out the clutch. The truck shuddered and Nick remembered the parking brake—he slammed at it with his hand and the truck leaped forward. Nick juggled accelerator and clutch as he slowed the truck to match it to his family’s pace on foot. He crouched down over the wheel, trying to make a smaller target, and he tried to keep other vehicles between himself and the catfish pond, keep more metal between himself and any bullets. He ran out of parking lot and cover at the same time. He put in the clutch and let the truck coast to a stop.

“Everyone in!” he said. “Fast now, fast! Heads down!”

Manon and Arlette came scrambling in, Manon on top in an attempt to shelter her daughter with her body. Jason came next, jamming himself in with difficulty next to the others, his task made more difficult by the hard red body of the Astroscan telescope he’d slung over his shoulder. He had brought the scope with him that morning, Nick remembered, to have Frankland store it. And he’d kept ahold of it through everything.

“Maggie!” Olson’s voice, crying over the battlefield. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!”

Nick let out the clutch before his three passengers had quite wedged themselves in, and Jason gave a yell and clutched at the dashboard as the truck leaped forward and threatened to spill him into the bar ditch. The truck swayed as it ran up the shoulder of the road, and Nick flung the wheel over and punched the accelerator to the floor.

His back tensed. Waiting for the bullet.

Nick shifted into second, then into third. Tools and planks in the truck bed boomed as the truck thundered over broken asphalt and a filled-in crevasse. The last of the camp, the unmarried men’s compound, fell behind.

Gears clashed as Nick shifted into fourth. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a demon smile. The sniper wasn’t gunning for them. They were free.

Frankland tried to take a step and stumbled over Hilkiah’s inert body. Another shot boomed. There was the weird whine of a bullet sheathing itself in flesh, but all he could see was trampling feet. He clutched the microphone in his fist. He knew that if he gave up the microphone, he gave up all hope of saving the situation.

“Stop the shooting!” Frankland cried. “Stop!” Shots chattered out into the air, people firing wildly. The panicked crowd screamed as it scattered over the fields. Choir members sprawled over the ground as the risers on which they were standing were tipped by panicked singers.

Frankland scurried on hands and knees after the crowd, trying to get the solid bulk of his steel-framed church between himself and the sniper.

Some people ran past him, dragging Dr. Calhoun over the bloody grass. Calhoun had been shot, Frankland thought dimly. And a voice in him said, Oh, iniquity!

Another cry, barely audible over the panic, came from the man lying behind the banks of Brother Johnson’s catfish ponds. ” Send me my family!”

Olson, Frankland thought. It was Olson out there. Somehow he had not quite realized this till now.

“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted into the mike. “Just stop the shooting!” One of the Armalites ripped off a dozen rounds. “Stop that firing!” Frankland commanded, and the gunshots ceased.

He scurried around the corner of the church. There were thirty people lying there—Frankland saw Sheryl with a pistol in her hand, and Calhoun lying pale, and old Sheriff Gorton standing there with a mild, puzzled look on his face, as if he were trying to work out the daily crossword in the paper.

“Maggie!” Olson called. “Maggie, you come out here!” Frankland looked out at the terrified crowd stampeding away from the site of the shooting, and he wondered if there was any way he could find Maggie Olson and her children anywhere in that panicked mass.

“Maggie!” Olson’s voice again. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!” Olson squeezed off two shots that rang on the steel sides of the church. Frankland looked over his head and saw two bullet holes.

The church wasn’t cover at all. That high-powered rifle of Olson’s could punch right through it.

“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted, “just stop the shooting!” He had been the target, Frankland thought. If he hadn’t turned his head when he did, to whisper into Hilkiah’s ear, it would have been his own head that exploded under the force of the bullet. And if he hadn’t tripped, he would probably have been gutshot instead of Calhoun.

The Lord had preserved him, he realized. And that meant that the Lord wasn’t done with him yet, that the Lord still featured him in his plans.

Frankland and Olson shouted back and forth for long moments while the crowd dispersed over the camp and beyond. Eventually Maggie Olson and her two children were located and sent forward to her husband. Maggie wept as she dragged herself with slow steps across the asphalt highway toward her husband, and her youngest was hysterical, screaming against his mother’s shoulder as she carried him toward the catfish pond where her husband had fortified himself.

“Now you just leave us alone!” Olson shouted after his family joined him. “You leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone! If you send anyone after us, I’ll shoot him dead.”

Frankland saw no point in replying. He looked at Calhoun lying gasping and pale. Hilkiah’s corpse was barely visible around the corner of the church. The flies were already busy about his brains. They hath taken my right arm, Frankland thought, but I shall smite them sore with my left. He had better things to do than wonder if the phrase that just popped into his head was actually from the Bible or not.

There was a rushing sound in Frankland’s ears, like a thousand angels in flight. He picked his way through the prone figures toward Dr. Calhoun, who lay surrounded by the crouched forms of Sheryl, the Reverend Garb, and several others. Calhoun was pale, and his skin was moist. Frankland crouched by him, saw Calhoun’s midsection soaked in red. Someone’s shirt was folded and pressed over the wound to stem the bleeding, but Frankland knew that bleeding was not the greatest danger facing a gutshot man. Calhoun would die within a few days, and he would die of peritonitis because there wasn’t a doctor in Rails Bluff capable of saving him. Frankland took Calhoun’s hand. “How you doing, Lucius?” he asked. Calhoun licked his lips. “Praying,” he said. Dust blew from his ginger mustache as he spoke.

“Well,” Frankland said, and touched his colleague’s shoulder, “we’ll get the man that did this.” Calhoun nodded. “Olson,” he said.

“Yes. Smite him. We’ll smite him.” The sound in Frankland’s ears resolved itself into a band of angels singing a chorus of vengeance.

Calhoun nodded again. His bloody fingers tightened on Frankland’s.

“I’ll talk to you soon,” Frankland said, “and we’ll pray together, if you like. But right now I got a posse to put together.”

Calhoun nodded. “Heaven-o,” he said.

Frankland rose to his feet. His skull filled with the sound of angels crying for vengeance. An unprovoked attack, Frankland thought. He just fired from ambush, without warning, and blew Brother Hilkiah’s head right off. Frankland couldn’t let Olson get away with that. Olson and his family had to leave the safety of that catfish pond embankment sooner or later. And when they did, Frankland and his people would follow. Olson would find he wasn’t the only person with a high-powered hunting rifle.

Frankland cocked his head up as he heard the sound of a rattling little motor echoing from across the road. A dirt bike, he thought, or an ATV. That was how Olson was making his getaway. Olson didn’t even have a proper vehicle. He’d found a gun in a ruin somewhere, and some little Japanese scooter, and that was as far as his luck would go.

Frankland felt his lips turning in up in a grim smile. Spoke the words that the angels sang into his mind.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” he said.

That was one quote he was sure of.

Nick put Arlette and Manon behind some bushes by the roadside near the broken bridge. “You wait till I call,” Nick said. “Jason and I will talk to the guards.”

And maybe kill them, Nick thought, if they don’t do what’s needed. Kill them with my bare hands. He could do it, he realized. He could do exactly what was necessary. And he found that he was not surprised by this knowledge.

Jason dropped out of the cab to let Manon and Arlette out, then climbed back in. The telescope swung into his lap on its strap.

“Whatever happens,” Nick said, “I need you to back my play.” Jason licked his lips. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell them they’re needed at the camp.” Which, he considered, had the virtue of being true. He rolled the truck to the top of the bluff near the broken bridge, turned off the engine, set the parking brake. He could see the jetty down below him, boats bobbing in the water.

“Let’s go.”

He made his way down the red-clay path with Jason at his heels. It was still early morning and the Rails River gorge was deep in shadow.

“Hey there,” a man said from the bushes that lined the Rails.

Hey there, Nick thought with sudden scorn. He could imagine what his father would have said if a sentry had ever hailed him with Hey there.

“Hey there,” Nick answered. “Hey. We got some trouble at the camp.” Two men emerged from where they’d been sitting beneath the bushes. The speaker was a stranger, a grizzled white man maybe fifty years old, but the other was Conroy, the brother who had driven Nick and Jason to the camp on their first day.

“Hey there, Conroy,” Nick said.

Conroy’s unshaven face was uncertain under his baseball cap. “What’s happening at the camp?”

“Reverend needs you back there,” Nick said. “That Olson came back, with a gun.” Conroy and the guard exchanged glances. Hesitated.

“Better get moving,” Nick said. “There’s a bad situation there.” He heard his father’s voice in his head, tried to echo the commanding tones.

The guards’ eyes snapped to Nick at the sound of command. Then Conroy looked down at the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

“Can’t call from here,” he said. “Have to go to the top of the bluff.” The two guards looked at each other again. “I suppose we ought to check it out.”

“The keys are in the truck,” Nick said. “The boy and I will look after the boats for you. Hurry!” Nick watched, heart throbbing, as Conroy and the other man labored to the top of the bluff. Conroy lifted the walkie-talkie to his ear, then Nick saw a shock run through his frame. He and the other guard hustled into the truck, started the engine, and drove off.

Nick turned to Jason. “Fetch Manon and Arlette. I’ll get a boat ready.” There were a half-dozen or more boats, either tied to the plank jetty or drawn up on land, but only one boat actually possessed a motor. The rest of the outboards had apparently been taken to the camp and put into storage.

The one boat with a motor was Retired and Gone Fishin’, Jason’s battered old bass boat. American Dream, the speedboat Jason had got at the casino, wasn’t even there. For a moment Nick considered shifting the outboard to another boat. Retired and Gone Fishin’ was small for four people, and there was no canvas top as there had been on American Dream. But then he thought of the delay. It would take time to shift a heavy motor from one boat to another, along with its fuel. The bass boat, whatever its other disadvantages, would be fast under power. He could probably stay ahead of any pursuit. And the bass boat had built-in storage compartments, and the silent electric motor that could be rigged to the bow.

And then it occurred to Nick to wonder where Olson would go once he got his wife and children free of the camp.

He would come here, Nick realized. Olson would have to get a boat and flee. It was the only way he would escape Frankland’s revenge.

He was probably on his way. Conroy and the other guard wouldn’t be able to stop him: Olson would riddle them before they even got out of the truck.

Nick’s heart lurched in his chest. He turned to Jason, shouted, “Hurry!” and jumped into the bass boat. The oars that the Beluthahatchie had provided were still there. There were plastic jugs of water in one of the boat’s coolers, but the compartments were empty. The fifty-horse Johnson had two plastic jerricans full of fuel. Nick wondered if he could find more.

He ran from one boat to the next, checking each in turn. Nothing. Then he turned to the bank and was luckier—four more plastic jerricans sat in the shade under the bluff, ready to be placed aboard any boat that was running low. Next to the jerricans were a pair of box lunches intended for the guards’ midday meal, a plastic jug of water, a roll of actual toilet paper, a blanket, and a bright orange plastic sun-shade held in place with rope and tent pegs.

Nick gave a breathless laugh at the sight. He carried the jerricans two at a time to the boat. By the time he finished his second run, Jason and the others had come down the bluff, and they brought the food and other supplies aboard, including the awning.

Nick got everyone on the bass boat, then cast off. The boat drifted gently down the Rails River as he readied the engine, primed the fuel, worked with the clutch and choke, then pressed the self-start. As the outboard boomed into life, Nick looked at the joy and relief in the eyes of the others. His heart thrilled. It was the most glorious sight he’d seen in his life.

He moved forward into the cockpit and took the wheel. Spun the wheel to correct the boat’s course, pushed the throttle forward.

They were on their way.

“Daddy!” Arlette’s arms came around him from behind. “That was brilliant!”

“Man, Nick,” Jason said. “The way you gave orders, you sounded just like a general.” Joy sang through Nick. He kissed one of the brown arms that embraced him.

“Next stop,” he said, “civilization.”

The bluff parted before them, opening like a curtain sweeping left and right over the stage, and they coasted into the Delta. The still, brown waters of the Arkansas floodplain were littered with wreckage, and Nick had to keep his speed down. He took comfort in the thought that pursuit couldn’t go any faster. He put Jason on the front deck, with one of the oars, to pole off such of the flotsam as he couldn’t avoid. Retired and Gone Fishin’ glided slowly and cautiously through perhaps three miles of maimed, flooded forest before catching a glimpse of the main channel of the Arkansas River through the trees. It was then, just as Nick’s heart was lifting, just as he was about to throw his head back and laugh his triumph to the sky, that he heard the sound of a big outboard booming into life just ahead. Nick’s pulse thundered louder than the engine. He stood in the cockpit to stare ahead, and despair fell upon his heart like rain as he saw a familiar shape easing out from between the trees. It was American Dream, with its hundred-fifty-horsepower motor that could run down the bass boat without even trying. And inside the boat’s cockpit Nick saw at least three silhouettes.

One of Frankland’s river patrols out looking for refugees, the same sort that had brought them to the camp in the first place.

Plans flailed through his mind. He didn’t think, in this instance, the “Brother Frankland sent me to tell you to come back to the camp” ploy was likely to work.

“Oh, hell,” Jason murmured. “It’s Magnusson.”

“The porno guy?” Nick said. He cut power as the other boat approached. Fleeing at top speed was a futile idea, and therefore reserved for the moment when everything else had failed. The other boat throttled back, then reversed briefly to check its momentum.

“Heaven-o there, Adams,” Magnusson said. “What’s going on?”

“There’s shooting in the camp,” Nick called out. “A war almost. Olson came back with friends and guns. Hilkiah was shot dead in front of the whole camp, and so was the Reverend Calhoun.” The others looked at each other in surprise. Whatever they’d been expecting to hear, this clearly wasn’t it.

“So what are you-all doing?” Magnusson said.

Nick stood straight, squared his shoulders. You are telling them, he informed himself, you aren’t asking their permission.

“We’re getting to safety,” Nick said. “We’re not armed, and there’s nothing we can do. If you’ve got weapons, you should go back to the camp and help restore order. But otherwise I advise you to stay away.”

The other two men seemed uncertain, but Magnusson returned an answer quickly.

“I don’t think you’re thinking very clearly, sir,” he said. “There’s no safety on the river. It’s dangerous, and that’s why we’re supposed to bring in anyone we find here.”

“There isn’t any warfare on the river,” Nick said. “It’s a lot safer than the camp.” He nodded as calmly as he could at Magnusson, but he felt helplessness drain the strength from his knees, and he leaned slightly against the side of the cockpit in order to support himself.

A momentary aftershock shivered the tops of the trees. Twigs and leaves rained down on the water.

“Sir,” Magnusson said, “I can’t let you out on that river, okay? Not with your family. It’s too dangerous.”

“People are dying at the camp,” Nick insisted. “You don’t believe me, you call them. You have a radio, don’t you?”

“It don’t work this far out,” one of the other men said. “Trees and water just eat up the signal, I guess.”

“I think you should come back with us, okay?” Magnusson said. “We’ll check out the situation, make certain that things are safe before we bring you into the camp.”

So here it was. Nick drew himself up, tried to summon his father’s authority.

“No,” he said. “No. We’re not going back.”

“I can’t permit you to leave, mister,” Magnusson said.

Nick narrowed his eyes. Looked at the pistol holstered on Magnusson’ hip. “What are your orders exactly?” he asked. “You supposed to shoot us or what? And what exactly gives you the authority to do that?”

And the question, Nick thought, was, Would they? Would they actually open fire?

The other two, Nick thought, probably wouldn’t. They seemed intimidated by the situation. He couldn’t see either of them raising a weapon against someone who wasn’t trying to harm them. They would look for excuses not to.

Magnusson, though, was more problematic. Magnusson was the strong-willed one, the one with the white armband that marked him as a leader. The one who wailed in front of a hundred and fifty people about the evil pornography he had sold, and how Frankland had helped him see the light.

“You’re coming back with us, okay?” Magnusson said.

“Calhoun is dead.” Nick barked out the words like his father dressing down a recruit. “Hilkiah’s dead. Other people died with them. And Reverend Frankland’s dream is dead! There’s nothing to go back to.”

Fury blazed in Magnusson’s eyes. “That’s not true!” he snapped. One hand touched the butt of his pistol. “You’re coming back!”

Nick’s heart sank. He’d played it wrong. General Ruford had given too many orders. If Nick had stayed sweet and reasonable, he might have been able to talk his way out of this.

Now it was hopeless. General Ruford had failed, and it was up to Nick to make up for the general’s failure. The only thing for Nick to do was to try to talk his way onto the other boat, then knock Magnusson down and get a gun, hold them all off at gunpoint or go down blazing… Hopeless, but it was the only thing he could think to do.

Jason looked at Nick and knew. There was that resolution in Nick’s face, that hard resolve that Jason had seen before on the river when he was trying to get to Arlette and Manon ahead of the people who had killed Gros-Papa. Nick was going to try something desperate, jump onto Magnusson and his gun maybe. Do whatever he could to save his family, and probably die.

Jason’s head whirled. He needed to do something, he knew. Something…

“No way!” he yelled. He waved his arms and jumped from the foredeck down into the cockpit. The boat rocked under him. He had wanted just to distract Magnusson, to break the thread of tension he’d seen running from Magnusson to Nick. That, and maybe give Nick a chance to come up with a plan that wasn’t based on getting himself killed

And then his eye lit on the red plastic case of the telescope, tucked behind the passenger seat. Wild inspiration seized him. He grabbed the Astroscan in both hands and held it over his head.

“This is a nuclear reactor!” he yelled. “You hit this with a bullet, and we’re all blown to bits!” There was a long, astonished silence broken only by the pounding of Jason’s heart. Magnusson’s eyes were wide and staring. Muscles worked on his unshaven jaw.

“Nick,” Jason said, still glaring at Magnusson, “let’s get this boat out of here.” Nick slowly lowered himself into the driver’s seat and pushed the throttle forward. The Johnson rumbled and the bass boat began to move.

Looking over his shoulder, Nick saw Magnusson step forward, one foot on the gunwale. Then saw one of the others put a restraining hand on his arm.

The boat rolled from the broken forest into the bright sunlight. Jason faced aft, the telescope still held over his head. Nick felt a laugh rising like a bubble through his astonishment.

“Goodbye-o!” Jason howled over the stern as he waved the Astroscan over his head. “Goodbye-o!” He turned to the others. “Who’s the genius?” he demanded. “Who’s the genius? Who’s got his own atomic bomb?” He gave a whoop.

And then Jason looked down at Nick, at the man’s trembling hands clenched on the wheel, and he felt the silent passage between them.

I was this close, he read in Nick’s face.

I know, Jason answered silently. I know how close we were.

The hunt lasted most of the morning. Frankland and his people, traveling across country in pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, in pursuit of Olson, who had his whole family piled onto one little beat-up ATV that wouldn’t go twenty miles an hour.

Olson first of all tried to make for the piney woods to the northwest of town. Frankland knew that once Olson got his family into that dense wreckage, they might well die of starvation or frustration, but would be perfectly safe as far as pursuit was concerned. So Frankland first sent a column of hunters under Sheriff Gorton zooming down the highway to get to the woods first. They succeeded, and when Olson’s ATV appeared, in a soy field south of the piney woods, he found Gorton’s people waiting, behind the cover of their vehicles with their weapons pointing across their hoods.

Olson should have known, Frankland thought, that you can’t fight the angels.

Olson slowed his vehicle, peered for a moment at the reception party ready for him, then turned the ATV

around and buzzed away to the south. Gorton mounted his people and pursued cross country, careful to keep out of range of Olson’s scoped rifle. Frankland was in touch with Gorton by radio, and had another posse under Garb waiting for Olson when he came. So Olson turned again, heading in about the only direction left, to the northeast. There wasn’t much there for him, not unless he planned to descend the bluff and wade out into the flooded country below, but Frankland hadn’t left him much choice. Frankland himself waited there, between Olson and the bluff, with six trucks spread out and twelve guards under good cover. And when Olson saw that, and looked over his shoulder at the patient vehicles slowly following him, he turned again and went to ground, in a partially collapsed farm building belonging to a family called the Swansons.

Angels sang their triumph in Frankland’s mind. The rebel Olson was in his power.

“Heaven-o!” Frankland called out, standing in the back of a truck and bellowing over the cab through cupped hands. He called for Olson to surrender, but there was no answer. So Frankland and Gorton sent in their posse. Frankland gave the advancing men cover, blasting away at the wrecked farmhouse with his Winchester from behind the cover of his truck. Angels cried their triumph at every shot. The angels’ song turned to a lament. Olson blew up one of the advancing trucks with a shot that hit the gas tank, almost roasting the three men inside. Olson killed one man sheltering behind another vehicle, and wounded two others. After that Frankland’s people beat a retreat despite the reverend urging them on.

Then a siege began, with Frankland’s people lying under cover at what they hoped was a safe distance and firing into the Swanson house in hopes of hitting their invisible enemy. Occasionally Olson would fire a round back to tell everyone to keep their distance.

Wait till night, thought Frankland. At night I can get close enough to burn them out. This went on for hours, as the sun mounted hot into the sky and the land baked beneath them. Frankland’s people hadn’t even had breakfast, so he called the camp and arranged for food and water to be brought.

“Honey bear,” Sheryl told him over the walkie-talkie, “I think you better get back here with some of those men of yours. Things here are going all to blazes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t leave enough guards to keep order here,” Sheryl said. “People are wandering around outside the boundaries like they’re not supposed to. A lot of folks ran off during the incident this morning and haven’t come back. When you sent the dead and wounded back, that shot down the morale of the people who would have helped me. Some of the folks took some of our stored food and wandered away.”

“Tell those people that the angels guard them,” Frankland said.

“What was that, honey bear?” Sharply.

“If there is mutiny in the camp,” Frankland said, “you have my authority to enforce discipline.”

“How?” Sheryl demanded. “Nobody’s paying attention to me.”

“Shoot somebody,” Frankland said. “Shoot ten somebodies. The angels will acquit you.” And then he added, “When Satan rageth, surely he must be put down.”

“I’m not shooting anybody till you come back,” Sheryl said. “I want an army to back me up.”

“Just send food and water,” Frankland said.

“I’ll bring it myself.”

Sheryl brought supplies and somber warnings about what was happening in the camp. Before she left Frankland assured her that the angels were guarding them all.

All through the afternoon Frankland’s people continued to fire randomly into the ruin. It was nearing twilight when Frankland finally heard a shout from the Swanson place.

“Stop shooting!” Olson’s high-pitched screech. “You hit my girl!”

“Throw down your guns and come out!” Frankland said. “All of you!”

“Just take my girl!”

“No! All of you or none!”

“She’s hurt bad! Someone come and take her!”

Frankland shouted “Open fire!” leveled his Winchester over the hood of his truck, and let fly. A regular volley rang out. Frankland heard screaming from Olson’s wife, then shouts from Olson, then a shot from the farmhouse that cracked air right over Frankland’s head. The screaming stopped. The firing went on for a while. And then Frankland heard a strange throbbing in the air, and looked up to see a helicopter banking into a lazy turn over the bluff to the north. The helicopter was a small one, dark in color, but it had clearly seen something of interest below, because it finished its turn and began a shallow dive toward Frankland and the Swanson cabin.

“No,” Frankland gasped. He could see it all too clearly. The Devil was coming to save his own. Flying through the air like the wicked angel he was.

“No!” he shouted, rising from his crouch behind his truck. “Shoot! Black helicopter! Government black helicopter! Shoot!”

“It’s green, Brother Frankland,” one of Frankland’s men pointed out, but Frankland raised his Winchester, aimed at the oncoming helicopter, and pulled the trigger. He cranked another round into the rifle, fired, then fired again. Then he thumbed on his walkie-talkie.

“Black helicopter!” he shouted. “It’s coming to rescue Olson! Shoot it down!” More shots crackled out from the circle of trucks, along with a few cries of surprise or protest. Frankland fired twice more. The helicopter roared low over Frankland’s head, close enough so that Frankland could see the government markings and helmeted pilot peering out of the slablike cockpit window. Frankland’s rifle clicked on empty, and he frantically reached for fresh rounds in his vest and began to reload.

The helicopter passed over the area and began a steep climb. Shots dwindled away as the chopper passed out of range. “Brother Frankland!” someone called on the radio. “That was an Army helicopter!

We can’t—”

Frankland finished reloading and snatched the walkie-talkie from the hood of his truck. Angels chanted their anger in his ears. “Smite them!” he cried. “Let their tears be as ashes and let cinders be their end!”

“Brother Frankland!” Another voice. “You don’t under-stand!”

“Heaven or Hell!” Frankland raged. Angels roared in his ears. “You go to Heaven or Hell! Choose now!”

Frankland dropped the walkie-talkie back onto the hood of the truck, then readied his rifle. The chopper reached the top of its climb, then spun in a lazy turn, the setting sun gleaming red off its rotor. Frankland shouldered his rifle, wiped sweat from the pit of his eye. He put his eye to the scope and lined up the copter in the crosshairs.

The helicopter began another dive. Frankland could hear the whine of its jet engines above the throb of rotors, above the chant of the angels in his ears. He tracked the helicopter through his scope, saw sunlight etch shadows of the crewmen behind the smoked cockpit glass.

“I choose Heaven,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

THIRTY

Jessica jumped as a bullet splashed off the windscreen of the Kiowa. She could see armed men down below, crouched behind vehicles. Some of them were shooting. And some of those were shooting at her.

Bullets rattled off the helicopter’s semi-monocoque hull as the Kiowa roared over the scene at a hundred knots. “Hell of a lot of firepower, General,” her pilot remarked.

Jessica winced as a round panged off the cheek window below her feet. “Who are these people?” she muttered.

The Kiowa zoomed over the field and climbed up over the Delta, out of range. Jessica’s heart thrashed against her rib cage.

A hot landing zone in Arkansas? This was deranged.

“Damage?” Jessica said, her eyes flickering over the cockpit displays.

“I hear air through some holes in the fuselage,” the pilot said. “Oil pressure’s steady. No unusual vibration.”

“Alert HQ to the situation,” Jessica said. “Tell them to prep a dustoff in case we have to bail over the Delta.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t suppose that twenty-millimeter gun you’ve got has any ammunition in it.”

“Sorry, General. We left the ammunition loads in Kentucky.”

Oh well. That was just letting the adrenaline talk, anyway. Although the helicopter’s cannon—if loaded—was perfectly capable of wiping out everything in sight on the field below, she could only imagine the penalties for any military officer who used such a weapon on civilian targets, whether they’d fired on her or not.

Jessica was already busy with the controls for the MMS, a kind of periscope unit inside the craft’s rotor hub that carried video, infrared, and laser-sighting systems.

She turned on the video recorder, so there would be a record for later, and panned the area of the battle with the camera cranked up to maximum magnification. Saw the vehicles laid out around the half-fallen farmhouse, the rifles banging away. Presumably they wouldn’t be firing at the farmhouse unless there was someone inside firing back.

Two of the vehicles, she saw, had racks of lights on top, maybe sheriff’s department. Maybe there was a perfectly legitimate police action going on.

In which case, why had she been shot at?

While Jessica peered into the MMS display, the pilot gently tested his controls and control surfaces, shifting the Kiowa gently around the sky. “Are we going to have to dust off that farmhouse, General?” he asked.

“Negative. I’m not going to take us into a hot LZ without knowing what’s going on, or who’s shooting at us.”

“HQ says they are warming up a Cayuse in case we need a dustoff. It’s the only aircraft they’ve got available.”

“Very good.” Another light scout helicopter, damn it. If they had a Blackhawk or Sea Stallion available, a big ship with a reasonable chance of not being shot to pieces, she might have risked trying to rescue whoever was in the farmhouse.

“And ma’am—” The pilot shifted his chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. “I don’t mean to bring you down or anything, but our fuel situation will become critical in about five minutes and night is coming on fast.”

“Let me know when we have to leave. Is there any way we can talk to those cops down there, or whatever they are?”

“We’ve got the secure UHF and SINCGARS only, General. Just military channels.”

“Damn it.” Eyes still on the display, she began searching for the map case she’d placed between the pilot’s seat and her own. “Where the hell is this place?” she asked.

It was pure coincidence Jessica was there at all. She’d flown to Bald Knob to deliver instruction to a National Guard unit concerning the appropriate way to repair a levee, and on her return journey had flown over the Delta, as per her own standing orders to search for refugees whenever possible. The flashing lights of the police vehicle had attracted her attention, and the next thing she knew people were shooting at her.

She looked at the data from the AHRS display, which provided her position within a hundred yards or so, then down at the plastic-encased maps, gloved fingers tracking the coordinates. They were 4.3

kilometers northwest of Rails Bluff, Arkansas. Wherever that was.

She looked back at the MMS display and saw a half-dozen of the besiegers pile into a pickup truck and leave the scene. A grin tugged at the corners of her lips. “I’d say they have a morale problem down there,” she said.

“Ma’am? The fuel…”

“Let me pan across this one last time,” Jessica said, “and then we can get out of here.” She swept the video across the battlefield one more time, then took her hands off the controls. “Take us back by way of Rails Bluff,” she said. “I want to see what’s there.” Rails Bluff was a wreck, with no sign of life, though apparently efforts had been made to clear some of the rubble. Jessica took more video images for the record, though she suspected that twilight was degrading the image significantly. The surprise came a few miles outside of town, when a refugee camp floated into sight, a long line of tents and awnings stretched out along the broken highway.

“Is that one of ours?” Jessica wondered aloud. She couldn’t remember anyone airlifting supplies to a place called Rails Bluff.

“Want me to get closer, General?”

“Negative. We’ve already been shot at once. Just let me get some pictures.” It was dark enough that the video unit wouldn’t provide a suitable image, so Jessica used the FLIR, the Forward-Looking Infra-Red detector set into the MMS. She recorded the little burning lights that were stoves, generators, and human beings. And amid the camp, she saw a long tripod-shaped object standing into the night.

“Is that a radio mast?”

“Looks like it, General.”

“Well.” She panned the camp one more time, then folded the MMS back into the rotor hub. “Let’s get back to HQ.”

While the Kiowa was en route, Jessica spoke to headquarters and told them to check the FCC’s web page to find out as much as they could about whatever radio station was licensed in Rails Bluff. And then to find out everything else available about Rails Bluff, including whether or not the state of Arkansas, the military, or anyone else had set up a refugee camp nearby.

Pat waited for her in the spill of the Kiowa’s landing lights as the chopper came down onto the Vicksburg improvised helipad. He raised a hand to protect his eyes against dust kicked up by the rotor, and she saw a boom box in his hand.

On leaving the helicopter, Jessica suppressed the urge to jump onto Pat and wrap her arms and legs around his lanky body, and instead gave him a peck on the cheek.

He put an arm around her as his eyes surveyed the bullet splashes on her transportation. “You okay?” he said.

“All in a day’s work,” she said, a little too casually. “What have you got for me?” He drew her away from the noise of the helicopter. “I’ve got something to play for you,” he said. “We listen to this sometimes in the clerks’ tent. It’s not all disaster news, and it’s kind of entertaining, in its own surrealistic way.”

The Kiowa’s turbines shut down, and Pat raised the antenna on the boom box and punched the power button. He held the speaker close to Jessica’s ear. A crashing sound began to thunder from the speakers, a horribly distorted noise that suggested metal shelves being hit repeatedly with a baseball bat. A high-pitched male voice howled over the noise, distorted even more than the crashing sound in the background. Jessica wanted to cover her ears.

“Is this the day?” the voice cried. “Is this the day? Is this the day of the Lord?”

“Fifteen thousand watts AM,” Pat said. “The Voice of Rails Bluff.” The Arkansas was slow and wide and choked with debris. Jason and Arlette worked on the bass boat’s foredeck, each with one of Captain Joe’s oars, fending off the trees, the chunks of lumber, the pieces of paneling or shingled gables that had once been a part of someone’s home. It was slow and tiring work. Nick fretted aloud about the fuel they were using idling down the river this way. Jason was dreadfully aware of Arlette’s presence, of the tantalizing warmth of the girl’s bare legs as they moved next to his. It was as if his nerves were reaching out toward her, straining in her direction like new green shoots reaching for the light. He wondered if Arlette shared this awareness, or if this pleasant torture, was for him alone.

He heard Nick and Manon in a whispered conversation in the cockpit, and then Jason heard Nick say,

“Well, I hope you don’t expect me to find a service station,” and Jason felt a grin tug at his lips, a grin that he was careful to turn away from the cockpit. There were more whispers between Manon and Nick, and then Nick cleared his throat.

“Manon needs to pee,” he said. “Jason, I’d be obliged if you’d keep your eyes to the front.”

“And you, too, Nick Ruford,” Manon added.

Jason strove to control his amusement. When he and Nick had been alone on the bass boat, this had not been much of an issue.

The boat took on a list to port, indicating that Manon was hanging her butt out the cockpit. Jason moved a little to starboard to help keep the boat balanced, crowding against Arlette. She gave him a glance over her shoulder—their eyes met for a moment, and she looked away. Their arms touched, and Jason felt the hair prickle on his arm at the touch of Arlette’s skin.

There was a pause. Then a wail from Manon.

“I can’t, Nick! Not here in the middle of the river!”

“Nobody’s around to see you.”

“I just can’t!”

“There’s no place else to have a pit stop out here,” Nick said. “Not unless you want to hold it till we get to Vicksburg.”

“Just take us over into the trees,” Manon said. “Please, Nick, I can’t pee out here.” Nick nudged the throttle forward and turned the wheel. The boat stabilized as Manon came inboard. Jason stepped back from Arlette, took a grip on his oar, fended off the garbage until they were in the shade of the trees.

Manon hung herself outboard again and managed to overcome her mortification at the procedure. After she was finished, Nick said, “Anyone else? Because I’m not taking this detour again.”

“I’ll go, Daddy,” Arlette said.

“There’s not much toilet paper,” Manon remarked.

“Plenty of leaves and cattails,” Nick said cheerfully. Manon made a noise of disgust. Jason stood on the foredeck, eyes rigidly forward like a soldier, his oar grounded like a spear. They sure sound married, he thought.

It was slow going on the river. They passed a broken highway bridge, its span completely fallen, and shortly thereafter a shattered lock and dam, now abandoned. A towboat and a small fleet of barges were sunk in the lock, apparently having been caught there by the first big quake. At nightfall they kept moving. Nick decided they were safer in the channel than anywhere else—if they moored beneath the trees, an aftershock could drop the trees right on them.

Eventually they grew tired and decided to drift. They had used two-thirds of their fuel and could no longer see any landmarks. Nick shared out the food he’d taken from the two guards—there wasn’t much, and it didn’t last long.

“This is the last,” he said, “till we find civilization.” There was a roaring overhead, the sound of rotors flogging the sky. Navigation lights flashed against the blackness. A whole squadron of helicopters tearing away on some urgent errand. If it were only daytime, they could have waved.

After the helicopters passed, Jason lay on the foredeck and looked up at the sky. He could spot M31 easily, and M13 and M3. Funny how easy it was when you knew how.

His eye searched for the Ring Nebula, but couldn’t find it. He thought he could detect a smudge where Captain Joe had showed him the Veil Nebula.

A supernova. The Veil wasn’t a veil but a shroud, draped over the corpse of its once-mighty star. Jason gazed at the sky and felt on his mind the subtle pressure of its millions of stars. He wondered what his life meant in regard to that brilliant, diamond-hard, uncaring immensity. Compared to those stars, his life, his thoughts, his very existence was the merest nothing—no, a fragment of nothing, a spark that flared briefly and then was gone, unnoticed in the vast darkness.

His mother, Jason thought, had believed that she mattered, that the universe cared what became of her, that she and the universe were of equal importance. Frankland believed, as far as the universe was concerned, that he was a person of consequence, that he was chosen to carry out a monumentally important plan on behalf of the being who had created all this immensity.

If they had only looked up, if they had seen those millions of stars, perhaps they would have come to a different understanding. That life was not of consequence to anyone but the living, that there was no plan but what life made for itself.

Jason acutely felt his own fragility, his own lack of significance in the cosmos. But that consciousness, in some strange, paradoxical way, seemed a kind of liberation. Life mattered only to life. Life could choose its own meaning, give itself significance, attempt to preserve itself against the violence and destruction of the universe. Life could value itself.

Nothing else would, that was certain.

And life could treasure other life, as Jason treasured the lives of the others adrift on the little boat. They could guard each other’s fragile spark, preserve themselves and each other.

Floating in that starry immensity, each was all the others had left.

After listening for a few minutes to Brother Frankland’s Hour of Prophecy, and rerunning the Kiowa’s recording one more time, Jessica decided that, whatever the dangers, she needed to send her rescue mission after all.

“We’ve got to dust off that farmhouse,” she told her staff. “I don’t know what the people in there did to get those others shooting at them, but I think we’d better do our best to part the combatants and sort out who did what later.”

Most of her helicopters had returned from their days’ errands, and after refueling she sent a half-dozen to Rails Bluff. Each craft was FLIR-enhanced so as to be able to navigate and maneuver at night without giving themselves away with spotlights or floods. Her own Kiowa was out of action until its ground crew could determine the extent of any damage, but since her pilot knew the country, she sent him as an observer on another craft.

The helicopters either weren’t armed or had no ammunition loads, but Jessica was able to send a platoon of engineers armed with light weapons and grenade launchers, soldiers who could either fire from the helicopter doors or deploy on the ground. They were to avoid confrontation, and fire only if fired upon, but primarily they were to find out who was in that farmhouse and evacuate them if it was at all possible.

The other helicopters could support by making threatening, low-altitude passes over any opposition, by illuminating them with spotlights, or—if their lives were in danger—by returning fire. After dispatching the mission, Jessica filled out the paper-work justifying the sortie—work that was inevitable and mindless, and therefore almost adequate for distracting her from the knowledge that she’d just sent her people into danger—and then she went to the communications tent to listen as the radio reports came in from Rails Bluff.

Her booted feet crunched the plastic sheeting underfoot as she paced. After a while she noticed that the crackling made the communications techs nervous, so she sat on a canvas chair in the semi-darkness and tried not to fidget. Disaster scenarios panned across her mind, her people flying into an ambush, fanatic bunkered Arkansas bushwackers letting them land, then mowing them down with entrenched weapons. Her rescue team pinned down in the farmhouse, the unarmed helicopters unable to properly support them.

The scenarios contrasted with the calm words of the chopper crews that floated toward her across the miles, illuminated in the commo tent by the soft glow of LEDs and liquid-crystal displays. The lights reminded her unpleasantly of the fireworks she’d been seeing behind her left eye, and she closed her eyelids so as not to stir her unease, but then the fireworks began to flash, like helicopters burning in the night.

“Want some coffee?” She heard Pat’s voice.

Jessica thankfully opened her eyes. “Yes. Thanks.”

He poured from a thermos into a plastic cup. She took the cup and held it below her chin, letting the aroma float up to her nostrils. Pat brought a chair, sat next to her, and silently took her free hand; their linked hands dangled between their seats.

She tensed and leaned forward as the copters turned off their running lights in the final approach to the target area. The leader hovered over the bluff, scanned the area with their infrared detectors.

“The farmhouse is afire,” the observer reported. “I see no heat signatures in the area that resemble vehicles or human beings.”

Jessica restrained herself from lunging forward to snatch up a microphone and start barking out orders. The sortie leader gave the orders that Jessica would have given anyway, to reconfirm the absence of human or vehicle IR signatures, then to advance cautiously in a dispersed formation so as to get a wider view of the area.

“I am on visual,” another observer reported. “I see what appear to be two bodies in the yard of the farmhouse.”

“I confirm.” Another observer.

“An adult and what appears to be a child,” the first observer said. Jessica squeezed Pat’s hand. A child. God in Heaven.

The sortie commander brought in a Huey to land in the yard while the others flew cover. Armed engineers piled out of the Huey on landing to secure the area, scout the out-buildings, and examine the corpses.

“A middle-aged man in civilian dress,” the report came. “A little girl, maybe five years old. Both dead by gunshot.”

At this point Jessica decided that it was time to give an order. She took the microphone and ordered the Huey to return with the casualties, keeping over the Delta and flying without running lights until they were well clear of Rails Bluff. The rest were to spread out and gather as much intelligence as they could without giving away their presence.

Jessica returned to her seat, took Pat’s hand again, and gave thought to what she would do next. It was clear she must report this matter to her superiors. After that it was very probable that the matter would be taken out of her hands. Her authority involved civil engineering, not military operations. The area was full of military units that were getting really tired of looking after swarms of complaining refugees and their screaming children. Tired of repairing roads, cutting brush, and jacking up buildings that had fallen off their foundations. A lot of soldiers who just wanted to get back to soldiering. One of them would get the Rails Bluff assignment, she knew, whatever it turned out to be.

But she badly wanted to be a part of what happened next. She didn’t want to turn the matter over to some hotshot who was going to get a lot of people killed.

Besides, she thought, those motherfuckers shot at me.

She turned to one of her radio operators. “Get me the commanding general, First Army,” she said. She was going to figure out a way to keep her hand in, whatever happened.

Jessica contemplated Matthew “Tex” Avery, the burly black man who, with his family, had been pulled by one of her helicopters out of a cotton field near Rails Bluff in the middle of the night. Tex had sprained his ankle falling into a crevasse as he ran with his family from the Reverend Frankland’s camp, and now sat in a cot in a corner of the infirmary tent. His sprained, bandaged ankle was propped up in front of him on a folding chair, with a plastic sack of ice melting atop it. His abrasions had been cleaned and bandaged, and he’d been given a clean set of BDUs in a forest camouflage pattern. With his scraggly two days’ beard, he looked less like a refugee than a guerilla fighter just extracted from the wilderness.

“Tex?” Jessica said. “This is Colonel Rivera. I’d like you to repeat to him everything you told me this morning.”

Eddie and Rivera shook hands. Colonel Orlando Rivera was a stocky man who wore the sleeves of his tunic rolled up above biceps clearly sculpted by many dedicated hours at the curling machine. He commanded a Ranger unit that CG First Army had assigned to the liberation of Rails Bluff, and he had come in ahead of his command, which was still being pulled out of its rubble-searching duties in Greater Memphis and reunited with its combat equipment and transport.

The commanding general had said that Rivera was a reasonable type, a War College graduate, not a hothead, willing to work and play with others instead of stomping in and taking charge and committing heinous bloody massacre and otherwise acting like a macho stud. Jessica had been skeptical of this assessment, but so far Rivera seemed perfectly amiable.

And a Ranger, too, Jessica thought. And one with biceps. Would miracles never cease?

More important than the Ranger, perhaps, was the ruling she’d received from the Army’s legal counsel. Her proposed action, the ruling stated, was legal. Martial law had been declared by the civil authorities in that part of Arkansas over two weeks ago, and never rescinded. The Army was allowed to get as martial as it felt necessary.

Jessica and Rivera sat crosslegged on the ground by Tex’s cot while he went through his story. Rivera asked questions about the chain of command at the camp, the number of guards on duty at any one moment, how often the guards went on and off watch. Tex answered as best he could, but it was clear he had tried to keep as far away from the guards as possible and had little information on their movements. Jessica and Rivera thanked Tex and returned to the tent Jessica had erected on the edge of the helicopter pad, where she had gathered everything available on Rails Bluff: all the maps, tapes of radio broadcasts, all the videos from the various aerial scouting missions, and all the interpretations of the data that had been provided by MARS sources.

Among the various data present was the fact that someone trained in photo interpretation had counted no less than ninety-six human-sized infrared signatures in Rails Bluff and vicinity. The Pentagon had people whose job it was to count things on reconnaissance photographs—numbers of tanks, antiaircraft missiles, and soldiers marching in formation—and Jessica had no reason to question the basic accuracy of the number.

That was a lot of people to get caught in a crossfire.

“The question is,” Rivera said as he frowned down at the information, “how many of them are armed?

And of those armed, how many are willing to offer resistance?”

“Tex said that most of them had no weapons. That there was a hard core of supporters from the churches of the three preachers, but that everyone else was without arms, and that a lot of those were apathetic.”

Rivera didn’t seem reassured. “So how many is this hard core? Fifty? That still leaves a lot of bystanders.” He looked grim. “Or hostages, however they want to play it.” Jessica looked at him. “We own the night,” she said. One of the Army’s unofficial mottoes, proudly proclaiming that they could move and fight as well in darkness as they could in the day. Rivera looked at Jessica for a long moment, then nodded. “It’s best that everyone wakes up tomorrow morning and finds out their camp’s under new management.”

“I think that’s how it should be played.”

He stroked his chin.

“Well,” he said, “let’s look at a map.”

“There.” Pointing. “The key to the position. This big tank, or whatever it is.”

“Tex said it was a catfish pond,” Jessica said. “Ten acres.”

“That’s where the sniper was, according to Tex. Just one man. We could put a battalion in there and they wouldn’t see us unless we wanted them to.” Rivera looked at the photograph. “Can we see any sentries on that embankment? If I were trying to hold that camp, I sure as hell would put people up there.” The latest photographs from Rails Bluff had just come in. Jessica had managed to get an Air Force RF-16, the reconnaissance version of the F-16 fighter, tasked to her command from a combat wing in Texas. The RF-16 had overflown Rails Bluff at high altitude, presumably without anyone on the ground taking notice, while snapping one detailed photo after another. The results had been flashed to Jessica’s command tent, printed, and were on her desk within two hours of the sortie’s landing. Jessica took her magnifier, bent over the photo, looked down at the catfish pond through her left eye. There were strange little flashes in the corner of her eye, and she shifted the magnifier to the right.

“I don’t see any sentries there,” she said.

“That camp’s spread out along the road, made up of smaller camps lined up in a long row. With the unmarried men at one end, the unmarried women at the other.” Rivera grinned. “They’re not so much interested in defense as keeping the single men and women as far apart as possible. We can flank the camps and cut one off from the next. Particularly if we can maneuver out of that catfish pond.”

“Sorry to interrupt, General.” One of Jessica’s staff standing by the door and offering a folder. “The latest weather forecast.”

“Thank you.”

Jessica looked at the satellite photos, the attached isobar map, the analysis, and didn’t know whether to feel relief or not. The strong high-pressure system that had been sitting on the south-central U.S. since just after M1 was finally moving. A big wall of low pressure was dropping out of the Rockies across the plains, bringing cooler, wetter weather.

It would be a relief to be out of the heat for a while. But as the whirling high-pressure area was shoved eastward, the moisture it had been sucking out of the Gulf of Mexico and dumping on the western plains would move with it. Torrential rains pouring across her entire area of operations weren’t going to make her primary job any easier, not when half the country was flooded and the rest was bogged in the muck.

“This is going to help us,” Rivera said. “In foul weather the camp sentries are going to be spending their time under cover, not looking for us.”

“It may affect our ability to surveille the area.”

“Can we get another photo mission scheduled before sunset? The long shadows would be valuable in showing us anything we’ve missed.”

“The Air Force is cooperating.” She gave a laugh. “They’re just like the Army—in the national emergency, the glamour units are tired of taking a backseat to the support elements.” She glanced quickly at Rivera, suddenly aware that she’d just been tactless. Keep your opinions to yourself, she mentally snarled.

“No offense,” she added.

Rivera grinned. “No problem,” he said.

“They’re coming,” Frankland said. “The black helicopters are coming. They’ll be back, and we have to be ready.”

He had his most loyal people gathered around him on the highway in front of the church, and even there he had to talk loudly over the boom of the loudspeakers. He had cranked the volume up all over the camp so that the inmates couldn’t ignore the Word. He knew he had only a short time to get his message across before the Pale Horseman rode into town with an unsheathed sword.

“It’s been a whole day, practically,” said Martin, the guide for the Second Thessalonians. “Are you sure they’re really coming? Maybe the Army has other things to do.”

“Don’t you think Satan has an enemies list?” Frankland said. “Don’t you think we’re on it?” He had felt the black helicopters hovering over him all night long. He’d felt the touch of their rotating wings on the back of his neck while he crept forward to the old Swanson place to light his gasoline bomb and throw it into the ruins. He felt it when Stone and his family fled the flames and ran into the bullets of his supporters. He felt it as he grabbed Stone’s wife and surviving child and flung them into his truck, then lit out at full speed for the camp. He knew the enemy was there. He knew he had to get back to the camp and make ready. The terror of Satan’s dark wings drove him on. That was why he’d left Stone and his daughter lying in the dust instead of bringing them back for burial. He knew he had so little time left.

“Satan never sleeps,” said Magnusson. “I should know. I let some people get away yesterday because I let them bluff me. It was the Devil who put that bluff in the boy’s mind, I know that for sure.” Frankland glanced over the highway. “What I want to do is make this place defensible. Sandbagged emplacements on the corners of the camps. Slit trenches for the people to shelter in.” He pointed at the catfish farm. “And I want to emplace some of you there. I’m not going to let somebody with a gun catch us napping again.”

Most of the guides and guards nodded and looked severe. A few seemed hesitant. Frankland looked at one of them, turned on his silky, persuasive voice.

“Do I want a battle?” he said. “No. But we haven’t thought enough about our security, and yesterday we paid the penalty. I want everyone here safe. And they’ll only be safe if we make them safe. Then we can be like the angels around the Throne, spending our days chanting ‘Holy, holy, holy, Good God Almighty.’ We’ll be safe.”

“‘Lord God Almighty,’” someone corrected.

“Sorry,” Frankland said, “I misspoke.”

He wasn’t sure whether he’d succeeded in motivating them or not. He made assignments, put people in charge of his new projects, then crossed the camp to his home.

Dr. Calhoun had been moved to the room where Father Robitaille had died. Calhoun was alive, his pulse strong, but he had been unconscious since morning and his abdomen was rigid and hard as iron around the bandaged entrance wound. He wouldn’t live more than a day or two, and would probably never wake.

Sheryl and Reverend Garb watched in silence over the dying man. Garb looked somber. He had been very quiet since the incident the previous morning and spent much of his time in prayer. Sheryl wore her reading glasses and had her art on her lap, working nimbly with tweezers and tiny bits of postage stamp confetti. She had started a new project to keep hand and mind occupied—the Book of Daniel this time, Frankland noticed, the beast with seven horns.

“No change,” Garb said in answer to Frankland’s query. He held Calhoun’s limp hand in his own.

“I’m trying to put the camp in a state of defense,” Frankland said. “The forces of the Enemy will be coming for us soon.”

Garb looked sadly down at the unconscious man. “I didn’t think it would come to this.” Sheryl gave Garb a sharp glance over the rims of her spectacles. “You knew it was going to be bad,” she said. “You knew that most of these people would die during the next seven years of Tribulation, no matter what we did.”

“I suppose,” Garb said.

“It only matters how they die,” Frankland said. “If they have Jesus in their hearts, it doesn’t matter what happens to them.”

Sheryl dropped a yellow stamp-fleck onto one of the beast’s horns. “Once the people leave us, teddy bear,” she said, “they’ll be back in the secular world.” She shook her head. “Nothing there but temptation and sin, and most likely they’ll die no matter what happens. Better they die here, when they’re more likely to die in a state of grace.” Her eyes flickered to the wounded man. “Like Dr. Calhoun,” she said.

“Yes.” Garb nodded sadly. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m going to prepare the camp for the end,” Frankland said. “If we die, it’s best we all die together.”

“I’ll be along in a minute, sweetie,” Sheryl said. “I want to finish this horn first.” Frankland rounded up some of the Christian Gun Club and put his block and tackle over the last, untouched concrete bunker. He lifted up the slab and looked at what lay there. The others stood in sober respect.

And when he had opened the seventh seal, Frankland thought, there was silence in heaven… M26A1, read the stencils on the box, Fragmentation, 30. Two cases at thirty per case. Hilkiah had acquired them two years ago, and Frankland had been careful not to ask how.

“Let’s take the grenades out,” Frankland said, “and then the .50 caliber Browning.” Midmorning, the bass boat drifted at last into the Mississippi. The great river was sluggish, but at least it moved faster than the Arkansas. The amount of debris had increased, if anything, but on the wider, larger river it was possible to steer around it. Nick started the outboard but kept speed and fuel consumption low.

He kept a wary eye on Jason, who shared with Arlette the duties of standing on the foredeck and fending off debris. Jason had turned cooperative—he was obedient, cheerful, helpful, and had kept to himself his endless supply of smart remarks.

Nick found this ominous. That and the way Jason was relating to Arlette—the shared glances, the giggles, the way their arms or legs brushed together, as if by accident, as they worked on the foredeck. Nick knew damn well what was going on. It was right there in front of him. But there was nothing he could object to, no inappropriate behavior, not so much as a kiss.

Just two young people falling in love. It made Nick grind his teeth. He ground his teeth so much that it made his neck ache.

There was no traffic on the river. None at all. The huge cypress and cottonwood trees coming down with the flood apparently provided too great a hazard to navigation.

At De Soto Landing, they gave a wide berth to a docking platform that thrust a hundred yards or so into the river. The facilities were big enough for tankers. Some of the big oil tanks on shore had burned. There was no sign of a living human being.

The boat floated downriver alongside the shimmering ribbon of oil that stretched out from the landing. The stench of the oil sank into the back of Nick’s throat, a foul rasp he couldn’t cough out even though he tried.

The river slowed to a crawl. The boat drifted, bumped aimlessly against debris, because Nick wanted to conserve fuel.

Hunger settled into Nick’s stomach, became a part of him, a steady ache he carried always with him like a woman carries a child. He found himself thinking nostalgically of Brother Frankland’s greasy fish and mixed vegetables. Food occupied his thoughts almost every minute. Not just for himself, but for his family. Rescue needed to come very soon.

A cooling breeze fluttered the surface of the water, brought light dancing on the river’s skin of oil. The breeze was refreshing at first, the first real weather change in two weeks and a relief in the sweat-drenched, smothering tropical heat. But as the sky darkened and the breeze strengthened, flying into their faces from the south, Nick began to look for a way to shelter from the storm that was obviously building. Lightning flashed in the oncoming clouds, suggesting it would be unwise to remain in the main channel as the tallest electric conductor for half a mile in any direction. A gray chop rose on the river, tossing debris against the boat’s chine.

It was clearly time to take a chance on the falling timber in the flood plain. The treeline on the east bank looked far too dense to safely enter, so when Nick started the Johnson, he maneuvered toward the western bank, crossing the track of the oil that had been draining from the broken tanks upstream. Oil-flavored spray spattered Nick’s face as the bass boat shouldered into the chop. Thunder boomed from the sky like the bootsteps of God.

The bass boat reached the trees just as the rain cut loose, a drenching rainstorm that came down in floods all at once, without preamble. Within seconds it was too dark and wet to see more than a few feet. Wind howled through the broken tops of the trees, bringing a gentle drizzle of small branches and willow leaves. Nick and the others huddled in the little cockpit, stretching over themselves the orange plastic sun shade that they’d taken from Frankland’s guards. Rain rattled on the plastic, little bright concussions like gunshots next to Nick’s ears. Thoughts of cold drove thoughts of food from his mind. He was cold and hungry and wet, and as he shivered he could feel the others shivering, too. The rain ceased around midnight, and with stiff limbs Nick and the others bailed out the boat. No stars were visible overhead. The downpour started again an hour later, as fierce as before, and continued intermittently past the gray, uncertain dawn.

When they finally shook the last drops off the orange plastic and looked around them, they found themselves in a flooded stand of cypress. The sun was invisible behind dark cloud, and they had no way of telling direction. Soon little wisps of mist began to rise from the water. The wisps thickened, then closed overhead like interlaced fingers.

The boat bobbed silently in the fog, lost and alone in the forest of silence. The rain hammered down. Omar had set out pails and crockery for the leaks—his roof had not done well in the quakes.

Wilona was standing a night shift at Clarendon—probably sitting down to a session of tea and heartfelt gossip with Mrs. Ashenden as the rain drummed on the rooftop—so Omar was home alone, lying on the sofa with his shoes off and listening to Johnny Paycheck on the radio.

It was the endgame that he worried about. He’d isolated the A.M.E. camp. He’d made certain that no one but certain of his own people had access. Jedthus and Knox both told him that things were going well there, though they volunteered no details, and Omar asked for none.

But at the end, when the camp was empty, what then? He couldn’t tell everyone that two hundred refugees had just flown away.

Timing, he thought. If the Bayou Bridge could be repaired soon, and he could know the date in advance, he could just claim that everyone had left of their own accord as soon as they could. He heard booted feet stomping on the porch, kicking off the raindrops, and then David came in, banging the screen door and moving with the slow, over-elaborate deliberation that gave Omar to understand that he was drunk.

David wore a plastic rain slicker over his deputy’s star and one of Omar’s spare uniforms. That morning, Tree Simpson had ruled that his shooting of the refugee was justified, and David had returned to duty as a special deputy.

Omar had made a point of assigning David to patrolling the highway between Shelburne City and the fallen Bayou Bridge, on the other end of the parish from the A.M.E. camp. He didn’t want David near the place. When David asked him why, Omar said, “because if you turn up at the camp, we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

Which was not the real reason, but it was a reason that would have to serve for David.

“Hi, Dad,” David said. He hung up the rain slicker and his baseball cap on the pegs by the front door.

“How was your evening?” Omar asked.

“Went out with the boys.”

“Which boys?”

David went into the refrigerator without answering, got a beer, returned to the front room to sit in Omar’s easy chair. Omar looked at him from his reclining position on the sofa. “Which boys?” Omar repeated.

“Knox and them.”

“I thought—” Omar was about to repeat his instructions to stay away from Knox, but then he saw David’s knuckles bruised and swollen, and he sat up.

“You been in a fight, son?” he asked.

David looked at his battered fists, then shrugged. “A little ramshagging, that’s all.” Anger snarled in Omar’s veins. “You just survived an inquest, sonny boy!” he barked. “Now you want to start getting into fistfights and maybe having people start thinking second thoughts about that killing you did? Who were you fighting with, anyhow?”

David gave a slow, drunken grin. “Nobody that’ll complain. We was down to Woodbine Corners.” Omar stared at him in shock. David took a swig of his beer.

“We decided, hell, we’ll save some bullets,” he said. “We’ll kill this batch with our bare hands. So we had a few drinks and got to business.” He looked at his free hand, flexed the fingers meditatively. “It was a lot more work than we thought. It takes a long time, you know, to kill someone like that.” Omar’s head swam. Revulsion squeezed his stomach, brought the tang of vomit to his tongue. He bit it down.

Then the anger hit, and he stood over David and slapped the beer from his hand. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?” David stared up in amazement. Omar slapped him across the face. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from Knox?” he demanded. “Didn’t I?”

The beer bottle gurgled as it emptied itself onto the floor. “What’s the problem?” David demanded.

“What’s wrong?”

“Knox is crazy,” Omar shouted. “Isn’t that enough?” He clenched his fists and marched an angry circle around the room. Spilled beer soaked his socks.

“But Daddy,” David said, “Knox believes the same as you. He believes the same as what you’ve always taught me.”

Omar lunged across the room to stand over his son again, hand raised to strike. David flinched but didn’t raise a hand to defend himself. Omar didn’t bring the hand down; he left it in the air, in case he changed his mind.

“Knox is out of his head!” Omar shouted. “He’s been wandering around the country stealing and killing!

If you hang around him, you’ll get killed or spend the rest of your life in jail! Did I raise you for that?” Omar demanded. “Did I, Davy?”

“He’s a soldier!” David said. “He’s fighting a war against ZOG. Just like you!”

“ZOG, shit! Ain’t no ZOG and never was!”

Bewilderment shone on David’s face. “I don’t get it. If you ain’t fighting for the white, why are you doing what you’re doing?”

Blood flamed in Omar’s heart. He panted for breath. He looked at the hand he’d raised, and let it fall.

“It’s for you, son,” he said. “You did a killing. Can’t let no witnesses testify or they’ll hang us both.” He took a breath. “I’m not doing this so you can get drunk and beat niggers to death! I’m doing it so you’ll stay out of prison!”

David licked his lips as he tried to comprehend this. “Knox says we’re going to be famous. Knox says we’re going to liberate all America starting with Spottswood Parish.”

Omar straightened wearily from his crouch over David’s chair, turned, slopped through the spilled beer back to the couch. He sat down heavily, staring at the wall opposite with the blue flowered wallpaper that he and Wilona had put up when David was still in grade school.

“Do you really think a dozen killers are going to turn this country around?” he said. “Do you really think that?”

“You’ve always stood up for the white man,” David said. “That’s all I’m doing.”

“I’ve done what I can for myself in this place,” Omar said. “Our family has been here for seven generations and we’ve never had anything to eat but shit from the people who run the parish. The Klan’s the only answer for a man like me. But you—” He looked at his son. “You’re in college. You’ve got what it takes to make it outside Spottswood Parish. You can leave this used-up old place. And that’s what I want you to do.”

David was still bewildered. “I ain’t never heard you talk like this.” Omar felt cold beer seeping up his crew socks. “I want you to go away!” he shouted. “I want you to save yourself!”

“There’s no way out of town, Dad.” A reasonable tone had crept into David’s voice. “The bridges are down. Besides, I don’t want to leave. Not when we’re all going to be famous!” Omar stared at his son. “Famous?”

“With our pictures on TV and everything!” There was a drunken glow in David’s eyes. “Then we’ll disappear into the underground, like Knox does after he rescues some Jew money from a bank, and we’ll wait to strike again. And then after the Liberation—”

“After the what?” Omar repeated.

“After we win. After the white man’s in charge again.”

Omar’s heart beat sickly in his temples. His head whirled. He couldn’t quite seem to catch his breath.

“My God,” he said, half to himself. “My God in this world.” Micah Knox would pay for this, he thought. Would pay and pay.

David reached out, patted Omar in a comforting way on his knee. “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

“Everything will be fine. You’ll see. We’ll come through, and maybe you’ll even be President.” He laughed. “Won’t that be something! You and me in the White House.”

Omar threw his head back and felt anguish twist in his heart like a knife. He wanted to howl his pain aloud. “I wanted you to be better than me,” he said.

David looked at him with drunken amiability. “Nobody’s better than you, Dad,” he said. “Nobody in this world.”

Jessica’s helicopter lurched as wind shear tried to fling it into the invisible Arkansas Delta below. Water coursed over the windscreen in streams, and blinking red and green navigation lights reflected off the slanted raindrops like a thousand distant stars. The command radio channel hissed in Jessica’s ears, then crackled to the sudden flashes of lightning that lit the strange, featureless gloom in which the Kiowa traveled.

The rescue mission to Rails Bluff was underway. It was a little after two in the morning. Rivera’s Rangers, with units of Jessica’s engineers in support, were scheduled to be in position around the camp by five. The camp was due to be under new management, as Colonel Rivera had put it, by dawn. Brightly colored star shells flashed in Jessica’s left eye as the helicopter gave another lurch. She blinked, tried to will the flashing lights away. Gravity clutched at her stomach.

She enjoyed thrill rides, but this was absurd.

Lightning dazzled Jessica’s eyes and thunder boomed through the cabin. “Jesus Christ,” her pilot murmured, and then, “Sorry, ma’am.”

I want my high-pressure system back, Jessica thought.

Suddenly the pounding rain ceased, and the remaining droplets were blown off the windscreen by prop blast. The Kiowa floated through cloud, a world of cotton-wool eerily remote from the rest of the universe. Enhancing the sense of unreality were the ghostly symbols on the heads-up display, navigation and other information projected onto the interior of the windscreen so that the pilot could read them without looking down at the instrument panel. Though the data from those displays, from the Inertial Navigation System and the Litton AHRS, tracking their location in the murk to within a hundred meters, kept the outside world a lot closer than it seemed.

“We have reached Point C,” the pilot said. He touched the rudder bar with one foot while his hand made an adjustment to the collective. “Turning to course two-one-zero. Navigation lights—” A gloved hand reached for the instrument panel. “Off.”

Jessica felt her mouth go dry as the night shadows closed in. The outside world was getting closer by the second.

The late-afternoon Air Force overflight had revealed that the Rails Bluff camp had made defensive preparations. Sandbagged emplacements had appeared on the camp’s perimeter since morning, and some of the strong shadows inside the camp suggested that slit trenches had been dug here and there. And worst of all, there were two sandbagged outposts planted on the embankment of the catfish farm across the road. One of them showed a tripod-mounted machine gun that could dominate the flat country for a thousand yards in all directions.

In the early evening Rivera, Jessica, and their officers made hurried revisions of their plan of operations. The machine gun had to be neutralized or taken out. Likewise the sand-bagged bunkers.

“Good thing we’ve got bad weather coming in,” Rivera said. “Anyone in the camp’s going to be under cover, and that MG is probably going to be wrapped in plastic.”

We hope, Jessica thought.

The Kiowa gave another lurch, leaving Jessica’s stomach about two hundred feet above her head. Jessica wondered if Rivera was still thankful for the rain.

We own the night. Jessica hoped it wasn’t as empty a boast as We control the river turned out to be. Rivera’s voice crackled on the command channel. “Badger Team has landed and is taking position. All is copacetic.”

“Roger that, Badger.” Rivera’s primary combat team had landed north of the catfish farm, out of earshot—it was hoped—of any sentries in the camp. That would mean a long slog through flooded fields to the camp, but that shouldn’t be a consideration to people who Owned the Night. Other reports came in as other teams landed. Jessica’s Kiowa reached its landing point and began to descend. The cloud cleared, and below, in the infrared light of the chopper’s FLIR, Jessica saw Rivera’s helicopters spread over several acres of mud. Little glowing figures, Rangers, were setting up a perimeter.

Jessica’s own engineers would be in support, and would not approach the Rails Bluff camp unless the Rangers called for them, or when the camp was secured. Likewise Jessica would leave Rivera to take care of tactical operations and only intervene with the capture of the camp if it was absolutely necessary. Which meant only if things went terribly, terribly wrong.

The Kiowa settled gentle as a dandelion seed onto the muddy field.

Jessica sighed. It was going to be a long night.

Rain drummed on Frankland’s rain hood as he tramped to the door of the radio station. He wiped his boots on the mat and prepared to step inside, then hesitated with his hand on the doorknob as he heard a throbbing sound, distant but clear in the waterlogged night. For a moment his nerves hummed—black helicopters!—but then lightning cut loose somewhere to the west, freezing the world as if in a photo flash, and he shook his head and opened the door.

This weather was impossible. The black helicopters would come, he thought, but they could not come tonight.

Sheryl looked up from the reception desk. The desk light pooled on the long linen Apocalypse spread out before her. When the storm had blown up, after dark, Sheryl’s magnum opus had suffered considerable damage from the wind before she and Frankland could rescue it and bring it indoors.

“The camp’s going to be a real mess in the morning,” Frankland said. “We’d better have a hot meal ready when people get up.”

Sheryl nodded. “Already taken care of.”

“How you doing, honey bun?”

Sheryl looked at him over the rims of her reading glasses. “Dreadful damage. Just dreadful.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Just watch where you put your feet.” A lot of the linen rolls had ended up on the floor for lack of anywhere else to put them. Frankland shuffled his boots from the fragile artwork.

“I’m going back to the studio.”

“Mm.”

He opened the inner door and walked down the corridor to the control room. Lights glowed, and dials clicked back and forth unattended as the station broadcast a tape that Frankland had made weeks ago, before the first great earthquake

Frankland felt an aftershock rumble up through his boots. That, he thought, must have been the throbbing sound he’d heard.

He took off his rain slicker, then unstrapped the AR-15 he carried across his chest to protect it from the weather. He propped the gun in a corner, took off his pistol belt—the grenades made it too uncomfortable to wear while sitting—and sat in front of the microphone.

He hadn’t broadcast much new material since the first quake. He’d been too busy organizing the camp. But now that he knew the black helicopters were coming, Frankland felt he wanted to talk about what had happened, to explain his point of view and the necessity for everything he’d done. Frankland wanted to leave a testament behind him. So that after the black helicopters came people would understand.

It was for souls, he wanted to say. The bodies didn’t signify, it was winning souls for Christ that mattered.

And so he cued up a tape, positioned himself behind the microphone, and as the rain drummed on the roof and the building rocked to thunder, he began to speak.

When he broadcast the tape in the morning, the world would know.

The Rangers moved forward, hunched in their cloaks beneath squalls of wind and rain. While the pouring water streamed down the canopy of her helicopter, Jessica listened to her helicopter’s command channel, the terse, breathless communications of the officers. Her hands clutched the sides of the seat as reports came in of the camp coming into sight, as night-vision and infrared gear was used to carefully scan the camp and spot any sentries who dared to stick their heads out.

There weren’t many, it appeared. The camp was buttoned down against the storm.

“Coffee, General?” Jessica’s pilot produced a thermos.

“No. Thanks.” Much as she craved coffee at the moment, she was wound tightly enough as it was. Jessica had read that Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery used to go to sleep the night before an attack, with strict orders not to be disturbed until the battle had already developed. She wondered how he managed it.

The smell of coffee filled the cockpit, activating Jessica’s salivary glands. A mild aftershock rolled up the Kiowa’s struts as commands hissed into Jessica’s earphones. The Rangers were crawling forward toward the camp under cover of the intermittent squalls. They were moving toward the machine-gun nest at the catfish farm by crawling along the base of the earth embankment, so a lightning flash wouldn’t silhouette them on the top.

“This is Badger Six,” a voice crackled. “We have secured our objective on the northwest perimeter. The guards did not resist. Repeat, no resistance.”

“Roger that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice.

Jessica’s breath eased from her aching lungs. One corner of the unmarried women’s camp was secure.

“Holy shit!” came Badger Six’s voice again, very excited. Jessica jerked forward in her seat as if pulled by an invisible wire. “We got fragmentation grenades here! And a couple M-16s. Do you copy that?”

“Copy that, Badger Six.” Rivera’s voice was laconic.

“These people are loaded for bear, sir!”

“No chatter on this channel, Badger Six. We copy.”

Another outpost fell in silence, then another. Then—Jessica wanted to scream out her relief—the machine-gun nest on the catfish farm.

And then the rest. The camp’s perimeter had been secured without a shot, without an alarm, without a single act of violence.

Relief sang in Jessica’s veins.

Rivera began to position his teams to cut the camps off from one another, to secure the church, the radio station, and Frankland’s house.

Jessica leaned back in her seat.

“I’d appreciate some of that coffee, soldier,” she said.

They will say I have committed murder. The phrases rolled through Frankland’s mind as he pushed back from the microphone. Certainly I have killed, but I have killed justly. And God will judge me in the end, as he will judge all men. I have no terror of standing before the Throne of the Almighty.

Frankland stood, stretched, felt his vertebrae crackle. His body was weary, but his mind still churned with ideas, with images. The spirit still sang in him, stirring his nerves, and he knew that it would be hours before he would sleep.

He rewound the tape to its beginning, then turned up the in-studio speaker on the tape that was already playing. He waited until the older recording came to a natural pause, then Frankland turned it off and cued the new tape.

“This is the Noble Frankland of the Church of the End Times.” The voice came from the battered old speakers in the room. He turned down the volume, then strolled down the hallway to where Sheryl still sat behind the desk, working briskly with her tweezers.

“Any news?” he asked.

“No.” She looked up from her work. “Rain’s slackening off, I think,” she said. Frankland looked at his watch. It would be dawn shortly.

And then the door opened and a pair of armed men entered, rifles held across their chests, faces blackened and rain-streaked below the broad, dripping brims of their hats. “U.S. Army!” one of them said. “Nobody move!”

Frankland stared as his heart lurched into a higher gear. Caught! he thought. His rifle, his pistol, and his precious grenades were in the control room. He was helpless.

Another man entered the room, a pistol held lightly in his hand. “Colonel Rivera,” he said. “U.S. Rangers. I understand you had some trouble here?”

Frankland could only gape. He couldn’t understand how this could happen. He had guards! He had outposts! He hadn’t heard a single shot.

Black helicopters! his mind screamed. Black helicopters of Satan! They had come in the night, and he and his poor people had been caught unprepared.

Now they would all live. Live, and sin, and go to Hell. When they could have died and gone to Glory.

“You—” The word hissed from Sheryl. She stared in outrage at the colonel’s muddy boots planted on her artwork, right on the seven angels and the seven vials. “You—” She half-rose from her seat. “You’re wrecking my Apocalypse!” she shrieked.

It was only then that Frankland’s paralyzed mind recalled the double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun clipped under the desk, the shotgun that had been there all along, from well before the quake. He threw himself backward, down the hall.

The shotgun blasted out, twice. All three soldiers were caught in the broad swath of buckshot. Sheryl dropped the sawed-off, opened a desk drawer, took out a grenade, primed it, and pitched it straight out the open front door.

Frankland scuttled down the hall, on hands and knees, heading for his weapons. There was a flash and a bang out-side the door. Grenade fragments whined off the station’s steel walls. Frankland grabbed the Armalite, cranked a round into the chamber, then snatched up his gun belt with its grenades and pistol. He ran down the hall again toward the front room.

“Hang on, sweetie pie!” he said. “I’m coming!”

The Kiowa bored into the Arkansas dawn. Jessica could hear the grinding of her teeth amplified beneath her helmet.

Somehow, late in the game after all danger should have been passed, Rivera had somehow lost control and everything had gone to hell.

Rivera was dead, apparently, along with two other Rangers. Several others were wounded by grenade fragments. After everything had been secured—the outposts, the camps, the church, Frankland’s home—there had been some last-minute screw-up at the radio station. Shots fired. Grenades thrown. And the Ranger officer on the spot had ordered return fire.

Jessica had ordered support elements aloft as soon as she heard the news. Apache gunships and Hueys to provide close support, more Hueys carrying her engineers with heavier weapons and the body armor that the Rangers lacked.

It was over by the time Jessica’s Kiowa first soared over the camp. Resistance had ended. The radio station was on fire, smoke billowing from under the metal eaves. Rangers were diving inside, braving the flames, to haul out the bodies of their comrades.

Fucking amateurs, Jessica thought. The people in the radio station had no idea of the firepower of a modern military unit, even a lightly equipped outfit like the Rangers. They’d thought it was going to be like the movies, like a Western gunfight, like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.

Instead, everyone in the radio station was probably dead within seconds after the Ranger commander had ordered his people to return fire. A kill zone. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Just like that. Ranger training was not for the faint-hearted. One of the exercises featured a fifteen-mile ruck march, with 100-pound field packs plus a rifle, that ended with three shots to the bulls-eye at a range of fifty meters. Compared to that, a little slog through the mud and a firefight against a few hayseeds didn’t even signify.

The Kiowa circled the camp once, then dropped onto the highway in front of the church. Jessica dived out of the vehicle and ran for the church as fast as her short legs would carry her. Then she stopped in her tracks. Put a hand in front of her right eye, then her left.

Half the vision in her left eye was gone, gone as if a black curtain had dropped across the world.

THIRTY-ONE

“Sir! Sir! Mr. President!”

The President blinked awake, trying to adjust his eyes to the sudden glare of the overhead light. He had been dreaming so very nicely, too, a warm dream about—was it bread? Yes, bread. UFOs, it seems, were really loaves of bread, and the blinking lights were just the LEDs on the bread machines that made them… You could eat UFOs if you spread butter on them, that was the point.

“Sir? Are you awake?”

“Yes, Stan. What is it?”

There were a limited number of people who could wake the President. The names were on a list: the Secretary of State, the ambassador to the U.N., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whoever was on duty at NORAD…

A relatively small list. The President very much regretted that he had ever put his Press Secretary on it.

“Calm down, Stan. And tell me what it is. And if it’s the results of some kind of poll, I want you to march right out of here and—”

“It’s not that, sir! It’s General Frazetta! She’s gone berserk!”

The President sat up in bed and frowned at Stan. “Berserk? My little Jessica, berserk? What’s she done—” He smiled. “Gone and built another island?”

“She’s conducting a renegade military operation in Arkansas! She’s using Army Rangers and helicopters to attack some kind of church group!”

The President frowned. “Sounds serious.”

“The Attorney General tried to reach you earlier, but he’s not on the list to get you out of bed. He’s mad enough to spit. He called me—I was in my office in the Executive Wing—and he practically chewed my ear off. Civil rights violations, abuse of power, separation of Church and State—my God, what a fiasco. I came right over.”

The President considered Jessica Frazetta. Energetic, enthusiastic, overachieving. Sexy in a spunky, girl-next-door sort of way. And short. Really short.

He pictured her in a helicopter, spewing leaden death upon the citizens of Arkansas. He pictured her grinning as she did so. The thought of it made him smile.

“Any casualties?” he said.

“Several dead, both Army and civilian. My God, sir, how do we spin this?” The President lay back in his bed and pulled his covers up to his chin. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said.

“Sir?”

“We absolutely and categorically support General Frazetta’s actions.”

“Sir!” Stan was flabbergasted.

“Think about it, Stan. I appointed her to her present position. I was with her on her island, just a few days ago, shaking her hand and telling the world how wonderful she was. Implying that she’d saved the entire South from radiation poisoning. She’s in an absolutely critical position—she’s made herself damn near indispensable. I have to support her.”

“But—this fiasco—”

The President closed his eyes. “It’s not a fiasco yet. Right now it’s a brave and courageous action taken in defense of civilian lives.” The President smiled. “If it turns out to be a fiasco later, if she’s really bungled it, then we’ll say she misled us and cut her off at the knees.”

There was a moment of silence. “Yes, sir,” Stan said.

“Like I said, a no-brainer. Turn out the lights when you leave, Stan.”

“Yes, sir.”

The President heard Stan’s feet crossing the room, and then the lights went out and the door swung softly shut.

The President sighed and tucked the covers up to his ears. He tried to remember the dream he was having.

Bread, he remembered. It was about bread.

A pair of Hueys throbbed away into the rising sun, carrying Rails Bluff’s wounded. Including the Reverend Dr. Calhoun, who had been gut-shot two days ago, who had been in a coma for some time, but for whom—incredibly—no one in charge had ever thought to call a physician. Crazy, Jessica thought. The man would rather die than let anyone know about his little operation here. Fanatics. Jessica and her people were going to have to be very careful.

“Everyone gets patted down for weapons!” Jessica ordered. “When each is done, line them up on the road. Tell them rations and fresh water are coming!”

“O Lord!” cried a gangly red-headed man among the refugees. “O Lord, let me die with Brother Frankland! Let me pay for my sins!” The other refugees had cleared a space around him, looked at him with sidelong glances.

“O Lord! Take me now! I can’t be saved without Brother Frankland!”

“Who the hell is that?” Jessica asked. “Another preacher?” One of the grim-faced Ranger officers looked up. “He’s been like that ever since the shooting. He keeps saying he was a pornographer and that he should die.” He gave the man a grim look. “I think the others are good and sick of listening to him, but we can’t shut him up.”

Jessica rubbed her forehead over her injured eye. “Just make sure he doesn’t try to kill himself,” she said. The camp was going to be a colossal administrative night-mare. Sorting Frankland’s henchmen from the mere bystanders, and sorting the henchmen who had broken the law from those who hadn’t, and in the meantime feeding the hungry and doctoring the sick—the legal issues alone, she suspected, were enough to keep several grand juries busy for years.

Officers hopped to carry out her instructions. Jessica rubbed her forehead over her damaged left eye while she reached into a pocket to pull out her Iridium cellphone.

She dialed Pat.

“Yes?” he answered at once. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I came through it.”

“We were listening to the radio. Frankland had just started this new rant, but it went on for only a couple minutes, and then we lost the signal. So I figured that the Rangers showed up right then. How’d it go?”

“It went about…” She looked around at the stunned refugees, the burning radio station, bodies of the Rangers lying under blankets. “About as well as we could rationally have hoped,” she finished.

“That doesn’t sound too good,” Pat said.

“No,” Jessica said. “No, I wouldn’t call it good. It was the smallest and least destructive of a whole series of possible catastrophes, and that’s all the good you can say about it.”

“I’m glad you came through it okay.”

Jessica turned, pulled her rain cape over her head, hunched away from the nearest soldiers. “Pat,” she said, “I need you to make a phone call for me. I need you to call an ophthalmologist—probably one in Jackson—and make an emergency appointment. ASAP.”

“Okay.” Uncertainly.

“I need for you not to be overheard doing this.” She bit her lip. “Pat—the appointment’s for me.” Concern rasped Pat’s voice. “Was there a fight? Did you get hit?”

“It’s that shiner you gave me. I’ve been seeing flashes and…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve lost some vision in my left eye. I think it was the helicopter ride, it must have shaken something loose.”

“My God, Jessie.” Pat was thunderstruck. “My God, you’ve got to get here now.”

“I can’t. Things are a mess, and—look, you just make that appointment and let me know when I have to be there. And don’t tell anyone. Because if the Army finds out, they’re going to pull me off this job faster than you can spit.”

There was a pause before Pat replied. “Are you sure that wouldn’t be a good thing?” Jessica clenched her teeth. “Everything’s fucked up, okay?” she said. “Everything I’ve done has been destroyed or compromised or made a mess of. All I’ve been able to do is watch. I’m not leaving this job till I have a win, okay?”

“Yes,” Pat said. “Yes. I understand.”

“Make that call, okay? Take care of this for me.”

“Right away.”

“Good. Good. Because I need this.”

“I love you, Jessie.”

Jessica felt some of the tension ease from her taut-strung body. “I love you too, Pat.” She turned off the cellphone and pulled the rain cape off her head. The air smelled sweet, of rain and the grassy meadow.

Helicopters throbbed on the horizon, bringing in a company of military police, who would over the next day or two replace the Rangers and Jessica’s engineers, leaving them free for other duties. Jessica hoped to hell she wouldn’t be blind by then.

Jason rubbed Arlette’s arms, the friction of his palms warming the gooseflesh brought on by the clammy dawn. “Thanks,” Arlette said in a small voice, and shivered. Jason wanted to put his arms around her, hold her close, keep her warm against him. But though he had huddled with her through the storm, flesh to flesh, in the tiny cockpit, so close that he could feel the chill cold of her thigh alongside his, smell the warmth of her breath beneath the improvised plastic rain canopy, still he did not quite dare to put his arms around her.

Not with Nick and Manon there, looking at him with weary, half-resentful eyes, as if they were on the verge of politely asking him to leave.

“Come here, baby,” Nick said to Arlette. “Let me get you warm.” Arlette shifted across the little cockpit to sit on the edge of the cockpit next to her father. Nick began rubbing her bare arms, her back. Arlette sighed gratefully against his warmth. A pang of envy throbbed through Jason’s heart.

Arlette sneezed. “Scat,” her mother said.

“Thank you, Momma.”

Arlette sneezed again.

“Scat,” her parents said in unison.

Nick caught Jason’s puzzled look. “‘Scat’ is Arkansas for ‘Gesundheit,’” he said. Jason nodded. “I kind of figured that out.”

He rose stiffly to his feet from his perch on the edge of the cockpit, and gazed about at the fog-shrouded morning. Drops of water pattered down from the dark cypress trees, almost a rainstorm in themselves. The trees, standing on their thick stilt-legs and hung with vines and moss, were ungainly shadows barely visible through the mist. Some had fallen in the quake and lay like dead giants in the water, and elsewhere cypress roots, shorn off by tectonic force, stood in clumps like forlorn soldiers lost on a battlefield. Jason stepped up onto the wet front deck, looked down at the still, dark water, at his reflection fragmented by ripples. All the ripples were from the falling water, he realized. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind. Hunger burned in his stomach. “What do we do?” he said.

“Get some food,” Manon said. “It’s been two nights since we ate.”

“We need to figure out where we are,” Nick said. “The river’s to the east of here, generally—maybe north or south is closer, but east will get us there—but in this fog we can’t tell where east is.”

“So we just sit here?” Manon said. “In the fog? And starve?”

“If you have a better idea,” Nick said, “I would like to hear it.”

“You should have planned better,” Manon said. “You should have made sure that we had food with us when we got away from the camp.”

“I wasn’t the one who worked in the kitchens,” Nick said. “You didn’t put anything away?”

“Can we not argue over this?” Arlette demanded in a loud voice. “Can somebody tell me why we’re arguing?”

The argument had the bitter taste of familiarity to Jason. They sure sound like a family, he thought. Arguing about all the things they can’t change.

That was his family, too. What he remembered most about his family was the arguments. That and the long, terrible silences that followed the arguments, and the long absences when his father would vanish for weeks at a time, working eighteen hours a day in his office.

Nick’s family seemed to be entering one of those familiar glacial silences. Jason rubbed the chill out of his upper arms.

“We could try to find some cattail,” he said. His voice had a strange, hollow ring in the clammy mist. “Or some—what is it?—pokeweed?”

His voice vanished into the mist. The silence enveloped him. No one bothered to acknowledge his words.

He dropped to sit on his heels on the foredeck, hunkered against the tendrils of misery he felt floating around him, dank and clammy, like the mist.

Jason looked up for a moment as he noticed that one of the strange-looking cypress trees, standing tall on its knees in the flood, was moving along his line of vision. He looked up and found himself staring at the range of twelve feet or so into the beady eyes of a cormorant, one of a dozen who occupied the tree’s lower branches—black, sinister silhouettes that sat in the trees as motionless, and as alien, as Easter Island statues, sentinels standing guard over unknown country.

Surprise brought an exclamation to Jason’s lips. The cormorants didn’t react, didn’t even blink.

“Urn,” he said, to cover sudden embarrassment. “We’re moving. There’s a current here.” He heard the others shifting in the cockpit, testing the notion for themselves. None of them seemed to notice the ominous, long-necked figures in the trees that followed them with glittering eyes.

“The current is going downstream,” Manon said. “All we have to do is go in the direction of the current, right?”

When Nick spoke, it was with slow reluctance. “Not necessarily,” he said. “The storm just dumped a lot of rain upstream from here. When the flood hits us, it might spread out into the country as well as draining toward the Gulf. This current might be taking us further inland.”

“That’s not bad, is it?” Manon asked. “There are people inland.”

“Maybe. It could be that we’re just going further into the wilderness.” There was another moment of silence. “Nick,” Manon said, “we have to get the child some food.” Jason turned away from the cormorants, saw Nick frowning in the cockpit. “I don’t want to use fuel till we know where we’re going.”

“Anywhere is better than this.”

“The fog will lift sooner or later,” Jason offered, but the adults paid him no attention. It was as if they were locked in a kind of dance, and they couldn’t leave the dance floor till the end of the music, and they couldn’t change to a different dance because these were the only steps they knew. Arlette, who knew the steps as well as the dancers, left her father’s lap and joined Jason on the foredeck. They hunched in cold silence and watched the cormorants fade away into the mist. At the end of the argument, Nick started the outboard and began to motor along with the current. Jason and Arlette took their oars and stood on the foredeck to fend off floating debris.

At least the activity kept them warm. And Jason enjoyed just being in Arlette’s company, working next to her on the foredeck.

The strange cypress-shadows floated past, as if in and out of a dream. Little aftershocks trembled in the still water, then faded. The motor’s low rumble echoed from the invisible forest around them. Water streamed from the branches above. Jason was morally certain that they were heading in the wrong direction, that they were just getting deeper into the wilderness, but he was part of the adults’ dance now, too, and there was no escaping it.

After an hour or so the cypress swamp came to an end. Instead of trees there was a tangle of bushes and low scrub, much of it covered with creeper and strung with floating debris. Nick cut the motor for a moment, and the boat drifted in the sudden silence. “What is this?” Nick asked. “Is it somebody’s field?”

“If it’s a field, it’s overgrown,” Manon said.

“The current’s strong here,” Arlette said, looking over the bow. “Stronger than in the cypress swamp.” The boat spun lazily in the current. Arlette reached out with an oar, pushed the boat away from a tangle of scrub. “It’s a flood plain,” Nick said. “We’re in a flood plain.”

“We’re in the batture?” Manon asked, using the old Louisiana name for the country between the levee and the river. “That should mean we’re near the Mississippi.”

“I think we’re going the wrong way,” Nick said. “We’re in a—what’s the name?—floodway. The Corps of Engineers, or somebody, keeps this place clear of trees so that it can be flooded deliberately when the water gets too high. We’re being carried off into an area that’s been set aside intentionally as a place to store flood water.”

“I think that makes sense,” Jason said. Not that anyone cares what I think, he added to himself. Manon’s voice was uneasy. “Well,” she said, “this really doesn’t look like the Mississippi, what we can see of it. But what if we’re in a river, and the current’s taking us to the Mississippi?”

“That’s possible,” Nick said. “I’d rather not use any more fuel until we know for certain.”

“Nick,” Manon said, “I am so hungry. And Arlette hasn’t had any food since the day before yesterday.”

“I’m okay, Momma,” Arlette said. “I’m getting used to it.”

“We’ll know soon where we’re headed,” Nick said. “If this is taking us to the Mississippi, we’ll get there pretty quick. No mistaking the big river when we find it.”

“I hate to do nothing,” Manon said. “Just sit here and do nothing.” Her voice trailed off into the mist. The current lapped against the bass boat’s chine as it drew the boat into the pale unknown. Jason planted his oar on the deck and leaned his forehead against the smooth wooden haft. River water, trickling down the length of the oar, tracked its cooling path against his forehead. Suddenly Jason was very, very tired. He hadn’t really slept during last night’s rain, just drowsed against Arlette’s shoulder while the rain rattled on the plastic sheet overhead; and the previous night’s sleep on the metal foredeck had not been restful.

Jason lowered his oar to the casting deck, then sat on the deck. If nothing was going to happen, he might as well rest. He began to stretch out along the length of the deck.

“Wait, Jason,” Arlette said. She put down her oar and sat beside him, her legs crossed. “Put your head on my lap,” she said.

Jason felt suddenly awkward. He felt that he ought not to look at her parents, should not receive whatever signal their faces were sending. “Thank you,” he said. He shifted himself on the foredeck and put his head in Arlette’s lap, her crossed ankles below his neck. He looked up at her, saw an enigmatic Buddha smile on her inverted features.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes. Very.”

He closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of her bearing him up, a yielding touch of softness in the cool mist. The current rocked the boat lightly. For a moment Arlette’s fingertips brushed his cheek, and he inclined his head slightly, like a cat, to strop his jawline along her fingers.

His thoughts whirled into the warmth of Arlette, into the touch of her fingers, and then his thoughts flew away and were lost to time.

When Jason opened his eyes he saw Arlette, the silent smile still on her face as she bent over him, drowsing. Her fingers lay curled against his cheek. In a pocket of her shorts he could feel the little jewelry box that held the necklace her father had given her. Above her was the whiteness of the mist. The current still chuckled against the bass boat’s hull.

Without moving his head Jason looked left and right, and saw to his surprise that the mist had lifted slightly: it hovered about fifteen feet from the surface of the water, a perfect, featureless shroud of white that hung unbroken in the air, as if the world had simply dissolved into nothing a few feet over their heads. Jason looked at Arlette against the backdrop of white and for the first time observed the little scar that disrupted the perfect arch of her right eyebrow, the length and richness of the lashes laid against her brown cheeks, the way her eyelids pulsed to the dream-movement of the eyes beneath. Arlette must have sensed his scrutiny, because her eyes fluttered open. Jason watched the eyes as they sleepily focused on him, the mouth as the smile broadened.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Her chin tilted as she looked up. “We can see a little,” she said. “Look.” He rose reluctantly from her lap, and Arlette straightened her cramped legs with a sigh. He saw that the boat was in a wide flooded channel, with a cypress swamp on one side and a line of cottonwoods on the other. The speed of the current had slowed, and the boat spun like an errant compass needle below the great sheet of mist above their heads.

Jason glanced at the other passengers. Nick was slouched in the cockpit, eyelids half-shut. Manon stood on the after-deck, gazing in silence at the great, dark, silent mass of water. She gave a sigh, her shoulders slumping. “I think you’re right, Nick,” she said. “We’re in the wrong place. This can’t be a real river.” Nick opened his drowsing eyes, straightened in his seat. “We can head the other way. But I’d rather wait till we’re absolutely sure before I use any more gas. I think we should just tie up to something till we can see the sun.”

He rose slowly from his seat and rolled his shoulders to take the kinks out of them. He turned to Arlette.

“Hand me that rope, honey.”

Arlette reached for the neatly bundled mooring rope, turned to hand it to her father, and then said, “Is that some kind of house?”

They all followed her pointing finger. There was a structure of some kind in one of the cottonwoods, a boxy-looking object that clearly had not been put there by Nature.

“Looks like a kid’s treehouse,” Nick said.

“Kids build treehouses near their real houses,” Manon said. A smile broke across her face. “I think we may be close to civilization here.”

“If civilization hasn’t been evacuated,” Nick said. He started the engine and motored across the flood. The object was in truth a treehouse, and a big one, a sort of split-level with two main rooms and a pitched roof of irregularly shaped, homemade wood shingles. The unpainted planks of the structure were green with age. Beneath, cross-pieces of wood had been nailed to the bole of the tree as a primitive ladder.

“Look!” Arlette said. “Power poles!”

As the boat neared the treeline, the passengers were able to see farther into the mist a little beyond the trees. The line of cottonwoods was narrow, and behind it was an embankment, or perhaps a levee. On the embankment two power poles stood with their heads crowned by mist. The lines between them had fallen, and another pole, farther down the line, leaned at an oblique angle, strands of wire hanging limp like the arms of a man in despair.

Jason felt his heart stagger into a quicker tempo. These forlorn signs of a once-human presence—the weird old tree-house, the abandoned power poles—were enough to kindle his hope. Suddenly he couldn’t leave Retired and Gone Fishin’ quick enough. He wanted to leap to the shore and kick out, run down the embankment as fast as his legs would carry him. Or swarm up the tree to the strange old dwelling, stand on the roof, look for rescue as if from the crow’s nest of a sailing ship.

“I’ll check out the treehouse,” Jason said.

“See if someone’s home first,” Nick said. He hailed the treehouse several times. No answer came. Nick maneuvered the boat to the cottonwood, touched it once, and Jason sprang for the homemade ladder.

“Watch out for snakes,” Nick called. “In floods they climb high.” The thought of snakes didn’t deter Jason. He practically ran up the tree, came to the platform where the treehouse rested. A weathered door of hammered-together planks, four feet high, was closed with a simple hook-and-eye. Jason hoisted himself onto the platform and unhooked the door. A strange smell, rotted vegetation and moldy fur, floated out of the old structure, and for the first time Jason hesitated. Then, slowly, he pushed the door open.

The hinges weren’t metal, but oiled leather. Jason blinked as he gazed into the darkness of the interior. The small room seemed to be full of old junk. He crawled partway through the door and tried to make sense of what he saw.

There were homemade nets, a rusty tackle box opened to reveal old wooden fishing lures, some hand-carved duck decoys. Animal pelts and snakeskins were tacked up on the plank walls, along with pictures from a calendar, Beautiful Black Women 1992. Scattered on the floor were metal objects that Jason eventually decided were animal traps.

There was a narrow pathway through the clutter to the shack’s other room, which had been built on a higher level. Jason crawled along the path to the upper room, where he found a stained old mattress with the cotton ticking sticking out of the seams, some plastic plates, cracked porcelain mugs, cooking tins for boiling water. They all looked as if they’d been scavenged from a rubbish heap. In one corner, on a little stand, were some small plastic statues of Catholic saints beneath a tacked-up card of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was a strange contrast to the calendar girls, who occupied most of the rest of the wall. The place smelled musty and unused. Jason guessed that no one had been in this place for months, if not years.

Jason backed out of the treehouse and stood on the narrow platform, craning to see through the trees. The mist was thicker here, but he could just make out, through a curtain of leaves, the embankment behind the stand of trees; and he could see that the top of the embankment was paved with a two-lane asphalt road.

He called out this news on the way down the ladder. Nick nudged the bass boat up to the cottonwood, and Jason jumped across.

“Anything in the treehouse?”

“Fishing gear. Animal traps. A few plates and pots.” He looked at Arlette as he recalled the provocative smiles of Beautiful Black Women 1992, and looked away quickly.

Manon looked at Nick. “Should we take the pots? They’d come in handy if we find something to cook.”

“They were pieces of junk,” Jason said, “but they were better than what we’ve got.” Nick considered their course of action. “Let’s check the road first. If we can’t find anything there we can come back.”

They motored along the line of cottonwoods, looking for a break in the vegetation, and found it soon enough: the embankment veered toward them, through the trees, but there it was washed out. The broken asphalt lay on the tumbledown slopes of the embankment as if trying to extend the roadway under water.

The other end of the washed-out road was lost in the mist. Nick drove the boat onto the grassy slope of the embankment. Jason slung the Astroscan over his shoulder, jumped off the boat, and helped Arlette and Manon disembark. Then he tied the boat to a sapling growing on the verge of the line of cottonwoods, Nick stepped off the boat, and they all climbed to the top of the road. The blacktop stretched forward into the mist. It had not been in good condition before the earthquakes, and the quakes had buckled it in several places. On the far side of the embankment were still more flood waters, lying dark and featureless as far as the mist permitted them to see.

“That’s somebody’s field,” Manon said. “There’s no brush, like in the floodway. Somewhere around here there are people. All we have to do is find them.”

They walked a few hundred feet along the road. Jason and Arlette fell back and let the adults walk in front of them. Jason felt his arm brush against Arlette’s as they walked, and he reached out and took her hand. Her warm fingers curled around his. He looked at her, and they shared a smile. The embankment continued to stretch before them, marked only by the downed power lines. A road sign came slowly out of the mist, and they paused before it.

“Well,” Nick said, “we may be getting somewhere after all.”

THIRTY-TWO

“You came from Rails Bluff?” the deputy said. “The place that’s on the news?” Jason saw his own surprise reflected on Nick’s face. “On the news?” Nick repeated.

“The Army flew in there and took the place over. The radio hasn’t been talking about much else.” Jason and the others looked at each other. If they had stayed in Brother Frankland’s camp, they might be living safely and happily on government bounty.

“Was there any shooting?” Nick asked.

“Some, I guess. They needed the Army and all.”

Well, Jason thought, maybe it was smart to have left anyway.

“Let’s get these people to the camp,” said the other deputy, the one without a uniform. It was a strange, eerie world that Jason and his party had walked through, the mist floating overhead and graying the world in all directions, the floodway waters on one side and the flooded field on the other. When the police car rolled slowly out of the whiteness ahead it seemed to emerge from nothing at all, as if the mist itself had formed itself into the car, into the ghostlike occupants. As soon as the car pulled to a stop in front of them and the deputies swung out onto the road, Nick ran up to the deputies and told them he needed to get to a phone to speak with the authorities about the camp they’d just escaped from in Arkansas.

“Rails Bluff, right?” the uniformed deputy said.

This deputy, obese and wearing a khaki uniform, seemed relaxed and talkative, but his partner radiated hostility. The other man was young, in his early twenties, and wore a mixture of military uniform and civilian dress, with his deputy’s star pinned to a hunter’s camouflage vest. He wore wraparound shades and glared through them at the four refugees, arms folded on his chest.

“Let’s get these people to the camp,” the younger deputy said. “They can listen to the news there.” He had a flat Northern voice that sounded a harsh contrast to the Southern speech Jason had been hearing for weeks.

The uniformed deputy hesitated. “Maybe we can take them to the camp in town,” he said. The younger man just scowled. “There’s sickness in that camp. These people need to go to the other camp.” He nodded at Nick and Manon. “They belong there. You know that.”

“I guess.” Jason could hear reluctance in the voice of the uniformed deputy. Jason looked from one deputy to the other. He didn’t know what he was sensing between the two, but he knew he didn’t like the vibe.

“Take us to a hotel,” Manon said. “I have a credit card. We can pay for hospitality.”

“No hotels in this parish, ma’am,” the uniformed deputy said. “Not in years. Sorry.”

“Boardinghouse?”

“Full up since the quake.”

“Perhaps we should talk to the district attorney,” Nick said. “We can provide evidence about what was happening at Rails Bluff.”

“Got to get you registered at the camp first,” the younger deputy said. “I’ll radio for a truck,” he added, and ducked into the car.

The uniformed deputy looked at Jason for a moment. “We could take the boy to another camp,” he ventured. “A camp for—for young folks.”

Jason looked at Arlette. “Can my friend come with me?”

“I’m afraid not, son. It’s for, uh, boys only.”

Jason turned to the deputy. “I’m staying with my friends,” he said. The fat deputy gave him a strange look. Jason could feel a warning chill run up his spine. “I really think you’d like this other place better,” the deputy said.

Jason decided that he would not go anywhere with this man. He took a step closer to Nick. “I’m sticking with my friends,” he repeated.

The deputy just stared at him for a long moment, then said, “Fine. Your choice.” The other deputy left the car and spoke to his partner, without even looking at Jason or his party. “The camp’s sending a truck.”

There was a long moment of silence. The silent mist hovered about them, sealing off the rest of the world. Jason looked at Nick, at the others, and drew away from the sheriff’s deputies. Nick and the others fell back a few paces as well.

“What’s happening here?” Jason said in an urgent whisper.

Nick looked over his shoulder at the silent deputies standing by their car. The two men stared back, and Jason thought of the black-eyed cormorants sitting above the flood. “I don’t know,” Nick said. “Maybe they’re sick of refugees here.”

“That’s not what it is.” Manon stood stiffly, spine straight, chin tilted up, and touched Arlette’s back.

“Cracker cops,” she said. “They don’t like black people, that’s all. Especially educated, well-spoken black people.” She turned to Arlette. “Souviens-toi qui tu es. Ces gents ne peuvent pas emporter ton amour-propre.”

Nick rubbed the healed wound on his left arm, the wound which—Jason suddenly remembered—had been inflicted by a deranged cop. “There’s more to it than that,” Nick said. “There’s something they’re not telling us.”

Jason shared Nick’s suspicion. “This reminds me of Rails Bluff,” he said. “Maybe we should just get in our boat and head back down the river.”

“Not without food,” Manon said.

Nick considered this. “Maybe we can just buy some food.”

These speculations were still unresolved when another vehicle appeared from the mist, a small white Toyota pickup truck. Two more men got out, both with deputies’ badges worn over civilian dress. Neither of them smiled, not even at the other deputies.

“We’re here to take you to the camp,” one of them said. “You-all got any more belongings than what you got with you?”

Manon walked toward them, head held high. “Not really,” she said.

“Where’s y’all’s boat?”

“We were wondering if we could just buy food,” Manon said. “Then we’d get back on our boat and head downriver to where we’ve got family.”

There was a glimmer of interest in the deputy’s eyes. “You got anything to buy food with?” he asked.

“A credit card,” Manon said.

The deputy lost interest. “Nobody’s taking credit cards. Cash or nothing.”

“I’ve got cash,” Nick said. A hundred and twenty-some dollars that had been sitting in his pocket since before the quake. “If you can take us to where the food is.”

The deputy hesitated. “We can buy the food for you,” he said.

Nick shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. There was some kind of racket here, police selling the refugees their rations, and he wasn’t having any part of it.

The deputy gestured toward the truck. “Get in back. There’s food in the camp.”

“We’re really not interested in going to this camp. Can you just take us to Shelburne City? We’ll get along fine once we get to town. We’re not destitute.”

The deputies looked at each other. One of them shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “Get on in.” Jason felt a decided reluctance to get in the Toyota. The situation was too strange: the highway elevated above the flood, the mist that masked the world, the uncommunicative deputies, the attempt to separate him from Nick and his family, so reminiscent of Frankland putting him in the young men’s camp… But his objections were unclear, even to himself, and so he found himself following the others, getting in the back of the truck.

Rainwater sloshed around in the bed of the Toyota. Jason perched uneasily, with the others, on the sides of the truck bed. Jason noticed a shotgun and a rifle in the rear-window rack in the truck cab. The truck turned around and began moving slowly toward Shelburne City. As they moved farther into the country, the land on the right slowly rose and emerged from the flood, rows of immature cotton plants in red soil, the furrows silver with water. The highway left the levee top and continued into the country. Broad puddles shimmered on the blacktop. A few buildings appeared. Unlike Rails Bluff, where every building had been wrecked, the quakes here seemed to have left the buildings largely intact—windows and chimneys were gone, and shingles had been lost, but for the most part the homes seemed to have survived without major damage. Only some outbuildings, mostly ramshackle old barns, seemed to have collapsed altogether.

The truck slowed as it approached a roadblock, two vehicles drawn across the road with only a narrow space between them. A handful of deputies stood there, mostly in civilian dress or bits of military surplus, and they waved the Toyota through. The truck picked up speed as it drove down the highway, past a highway verge cluttered with abandoned vehicles, and then the Toyota swung suddenly across the highway toward the chainlink-and-razorwire fence that loomed behind the abandoned cars, and splashed and bounced across drowned ruts to the gate.

There was a somber refugee camp beyond the fence.

Huddled miserably beneath the low sky were scattered a strange collection of tents, awnings, and primitive wagons—cotton wagons, Jason recognized, cotton wagons with open sides of wire netting, and with canvas or plastic stretched on top to make dwellings.

Jason was shocked. The contrast with Frankland’s orderly camp left him appalled. The truck slouched to a halt in front of the gate, where another pair of deputies waited, both with shotguns couched in their arms. People—black people—watched listlessly from behind tent flaps, through the wire netting of the cotton wagons, from beneath blankets or sleeping bags tented over their heads and shoulders.

The deputies in the truck bounded out. “Everyone out!” one of them said. For the first time, Jason saw, he was smiling.

Nick and his family rose to their feet and stared aghast at the camp. “I’m not going in there,” Nick said.

“And neither is my family.”

Without a word one of the deputies, standing behind Nick, reached into the truck cab and drew the shotgun out of the rear window rack. Jason cried a warning, but the deputy was fast: he slammed the butt of the shotgun into one of Nick’s kidneys before Nick was aware of the threat. Nick gave a cry and fell to one knee. The deputy raised the shotgun again.

Fury flashed like steam through Jason’s veins, and he screamed. Without thought he found himself flying through the air at the deputy that had hit Nick, arms outstretched to claw open the man’s throat. Jason bowled the man over and their heads came together with a crack. The world spun in wild sick circles. Something hit him in the face, then a heavy boot stomped him in the stomach. He gasped and curled into a fetal ball, and then something dug into his throat and his wind was cut off. He clawed at his throat as the strangling-strap pulled him, half crawling and half falling, along the wet, rutted ground. Then he was flung onto the grass, and he heard the chain fence slam shut behind him.

Air sighed at last into his lungs, and he choked, began to cough. He pulled the ligature from around his throat and found that it was the Astroscan strap that he hadn’t slipped off before launching himself at the deputy. For a while Jason was sick, puking up burning acid from his empty stomach onto the grass. He heard Arlette sobbing, Nick muttering. Tears blinded him. Then a cool palm touched the back of his neck.

“Take it easy, Jason,” Manon said. There was a strange sadness in her voice. “We’ll be okay. Just take it easy, cher.”

After the pain came rage. Nick staggered to his feet, breath hissing through his teeth with the agony that throbbed through his kidneys. Blind anger almost sent him lunging after the deputies, who were backing away from the closed gate with their shotguns leveled. With his bare hands he would tear the gate to shreds, then the armed men.

Arlette must have seen the fury in his face, because she ran to him and flung her arms around him. “No, Daddy!” she cried. “Don’t!”

And he didn’t. He stood there, poised to launch himself at the deputies, and Arlette clung to him, her terrified, tear-stained face pressed to his chest. Then Nick shuddered as a wave of pain and nausea rolled through him, and he looked down at his daughter and raised a hand to caress the back of her head.

“It’s okay, honey,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

The red rage faded from his mind as he stood holding Arlette and he became aware of Jason huddled on the ground nearby, Manon crouching over him, absently caressing his hair.

Somewhere a baby wailed. Nick glanced around, saw people approaching from all directions. Approaching cautiously, not yet convinced that shots wouldn’t be fired.

Black, he saw, all black. And the deputies all white.

A dreadful certainty began to chill his anger, the certainty of nightmare. The river had cast him up on an unknown shore, where some madman’s malevolent fantasy was being enacted.

A woman was walking up to him with a firm tread. She wore boots and bib overalls and a yellow T-shirt. Her white hair was shorn close to her scalp, and her skin was a deep ebony.

“I’m Deena Johnson,” she said. “Come with me, please. I’ll take care of the young one, and perhaps I might find you some food.”

Miss Deena Johnson performed some first aid on Nick’s and Jason’s abrasions, then found the newcomers some food: stale cheese and some kind of flat, greasy crackers that tasted as if they’d been buried in a pit for fifteen years; but it was the first food that Nick had eaten in almost two days, and he devoured everything that was put before him.

“Perhaps the young people might take a walk,” said Miss Deena, “and Nick and Manon and I can talk grownup business.”

She had an authoritative way of speaking, like the David women, that choked off debate before it began. Unlike the Davids, she had a way of not making it seem overbearing. Even Jason, who Nick suspected would bridle at being sent away because he wasn’t old enough to talk with the adults, accepted Deena’s ruling without protest, and left the dining tent along with Arlette.

Miss Deena reached into a pocket of her dress, pulled out a sheaf of rolled papers and a stubby pencil. She smoothed out the pages with her lined hands and put on a pair of reading glasses. Nick saw that the pages were filled with minuscule writing.

“Could I have your full names and addresses?” Miss Deena asked. “And your girl’s name, and the boy, too?”

“Certainly,” Manon said. She and Nick gave Deena the information, and Deena wrote it down in tiny print.

“There,” she said as she rolled up the pages and put them once again in her pocket. “There will be a number of copies made and hidden. So that when we are dead, a record of our names may survive.” Jason walked fast through the tent city. The boot-scrapes on his face burned. There was a sharp ache in his throat when he tried to swallow. It hurt less if he swallowed while tilting his head to the left. He was getting out of here. Out and away. He just had to figure out how. There were two big structures on the campsite. One was a large tent with metal folding tables for meals, where they’d just had their little meal of cheese and crackers. Next to the dining tent was a huge brick barbecue pit and a small frame building—since the quakes much reinforced with a strange supporting structure of timber and metal pipes—which held a propane-fueled cooking range, sinks for doing dishes, and the wellhead.

The other structure was a huge tent intended for church meetings, but which now housed entire families. The rest of the campground was a litter of tents, plastic sheeting, and cotton wagons slowly sinking into the mire. The ground was so wet that it squelched beneath Jason’s feet as he walked. Soaked clothing, bedding, and blankets had been strung up everywhere to dry, and now hung limp in the windless air. There were outhouses, a tool shed, and some pecan trees. Hungry people had scrounged all the old pecans. There was a softball field, with bleachers and a screen behind home plate, but that was outside the wire fence.

There were lots of people in the camp, entire families with children. It was strangely quiet. Even the children seemed subdued, walking or playing quietly in groups, and only occasionally would a lone child’s laughter ring out among the tents. The summer warmth had risen quickly from the damp ground and smothered the camp in sultry heat. The mist had risen farther from the ground, but still hung unbroken overhead, a bright white shroud that cloaked the world.

The strange silence that pervaded the camp kept Jason and Arlette from speaking as they made their way toward the back fence. Arlette kept her hand in her pocket, touching the box that held the necklace that Nick had given her. The camp had once backed onto a hardwood forest, but the chainlink wall now glittered between the camp and the trees, and the trees had been bulldozed back in order to clear a lane between the woods and the camp. A pair of deputies, neither in uniform, paced along the back fence of the camp. One of them had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, and the other—he drank Diet Dr. Pepper from a can—had a little black machine gun hanging on a strap from his shoulder. Jason walked slowly toward the fence, glanced left and right as he tried to find the weak spot in the camp’s defenses. Jason figured he wasn’t going to stay here long.

“You don’t go to fence,” someone said. Jason turned, saw an elderly black woman crouched in the shadow of a homemade shelter made out of plastic sheeting. “Only camp committee’s allowed to go to fence. You go to fence, they shoot you.”

The woman had no teeth and spoke with a kind of pedantic emphasis, as if she were talking to an unruly house pet. Her eyes were hidden behind thick glasses.

Jason’s nerves gave a shiver at this strange apparition. “Thanks,” he said.

“You don’t go near to fence,” the woman said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Arlette said.

Jason smiled at the woman and crabbed off to the side. Walked along the inside at the fence, peering out. He felt the stares of the silent people in the camp, and they made him nervous. The trees that had been bulldozed down, he saw, had just been shoved to the back of the lane, piled up against the standing trees. Good cover there, he thought.

“Slow down,” said Arlette. “There’s no place to go.”

Jason stopped, took a breath. “You’re right,” he said. Then, “I’m looking for a way out.” Arlette stepped up to him, touched the scrapes on his face where the deputy’s boot had connected. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” He swallowed, grimaced, touched his throat where the strap had cut across it. “My throat hurts, though.”

“Thank you for trying to help my dad,” Arlette said. “That was brave.”

“I got pissed off,” Jason said. “That man didn’t even know who Nick was.” There was a pause. Jason saw sadness drift across Arlette’s brown eyes. “He thought he knew everything that mattered, I guess,” she said.

Jason looked at her and felt a restless urge to flee the moment, this unwanted intrusion of the difference that was at the heart of this perverse scene they’d just entered. What she meant was that the deputy had attacked Nick because he was black, and black was all the deputy saw, all he thought he needed to know. All the deputy thought he needed to know about any of the people in the camp, apparently. And he, Jason, was white. And in a camp full of black people who were probably very unhappy with white folks right now. He didn’t want to be mistaken for the deputy or one of his friends. He was surrounded by people who were, in the only way that now mattered, different from himself. He didn’t want to be a member of a minority; he wasn’t used to it, and he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want it to matter that Arlette and her family were black. He didn’t want it to matter that he was not. All he wanted to do was get away before it was necessary to deal with any of this.

“I’m getting out,” Jason said. “I don’t think it’s going to be hard.” He licked his lips. “You come with me, if you want. We’ll get on the boat and get out of here. Get to Vicksburg and tell people what’s going on.” He reached out, took Arlette’s hand. “Let’s get out,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. These people are bad.”

Arlette looked serious. “I don’t want you to get hurt. There’s the fence, and those men have guns.”

“Chainlink fences are easy. Back in LA, I used to scale fences all the time so I could go skating. They’re easy to climb, and if that doesn’t work you can go under.”

Arlette looked uncertain. “Let’s find out what’s going on first. Maybe we should talk to some people.” Jason glanced at the camp inmates, the eyes that watched him, that maybe judged him, that maybe put him in the same frame as they put the deputies.

“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Okay.” If we have to, he thought. Nick and Manon listened in silence to Deena Johnson’s unadorned history of the camp. Partway through the story, Manon’s hand moved across the table to take Nick’s in her own. Nick squeezed her hand. At some point Manon had to take her hand back, because he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and he’d hurt her without meaning to.

Other people came into the tent while Deena was telling her story, either watching silently or adding details to the narrative.

“You can decide best how to tell the children,” Miss Deena said. “But you should tell them, because if they do not hear it from you, they will hear it from others in the camp.”

“Tell my daughter that a bunch of clay-eaters are going to try to kill us,” Manon said. Anger burned in her words.

Deena looked at her. There was a terrible cold objectivity in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, or she will not know how to behave when the moment comes. Because we have decided—we have voted—that we will no longer cooperate in any way with these people. No one will leave to work on this other camp of theirs, or to live in it, until someone is taken to the camp and returns declaring that it exists.” Manon’s eyes grew shiny. Her chin trembled. “I will not—” she began to declare, and then turned away, blinking back tears. Nick took her hand again. He could feel his jaw muscles hard as armor.

“What is being done?” Nick asked Miss Deena. “What are you doing to stop them?” The older woman shook her head. “It took us too many days to realize what was happening. And then it took us too long to get organized—the camp was like a committee of two hundred people, each with their own ideas. Some of us resisted on their own and were killed. And we have so few resources, so few weapons, so few people who have had military training.” She looked at Nick. “I don’t suppose you have a military background?”

A chill laugh broke from Nick. “I was raised in the military,” he said, “and my daddy was a general.” He looked at her. “But what I do for a living, Miss Deena—when I’m working—is design weapons.”