The Rift

THIRTY-THREE

So Nick, in his capacity as military brat and weapons designer, was put on the Escape Committee, seven men who met more or less permanently beneath one of the pecan trees, at least until one or more of them got mad at the others and stomped out. There were no qualifications for being on the committee, only the fact they’d volunteered. They were an argumentative bunch—two were elderly, and had to have things repeated to them—and they were all full of ideas and scorned the ideas of others, and were all too aware that they’d probably only have one chance to organize a big escape. All of this—most of all the knowledge of their own responsibility—had created a paralysis that had resulted in very little being decided.

They were able to inform him chiefly of what would not work. He heard of the two boys who had tried to drive away, only to have one shot by the Klan Sheriff’s son while the other disappeared. He’d heard of the man who had charged the cops shooting his pistol and been shot dead. He heard about the Klan Sheriff Paxton bringing the Imperial Wizard by to show off his camp. He heard about the twenty-eight men—all single, all without family in the camp—who had been taken away, allegedly to build another camp, and who had never been seen again. He heard of the junkie who had run out of narcotics, who had gone into a screaming fit, been carried away by deputies, and who had not returned. He heard of the diabetics who were running short of insulin, people who needed other medication, and of the mothers whose babies needed milk, and how terrified they all were that their supplies could be cut off. He heard of the man who wriggled under the wire one night and escaped into the country, and whose body was exhibited by the deputies the next day. “He was shot by a neighbor,” a deputy told the camp. “We didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. The folks ’round here hate you; I’d stay in the camp if I was you.” Nick was told about the spotlights that were turned on along the camp perimeter at night to illuminate the lanes on all sides of the wire. He was told about the random bullets fired into the camp at night. He was told that the water table was about four feet below the surface of the water, which meant no exit via tunnel, a la The Great Escape.

All the Escape Committee had managed to do was prepare a signal. Occasionally they heard the thrum of helicopter engines, presumably some relief agency or other delivering supplies to Shelburne City. No helicopter had actually been seen, but next time one was heard, the committee planned to ignite a bonfire of tires taken from the cotton wagons, and hope the column of dense, thick smoke would attract attention.

It certainly seemed worth a try, Nick thought, even though one of the Escape Committee, a thin, intense man of late middle age who called himself Tareek Hall, insisted that this was only one of many death camps, that white America had chosen this moment to exterminate all blacks, that this was all a well-planned worldwide conspiracy. Tareek seemed very happy when he spoke his theory aloud. It obviously gave him great satisfaction to know that millions of people wanted to kill him. Even paranoids have real enemies, Nick told himself.

Nick was told that the camp’s assets in any future conflict consisted of three handguns that had so far escaped the deputies’ attention, an assortment of knives, clubs, hammers, and other improvised hand weapons, plus the services of about twenty veterans of the armed services, aged from their mid-twenties to their sixties, none of whom had ever seen combat. A number of the refugees were country people who had been hunting all their lives and knew how to shoot a rifle, but few of these had even been in the military, and none had fired a shot in anger.

And there were about four remaining gangsters who, as they had arrived with their families, had not been shipped out like the other gangsters. They could be counted on for aggression if nothing else, though one was reluctant to surrender his pistol for the common good.

The Escape Committee had at least made a survey of the guards: which ones would talk, which could be bribed, which would respond only with anger, with blows, or by racking a round into his shotgun. Two guards patrolled the back of the camp at all times. One on each side. Two in front. All were armed with shotguns, machine pistols, or assault rifles. Any of these weapons could perpetrate a massacre. Three or four deputies manned the roadblocks on the highway to either side of the camp. Those four openly displayed scoped hunting rifles that could pick off anyone at long range. The roadblock guards were, in their way, more dangerous than the men patrolling the perimeter, because they could kill from a distance and because there was no way to reach them. Two of these men moved to the camp at night and mainly patrolled around the back, where an attempt to escape to the woods was more likely. The seven argumentative men of the Escape Committee, after vetoing a lengthy series of complicated proposals, had finally thrown up their hands and decided to attempt a mass escape. They’d try to cut the wire, or with the sheer weight of the inmates bash down a part of the fence, and then everyone would pour out of the camp and run into the woods.

It didn’t sound promising to Nick, and he said so. Nobody knew the country. They’d be running blind into the woods with killers firing at their backs. By the time any escapees got through the woods, the deputies could have a whole line of men waiting on the other side of the woods and catch them between two fires. No one knew how large the woods was, or how possible it was for people to evade capture once they were in the trees. Nobody knew of an escape route once they were away from the immediate area. There was no transportation out of the parish even if they did evade the deputies.

“I don’t like it,” Nick said.

“What else can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. He rubbed the old wound on his arm. “I don’t know.” You need a rear guard, he thought. That’s what his father would tell him. Bunch of civilians in flight, you’ve got to have soldiers who stay behind fighting to make sure they get away. But you can’t have a rear guard armed with three pistols and some clubs. That wasn’t a rear guard—that didn’t even achieve the dignity of suicide. It was pure absurdity. Even if the rear guard were brave, even if they made up their minds to sacrifice their lives, they’d last only a few minutes, and then the horrible pursuit would begin, the massacre would stretch over miles, armed men pursuing helpless people over the countryside.

We’ll need to get their weapons, Nick thought. Then we can put up a fight.

“They’re punks,” Nick said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Punks,” he repeated. “Punks back down when you show fight.”

“Maybe some of them will. But some of those redneck bastards learned to shoot at their granddaddy’s knee. The same place they learned to hate niggers.”

“Let me think,” Nick said. He wished his father were here. “How do they get food in?” he asked.

“They come every two-three days. They bring less food all the time, and never enough, so they can sell us food for money sometimes. But they bring more guards along with the food, and they come armed. March a few of us out of the camp to take the food, then march them back in. The guards hardly ever come in the camp themselves.”

That seemed the best chance for getting weapons, Nick thought. Swarm through the gate and bowl those crackers over. They would take casualties, but that was going to happen no matter what.

“When did they last bring food?” Nick asked.

“Yesterday.”

So he probably had a while, Nick thought, to let that plan mature. But not long. Not longer than overnight.

“Have we got a map?” he asked.

Where could you hide? Nick wondered. Where—assuming you had soldiers—could you hide them?

Back in the woods, certainly. Once you got back beyond the bulldozed area, the trees were relatively open, you could even maneuver your men back there.

The parking lot. Eighty or a hundred cars parked helter-skelter by the side of the road. You could hide people in the cars—if you could first get them out of the camp—then have them jump out from ambush. And the cars provided mobility, too. If he could get people into the cars, they could drive to the roadblocks and fight the riflemen at close range.

Nearby buildings. There was an old tumbledown church—literally tumbled down in the quakes—less than half a mile south of the camp. If he could hide soldiers there, he could enfilade the southernmost of the two roadblocks.

The bar ditch by the side of the road. It didn’t provide much cover, but it was better than nothing. And the camp itself. When all was said and done, there was a surprising amount of cover in the camp. Tents, blankets, and opaque plastic sheeting could hide people from sight even if they wouldn’t stop a bullet. And slit trenches could be dug secretly, inside the tents, to provide cover. The slit trenches would fill with water, with the water table as high as it was, but getting wet was better than getting killed. It might be a good idea to dig slit trenches under all the tents. Hide the children there, till it was time to run for the woods.

His head pounded where the deputy had kicked him. The pain in his kidney made him walk bent over, like an arthritic old man. The barely healed wound on his left arm throbbed. He could feel the tension lying like iron in his shoulders and neck as he walked about the camp making notes on paper. At the end of his tour, he looked at his notes and saw they looked like the scrawls of a madman. Got to do better, he thought. Got to do better, for Arlette and Manon. The grownups didn’t want to talk much. Arlette approached several, with Jason tagging along, and each greeted Arlette, and some asked about her family and where she came from, but they evaded answering Arlette’s questions about the camp.

“There’s a big secret here,” she told Jason. “I’ve never known black people to clam up like this. This isn’t natural. This is not right.”

They kept walking through the camp. Little insects raced along Jason’s nerves with swift sticky feet. His heart gave a leap at the sight of some white people—there were actually white people in this camp, two men and a woman—and he almost ran up to them to say hello.

But he didn’t. Now I’m doing it, he thought. Now I’m rating people by their skin color. His mind whirled. How do I get out of this trap? he wondered.

A golden beam of sunlight suddenly illuminated the camp. Jason looked up, saw that the pall of cloud that had covered the world was beginning to break up. A modest wind stirred the humid air. He saw that Arlette was walking away from him, heading toward three boys who looked a few years older than she and Jason. They were all taller and bigger, dressed like almost everyone else in an assortment of ill-fitting, ill-judged clothing. Their hair was uncombed and stuck out in tufts, and thin, youthful beards shadowed their cheeks. Reluctance dragged at Jason’s heels as he followed Arlette toward the three.

“Hey,” she said. “I’m Arlette.”

“Sekou,” one of the young men said. “This is Raymond.” He did not bother to introduce the third.

“We just got here,” Arlette said.

Raymond flicked Jason a glance from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. “Who’s your friend?” he asked. Jason figured he could speak for himself. He told them his name. The other boys ignored him. “How you get here, baby?” Raymond said to Arlette. “You come on a boat, or they open a road?”

“We were all on a boat.”

“Come through that storm, huh? That must’ve been hard.” He put an arm around Arlette. “You get all wet, baby? I dry you off.”

Jason’s hackles rose at Raymond touching Arlette. He didn’t much like Arlette’s acceptance of the touch either. “What we wanted to know,” Jason said, “was what’s going on here.” Sekou sniffed. “What’s it look like, man? One-eighty-six.”

Arlette stiffened. The third boy, the one whose name hadn’t been mentioned, looked amused. He shifted his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Boy’s never been stomped by a cop before,” he said.

This didn’t seem much in the way of credentials to Jason. “I’ve been arrested, if you think that’s important,” he said, exaggerating somewhat. “I’ve come a thousand miles down the river in my boat. And this is the second camp some nut-case has stuck us in. We got out of the first one, and we’ll get out of this.”

“Shi-it,” Sekou said, drawling the word out.

Jason decided he was not about to impress these guys no matter what, so he decided he might as well keep silent. Arlette flashed Raymond a smile—jealousy burned through Jason like a blowtorch—and then she shrugged out from under his arm. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “I got to Audi.”

“See you later,” Raymond said. Jason followed her another thirty feet, and then she stopped under one of the old pecan trees and turned to him. He was surprised at the drawn look on her face.

“What’s the matter?” he took her hands. “One of those guys say something?”

“One-eighty-six,” Arlette said. “Sekou said that.”

“And…?” Jason said.

An inscrutable look passed over her face. “Don’t listen to hip-hop much, do you? One-eighty-six—that’s a police call. It means murder.”

That’s where Manon found them, clutching each other’s hands beneath the pecan tree, and she took them aside and—her voice halting, tears welling slowly from her eyes—she told them what Miss Deena had told her.

What else we got to make weapons with? Nick thought. He could feel pain throbbing through the veins in his temples, a new viselike grip with each beat of his heart. There had to be more than sticks and stones. More than three guns. There had to be something.

Miss Deena was surprised when he burst into the cook-house while she and some others were preparing the noon meal. “Gotta be something here,” he said. “Ammonia, something.”

“What do you want, Nick?” Deena demanded. “We are busy here.”

“What do you use for a cleaner? Ammonia? Anything?”

Deena pointed with one bony finger. “Back there, boy. In the chest.” The chest was a heavy thing, tin nailed over a wood frame, probably used as a cooler for milk or drinks or bread in the days before light plastic coolers were invented. Standing next to it was a fifty-gallon metal drum with the red-and-yellow Civil Defense symbol on it. Inside were wrapped stacks of crackers, like the ones Nick had eaten for breakfast.

My God, he thought, those crackers have probably been sitting in some basement since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Someone had found them and shipped them to the camp to feed refugees. No wonder they’d tasted rancid.

Nick rummaged through the bottles in the cooler, read yellowed old labels on bottles that had sat here for, probably, decades.

Methanol. Oh, thank God. Somebody had been traditional in their choice of solvents.

“What else you got?” he demanded. “You got any fuel? Gasoline, oil?”

“They’s a tractor,” an old lady said. “Out in the tool shed.” Nick grabbed the methanol and ran out the door. The tool shed was thirty feet away. The lock had been broken during the previous night’s rainstorm, so that the place could be used for shelter. The tractor—actually a lawn tractor with a 42-inch mower blade—had been shoved out onto the grass. There were some blankets and clothing inside on the soggy, oil-soaked wooden floor, but no one was in the shed at the moment.

Nick ran inside, saw the pair of five-gallon red plastic jerricans standing against the wall. His heart leaped. One was filled with gasoline, and the other was half-full. On a wooden shelf at head-height were three dusty cans of motor oil.

Pain beat a wild tattoo in Nick’s skull. Madly he sifted through the contents of the shed. Insecticide and a sprayer for fire ants. Gas-powered weed trimmer. Miscellaneous garden tools—from the selection remaining, Nick figured that the ones that could be used for weapons had already been taken. Bases for the Softball field and fielders’ gloves—the bats and helmets were gone. Cleaning rags. A piece of canvas so oil-soaked and rotten that no one had yet been desperate enough to use it for shelter. Wildflower seed. A twenty-pound sack of Scott’s lawn fertilizer, half-used.

Nick pounced on the bag of fertilizer like a parched man lunging for a fountain. Ammonium nitrate. He wanted to hold the dusty old bag to his chest and dance a waltz.

He stood, looked around the musty-smelling shack. It was a simple equation. Petroleum products plus ammonium nitrate equaled boom.

Boom, he thought.

Boom.

Carrying his bag of fertilizer and his plastic jug of methanol, Nick went to the Escape Committee, still in permanent session beneath the pecan tree, and told them he could make explosive.

“But explosive isn’t any good without a way to detonate it. We need blasting caps, or something like them. I can make them, if we’ve got the right ingredients.” He waved his bottle of methanol.

“Bombs?” one of the older men said. “Want to blow down the fence?”

“I had something else in mind,” Nick said. He wiped sweat from his face. Pain beat through his head.

“Antipersonnel weapons. Claymore mines, command detonated.” He looked over his shoulder at the gate. “We kill them. Kill a lot of them, all at once. And then we take their weapons and we fight.” The seven men of the Escape Committee looked at him, silent for once.

Boom.

Nick made list after list. There was so much to do. Get the battery from the little tractor, so that he could boil the contents down to make sulfuric acid. Get Miss Deena to put out a call for aspirin, which could be used to make picric acid as a booster explosive for detonators. Chip bits of lead off the well pipe and the pipes in the cook shed, to make Lead monoxide, which was a preliminary step necessary to make lead picrate as a primary explosive in detonators.

But the first thing on the list was to collect buckets of human manure from the piles behind the outhouses. Because that could be turned into saltpeter, which was necessary for just about everything.

“You want your sand buggers?” one of the old men on the committee asked him.

“Hm?” Nick said.

“You want your sand buggers, you best get in line.”

Nick looked up and saw that a line was forming at the dining tent, and he decided that though he had no idea what a sand bugger might be, he knew he was probably hungry enough to eat one. He rose from his crosslegged position under the pecan tree, and walked to the end of the line, still carrying his notes. Manure, he thought, quite a bit of it. He hoped there was enough methanol to do all the work he needed it to do.

He looked up, saw Manon walking toward him. Her long hands rested on the shoulders of Jason and Arlette. From the solemn look on their faces, Nick could tell that Manon had told them what had been happening here in Spottswood Parish.

“Nick,” Manon said as she approached. “Tell Jason that he’d be a fool to try to escape tonight.” Nick hesitated before answering. The objections he’d given to the Escape Committee in regard to their planned mass escape might not all apply to a single individual.

But the single individual could still get himself killed.

“I wouldn’t leave without Arlette,” Jason said. “But I think it could be done.” Arlette’s name set alarms jangling along Nick’s nerves. There was no way that Nick would let his daughter go over the wall before he could make it absolutely safe. “I’m working on something else,” he said.

“What else?” Jason asked.

Nick looked uncertainly at the people standing with him in line. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. It occurred to him that not all the people in the camp might be safe. He didn’t know how much contact they all had with the guards, or—as far as that went—which of them might just be too talkative, too inclined to boast to his captors.

They stood in awkward silence in the food line till they received a sand bugger apiece—a patty of vegetable matter, fried like a hamburger and consisting mostly of potato with bits of onion and greens mixed in. With this was served a spoonful of baked beans and one of the strange, greasy crackers they’d had when they’d first arrived at the camp.

It all tasted awful. Nick ate every bite, then licked the plate. Then he took the others aside and told them what he was going to do.

Jason wanted to help, so Nick collected some plastic buckets and a shovel and went behind the nearest outhouse. Piled high was a decade’s worth of manure covered with bright green grass and blazing red pods of hearts-a-bustin’-with-love. Nothing like a shit pile, he thought, to make a fine flower garden.

“Dig,” Nick said. “Slowly.”

Jason gave him a thoughtful look, as if wondering if Nick had chosen this moment for some strange joke, and then apparently decided otherwise and began to dig. Jason turned a few spadefuls while Nick peered into the pile, and was rewarded with the sight of a line of dirty yellow crystals running through the soil.

Yes, oh yes, he thought. Potassium nitrate. Saltpeter.

Boom.

Jason filled three buckets with crystal-laced dirt, then he and Nick carried them to the cookhouse, where Nick filled another bucket with wood ash from one of the campfire circles. He took a fifth bucket and punched holes in the bottom, put the bucket in a big saucepan, put a towel in the bottom of the bucket, and poured in a layer of wood ash. Then he put another cloth on top of the wood ash, filled the rest of the bucket with night soil. He told Jason to go into the cookhouse and asked them to boil some water, and when the water began to boil he poured it into the bucket a little at a time while Jason watched.

“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Miss Deena asked from the shadow of the cookhouse.

“Making saltpeter.”

“You going to add that to our food? Think we’re getting too sexy around here?”

“I’m going to do a magic trick.” He looked up at her from his position hunkered by the bucket. “I’m going to make guards disappear.”

Deena gave him a cold look. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“You’ll see,” Nick said.

“I got that aspirin you wanted.”

“I’d like to take a couple. For my head. I won’t need the rest till later.” She gave him some aspirin. Nick swallowed them and poured hot water into the bucket. He repeated the procedure until he was out of earth.

When he was done, he poured the hot liquid from the saucepan to a clean saucepan, throwing away the dark sludge left behind. He went into the cookhouse and put the saucepan on a burner. Miss Deena and the other cookhouse crew watched him with suspicion.

“What now?”

“Crystals will start forming in the water after a while. We want to scoop those out with something clean. A paper napkin, or filters from a coffeemaker.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m going to need another burner. You might want to clear out for this next bit.” He found a glass baking dish. He put on some rubber gloves and pulled the caps off the battery he’d taken from the little tractor. He poured battery acid into the dish and turned on the burner beneath it. Sulfuric acid fumes began to fill the cookhouse. Nick sent Jason outside. Nick’s eyes watered, and he tied a bandanna over his mouth and nose and stood outside the cookhouse till he saw white fumes rising from the baking dish. Then he dashed inside, turned off the burner, and took the baking dish outside and put it on the grass.

“That acid’s concentrated,” he told Miss Deena.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

He looked at Jason. “Wait for it to cool, then pour it into a clean bottle. Make sure you’ve got rubber gloves on, and that your eyes and nose are protected. Put the bottle in the chest in the cookhouse, and don’t let anyone touch it.”

“When can I use my cookhouse again?” Miss Deena demanded.

“Use it now, if you like.”

“Uh-huh.”

Whatever Nick did next depended on having sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate, so he washed his implements, then left Jason watching the boiling saltpeter water while he went to report to the Escape Committee.

Leaves rustled overhead. Awnings in the camp crackled as the air snapped at them. The wind that had sprung up since the morning was growing brisk, providing the only relief from the day’s sledgehammer heat.

“Things are coming along,” Nick told the committee.

“Joseph here hacksawed some lead for you.”

“Thank you, Joseph.” He took a handkerchief from Joseph that held bits of lead pipe.

“That enough?”

“I think so. We don’t need much.” Nick put the handkerchief in his pocket, and the movement sent blinding, unexpected pain knifing through his kidney. He gasped, took his hand out of his pocket, and waited for the pain to ebb.

“You best hope you’re not pissing blood tomorrow,” Joseph said.

“Anything else you need?” said another man

Nick blinked away the tears that had sprung to his eyes. “Okay,” he gasped, “okay.” He blinked again.

“I’m going to need an electrician or someone who can string wire without blowing us all up.”

“We’ll ask around.” But Nick saw his audience craning to look past him, and felt a stir in the camp. He looked over his shoulder toward the gate and saw a line of vehicles moving along the road toward the camp: a sturdy old five-ton truck, a sheriff’s department car, and a civilian pickup truck.

“Some kind of trouble,” one of the old men said. “They’s not bringing food.” Sudden anxiety for Manon and Arlette sang through Nick’s heart. He looked over the camp, saw a young woman in a kerchief silhouetted briefly between two of the miserable cotton wagons, and trotted uneasily in that direction.

The little convoy pulled up before the camp. The larger of the two trucks backed up to the gate. A big, burly man in a deputy’s khaki uniform got out of the police cruiser and raised a bullhorn to his lips.

“Our new camp is ready,” he said. “The one your men were building. And we’d like to move the first families over there this afternoon.” He consulted a clipboard. “Jerry Landis and family. Connie Conroy and daughters…”

Nick’s mouth went dry at the thought that his own name might be called, but then he recalled that he had never been asked for his name, he was on none of their lists. He reached the area where he thought he’d seen Arlette and saw a completely strange girl wearing a kerchief. He stopped dead and peered around. The camp inmates, instinctively drawn by the announcements, but fearful of the deputies’ firearms, had formed a kind of half-circle at a respectful distance from the gate. Nick thought they would be better advised to be digging themselves into slit trenches. Somewhere a woman shrieked when her name was called; Nick could hear her sobbing and calling on Jesus to help her. Nick stayed well behind the mass of people, trotted along in hopes of catching a glimpse of Manon or Arlette.

Miss Deena was walking from the crowd toward the gate. She was absolutely erect, her white-haired head held high.

Admiration for Deena warred with anxiety in Nick’s soul.

Nick finally saw Arlette and Manon together, with Jason, who was standing on top of a concrete picnic table peering over the heads of the crowd. Nick accelerated, caught up with them, put his hands on Arlette’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of sight,” he said. “Miss Deena’s going to tell them we’re not going along with them anymore. This could be nasty.”

Manon cast him an anxious look. “All right,” she said.

“Jason. Get down from there.”

Jason clambered down with a show of reluctance. His face was swelling where the deputy had kicked him. Nick shepherded them toward the back of the camp. “Let’s get under one of the cotton wagons,” he said. He wished he could hide them all in a trench. Pain knifed his kidney as he crouched down, and he gasped in pain.

Crouching in cover, Nick didn’t see the deputies’ reaction to Miss Deena’s announcement. He didn’t see the argument, or the little red-haired runt of a man who led a group of deputies sprinting for the gate. But Nick saw and heard the crowd’s reaction, saw them fall back with a kind of collective cry, then saw them run as shots began to crack out.

Nick’s heart hammered. He clutched at Manon and Arlette, held them to his breast while Jason crawled restlessly left and right, trying to get a view of what was happening. “Get your head down!” Nick told him.

Then the crowd parted, and he saw deputies with shotguns at port arms running right for him. “This way!” he yelled. “Run!” He pulled Manon and Arlette away from the deputies, from beneath the far side of the cotton wagon, then urged them to run between a pair of tents. Shots cracked out. He heard a man scream. He remembered the flash as the shotgun went off in Viondi’s face, the way the warm, bloody body had fallen into his arms. He remembered fleeing into the night, running from the light, to wherever the light would not find him.

“This way!” he cried. His heart pounded in his throat. People screamed and ran in all directions. Shots began coming from the guards posted around the camp. There was nowhere to run, but Nick knew they had to run anyway. A man with a gun loomed up in his vision, fifteen yards away. “This way!” he shouted, and ran past the cookshed into a tangle of tents and awnings. A rope caught his ankle and he crashed down into the rainsoaked earth.

Hunted. He was being hunted, and so was his family. He rose to his feet and began to run. Shots rang out behind him. People shrieked, and a whole mass of them surged across his path. He ran with them. He had lost Manon and Arlette. Desperately he called their names. He realized that the people were being driven, like cattle.

A fence loomed up in front of him, and Nick realized that he’d swung round in an arc and ended up at the front of the camp again, to the left of the gate. People flung themselves against the fence, then fell back at the sound of shots. Sobbing for breath, Nick looked for cover, found a fallen tent, and wormed his way into it.

Panic hammered in his throat. He had never felt so helpless in his life, not even when the first quake had torn the earth apart in front of the wheels of Viondi’s car.

He looked out at the world through a piece of mosquito netting that served the tent as a window. He saw the group of eighteen or twenty people, terrified and bruised and bleeding, that the deputies herded together and threw onto the five-ton truck. The deputies made no effort to search for the people they were actually after, just took whoever they could find. Nick saw Miss Deena still standing by the front gate, standing like a soldier with her back straight and her shoulders back, her gaze unflinching and defiant as the weeping people were herded past her. Too proud to run, too contemptuous of the enemy. Nick saw the little redhaired runt, the leader, stop by the gate for a moment, saw strange green eyes turn to Miss Deena. Saw the thoughtful consideration in those eyes.

Saw him raise his pistol and shoot Miss Deena in the face.

A scream of horror and rage rose to Nick’s throat. It echoed the screams of dozens of others. Then, as the gate swung shut behind him, the redhaired man took out a pocket watch and looked at it.

“Six minutes!” he said. “Good work!”

Little chimes sounded through the air. Nick recognized the tune as “Claire de Lune” and felt his blood turn to ice, his thoughts to murder.

That little man, he saw, that baby-faced killer with the shotgun eyes, was carrying Gros-Papa’s watch. Nick crawled out of his hiding-place. Frustration and baffled anger throbbed in his chest. He felt soiled, utterly disgusted with himself. He had allowed himself to be driven like an animal. Terror had ruled his mind. He hadn’t acted the part of a man. He hadn’t behaved like a father who cared for his child. He’d crawled into hiding like a worm into its hole.

Gunsmoke tainted the air. Nick wandered through the stunned, sobbing refugees till he found Manon bent under a tree and weeping. He knelt by her, put his arm around her.

“I’ve never,” Manon gasped through tears, “never imagined.”

“Where is Arlette?” Nick asked. “Where is Jason?”

“I am somebody,” Manon said. “I am a person.”

Nick stood, bit his lip as he looked for Arlette. He hadn’t seen anyone familiar among those being herded onto the truck, but anxiety sang through him until he saw Arlette and Jason emerging from behind an awning. He called out to them, hugged them both against him.

He wouldn’t run again, he thought. Next time, he swore, it would be the guards who felt fear. Crystals of salt were forming in the simmering water that Nick had drained from the night soil. Nick set Jason to scooping them out with a coffee filter. Nick began assembling material for his next bit of chemistry.

Miss Deena didn’t die, not right away. She was laid under an awning near the cookhouse, along with an unconscious wounded man who had been shot in the stomach. There were some other wounds, all minor, and a few dead. Miss Deena’s moans and incoherent cries floated through the door and she tossed restlessly on a bloody mattress. The woman who had walked with such pride, spoken with such forthrightness, would not be allowed to die with the dignity she carried in life. Instead she would die slowly, half-conscious and moaning in pain.

Nick could see a little shudder run up Jason’s spine at every moan.

“I can do that job, Jase,” he said. “Why don’t you go find Arlette?” Jason gave him grateful look and made himself scarce. Nick tied a towel around his head so he wouldn’t drip sweat into his chemicals. He continued to pick out crystals of salt until he’d boiled most of the liquid away. Then he added methanol to the solution and filtered it through a paper coffee filter. The white crystals of pure saltpeter, collected on the towel, he laid out to dry.

While the saltpeter was drying, Nick got out the bottle of aspirin that Miss Deena had given him. He ground a fistful of aspirin tablets into a cup and mixed them with water to make a paste, then added methanol and filtered the mixture through a paper towel. He evaporated the remaining liquid out of the mixture, then added the white powder to the sulfuric acid he’d made earlier, then added saltpeter till the mixture turned red.

He refined the mixture further, cooling and straining and reheating, until he had picric acid. While the refining process was underway, he began to make lead monoxide from saltpeter and the chips of lead pipe that Joseph of the Escape Committee had sawn for him. This required more methanol, more distilling and filtering operations. By this point his operations monopolized the burners in the cookhouse. When he had picric acid, he used part of it to mix with the lead monoxide to form lead picrate.

“Boom,” he said softly to himself.

There it was. The lead picrate formed the primary explosive, the picric acid the booster explosive. Pack them together and they made a detonator. And that would set off the fertilizer explosive he would make next.

He had his weapons. What he needed now was a plan for using them that would leave his family alive. He stepped out of the cookhouse to take a breath of air, and he saw a woman drawing a blanket over the terrible gunshot face of Miss Deena. Her agonies were finally over. The wounded man, the one shot in the belly, had died also, apparently without ever regaining consciousness. Nick stared at the two bodies while pain throbbed through his skull. He had the sensation that he lived now in death’s realm, that his father’s passing had somehow opened a door into the world of night. The bodies were piling up. And the only escape, perhaps, was for Nick to start piling up bodies himself. He turned his eyes from Miss Deena and walked away, out of sight of the corpses, and simply stood for a while, looking at nothing, taking deep breaths of the sultry air. He’d been looking at Manon for a while before his mind really registered her presence—when it did, he felt it as a small shock. There she was, her unforgettable profile, the proud Nefertiti arch of the neck. She was facing away from him, gazing at the hardwood forest behind the camp.

Nick approached her. She turned as he neared her, looked at him with an expressionless face.

“You okay?” he asked.

“What a question,” she said. “No, I am not okay.”

Nick felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck. “I’m not okay, either,” he said. She hesitated, then touched his arm. “What’s going to happen?” he asked. “Are we going to be all right?”

“Some of us will get away,” Nick said. “How many, I can’t say. But some will. That’s the best we can hope for.”

Nick saw that Manon’s eyes were shiny, that tears were rolling down her face. She looked away from him suddenly. He stepped closer and touched her face, wiped a tear away with the back of his fingers.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s all right,” Manon said with a kind of sigh. “That was the General talking.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said again.

She turned to him. “You don’t think it’s my fault, do you?” she said. “Because I wanted to go the wrong way up the floodway?”

Nick looked at her in surprise. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s their fault.”

“Those bastards,” Manon said. Her lip trembled. “Those clay-eaters. They don’t know us. How dare they judge us on one thing? I am a person.”

Nick remembered her repeating that sentence, I am a person, after the deputies chased them through the camp. Clinging to her selfhood in the face of those who would deny it.

Manon’s family had worked for generations to build their pride, to educate themselves, to maintain their high standards of achievement, to lead their community. And that didn’t matter to the people on the other side of the fence, because they saw color only.

“I know,” Nick said. Because color wasn’t all Nick was, either. He was a father, an engineer, a man who loved. He was a father, at least, before he was a black man. He didn’t have any issues with people who reversed the order of those values—that’s who they were, and that was all right—but he always resented those who insisted that there existed values that were solely black, that black people who didn’t adopt these values, and no other, somehow weren’t black enough; that by choosing one life over another they were somehow betraying their ancestors; that he, by his choice of school, his choice of friends, his choice of a job, was betraying the brothers he’d left behind.

His mind spun. He wondered if the deputies—those people out there he was going to do his best to kill—ever accused each other of not being white enough. Probably they did.

“How dare they?” Manon said. “I have never felt so degraded.”

“Because somebody overlooked this damn place,” Nick said. Overlooked it for a century, probably. All it took for death to take a grip on a community was a handful of crazy people and a lot of other people who weren’t paying attention.

Both in Rwanda and in Bosnia, the radio had told people to pick up weapons and kill their neighbors. And they did. All that was needed to unleash the savagery was for someone to tell people it was okay. Wars were all ethnic now. That had been a problem at McDonnell, maybe even the reason Nick had been laid off. You don’t need a jet airplane to kill your neighbor; all you need is a shotgun and a machete and a voice on the radio to tell you what to do.

Whatever chaotic combination of circumstances had led to this situation in Spottswood Parish, it hadn’t been planned this way from the beginning. Never mind what Tareek Hall might claim about a nationwide conspiracy, this camp and this situation had the feel of improvisation. This simply wasn’t organized well enough to be a deeply held conspiracy. The coneheads and crackers that had gained control of this area were making it up as they went along, and that gave Nick a kind of hope. They might not have any kind of backup plan. If Nick could throw a monkey wrench into their scheme, their whole operation might fly to pieces. The Escape Committee had said there were a couple dozen guards at most, and some of them, like the Klan sheriff, hadn’t been seen since before the troubles really began. The ones who were present were standing double shifts, and were probably weary by now. The total wasn’t very many, not to keep a place like this going.

“The rest of the country has forgotten this place exists,” Nick said. “We need to remind them somehow. There’s got to be some way of getting news to the rest of the country. Radios, satellite phones, something.”

Manon shivered and turned away, hugging herself with her arms. “There’s nothing I can do.” She said. “I went to college. I’m not a fool. But I’m useless. I don’t have any skills that apply in this situation. All I can do is watch.”

Nick came up behind Manon and put his hands on her shoulder, began to work the iron-taut muscles.

“Look after yourself, that’s your job,” he said. “Look after the children.”

“I can’t even do that!” Manon said. “Not in a war! I don’t know how!” Nick felt her muscles leap under his hands. “Then save yourself for after the war,” he said. “Save yourself for me.”

Her muscles leaped again, and she cast him a glance over her shoulder. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “Let’s not.” Nick sighed. “Okay, baby.”

“There are reasons we’re divorced.”

He let his hands fall from her shoulders. “You know,” he said, “I’m not too clear on what those reasons were. Other than the legal ones, ‘irreconcilable differences’ or whatever.” She sighed. “We discussed it at the time.”

“You discussed it. I don’t think I discussed it much.” She half-turned toward him, gave him a resentful look. “You were a sweet man when I married you, Nick. But you changed.”

“I—” he began in anger, then said, “I changed?”

“When your father began to die. You got frantic. You kept turning into him—turning into a general, into a man who gave orders and wanted everything exactly his way and no other.”

“I didn’t do that,” Nick said.

“Yes, you did. Sometimes you were yourself—kind, loving—and then you’d snap. And you’d turn cold and start barking out orders.”

Nick stared at her. “Why are you blaming my father? There was nothing wrong with my father.”

“There was nothing wrong with your father, Nick, except that he wasn’t the one I married. I married you, not the General.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Then I realized, okay, the General was a part of you. I tried to accept it, I really did. But I couldn’t.”

He looked at her and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything to do with his hands. “My father was dying. Why couldn’t I mourn him?”

“Mourning I could deal with. Being in the military, I could not. I didn’t marry the Army, I didn’t marry McDonnell, I married Nick Ruford.”

“I never said things would be like Toussaint.”

She lifted her chin. “Toussaint wasn’t easy. You think being a David is easy?”

“You were in charge in Toussaint. Your family owned everything. Folks are a little more insecure out in the world. People outside Toussaint don’t understand that you’re supposed to be some kind of French royalty. People on the outside lose their jobs.”

Manon’s lips compressed in anger. “What’s wrong with being in a secure place? I wanted Arlette to be secure. Growing up with her own people in Toussaint, having all the advantages I had.”

“I wanted her to be in the real world.”

“The real world can be so unkind to a young girl! It doesn’t even know she’s human. This is the real world!” She jabbed her finger emphatically at the soil, at the camp with its armed guards.

“And the bayou put Toussaint under water,” Nick said. “You can’t live in your magic kingdom anymore.” They fell silent for a moment, each communing with the sullen, solitary resentment that each cherished in their heart. Then Manon shook her head.

“Look, Nick,” she said. “You need to be the General now, okay? That’s what will save us. I understand that.” She put a hand on his chest. “So you go and be a general. And when you don’t need to be Army anymore, we’ll talk about…” She hesitated. “Our future.”

Nick looked at her without speaking. He was too weary and heartsick to find the words, perhaps too weary and heartsick even to return to his war.

He felt like he’d been fighting the war for years. Forever.

“I love you, Nick,” Manon said. “I know you love me. But I don’t know what’s possible besides that.” He took her hand in his own, squeezed it, turned away. Knowing what was possible seemed the key thing. Nick didn’t even know if life itself was possible, if anything was possible more than living a few hours.

“’Scuse me?” a young man approached, carrying a heavy metal toolbox. He had light skin, a scraggly beard, and a Spanish accent. “Are you Nick? The Escape Committee sent me—my name’s Armando Gurule. They said you needed some wiring done, and I’m an apprentice electrician.”

“Well, Omar, some of it worked, and some didn’t,” Knox said. He gave a jittery little smile. “I know you had hopes for that camp committee bungling the food distribution, but they seem to have done a decent job—no complaints, no sign of dissension. Maybe some of the white folks in there taught them how to do it. And the niggers inside are getting more and more surly—I had hoped to keep ’em divided a little better, but it’s not happening. Are you okay, Omar?”

Omar sighed. His skull was splitting. After his conversation with David last night, he’d got a bottle of bourbon out from under the sink and started hitting it pretty hard. And he hadn’t been feeling so good to start with.

Knox’s peculiar, semi-industrial body odor was making Omar’s stomach turn flip-flops. Knox smelled worse than usual today.

“Maybe I’ve got a touch of that camp fever they’ve got at Clarendon,” Omar said.

“Anyway,” Knox said, “things didn’t go so good this afternoon, with our third shipment to Woodbine Corners. We ran out of single men, that was the trouble. We had to start taking away families. There was resistance—we had to go in shooting—but we got our quota.” He shook his head. “I think it’s time to make a maximum effort. We need to liquidate that camp. Everyone there. Just get the whole thing over with.”

It was early evening. Swallows flitted through the growing darkness. After the previous night’s toad-strangler of a rain, the air seemed unusually soupy. Beyond a nearby fence were the massive machines of the John Deere dealership, all strange half-lit looming angles. Omar and Knox met here, in secret, every evening.

“People are going to—” Omar rubbed his aching head. “They’re going to wonder where the camp’s gone.”

“Those Mud People are more dangerous if they stay,” Knox said. “If a whole bunch of ’em bust out of there, we’d get most of them for sure. But what if there were survivors?” He shook his head. “No survivors. That’s the plan. Then we deal with the cars—sink them or bury them or whatever—and we’re home free.”

Omar looked down at the little bouncing crop-haired man and he felt his insides clench in hatred. “No survivors,” he agreed, and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Knox from behind his shades. And this means you, he thought.

The camp was strange at night, almost eerie. No one dared to show a light, no one dared to speak in a normal tone of voice. Sometimes Jason heard a child’s cry, or hushed voices, or the slithery sound of someone moving in a sleeping bag. Sometimes the sounds reminded him of the noises that Deena Robinson had made when she was dying, and he shivered. Aftershocks rumbled on the northern horizon, though most were barely felt in camp. The chain link gleamed silver in the light of the spotlights that were trained on the lanes cleared along the sides of the fence. It was difficult to see anything beyond those lanes of light. All detail seemed to vanish into an exterior darkness, and the camp seemed to exist in its own world, a dark island afloat on a midnight sea.

Jason sat with Arlette in the warmth and anonymity of the night. He leaned against one of the camp’s concrete picnic tables, and Arlette sat with her back to him, reclining against his chest with his arms around her while they whispered to one another. Jason was glad he didn’t have to do more than whisper, because his bruised throat ached whenever he spoke.

“I’m almost sorry that I got talked out of going over the fence,” Jason said. “Our boat might still be where we left it, and I could be on the river by dawn. I could do all right living on water and some of those biscuits till I got to Vicksburg or someplace with a telephone.”

Memories of being hunted through the camp made him shiver. He had almost run for the fence even then, terror making him want to disregard the deputies’ guns.

“The roads are patrolled,” Arlette said. “And our boat might not be there.”

“I can avoid people in a car,” Jason said. “And if the boat isn’t there, I’d try to find someone friendly.”

“The people here aren’t friendly. That’s what everyone says. People here shoot anyone they think’s from the camp.”

Jason hesitated and wondered how to frame his answer. The local crackers might well shoot a black man who they thought was some kind of dangerous escapee, but Jason suspected that they wouldn’t kill an unarmed white boy. But Jason wasn’t certain how to phrase that suspicion, not to Arlette. He didn’t know how to talk about race. He didn’t know the words that were permissible.

“They wouldn’t shoot a kid,” he said finally. “Not if it was just me.”

“I trust my daddy,” Arlette said. “He’ll get us out of here.”

“If it were anyone but Nick,” Jason said, “I’d be out of here by now.” He remembered the fevered way that Nick labored in the cookhouse, the way his jaw muscles clenched as he worked with his primitive materials. It was as if nothing existed but the deadly task at hand. He hadn’t even been disturbed by the moans of Miss Deena, sounds that had Jason nearly crawling up the walls. It was that fierce, exclusive concentration on the work that gave Jason a degree of strange comfort. He knew that Nick would not rest until he had accomplished everything that was possible.

“At least you and I are together,” Jason said. He tucked his chin into the warm notch between her clavicle and jaw, and heard her give a little giggle at the sensation. She reached up a hand, touched his cheek, stroking the down along his jawline.

“Soft,” she remarked. “You don’t really have to shave yet, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s cute, that hair you got there.”

“Thanks, I guess.” His mind whirled at her touch. He kissed her cheek. She turned and her moist lips touched his. He kissed her avidly, dreadfully aware that they might have no time at all, that this could end any second. He wanted to melt into her, bury himself in her muscle and nerve. He yearned to obliterate himself in her.

He touched her hair through the kerchief, began to pull it down her hair in back so that he could caress her. Gently her fingers carried his hand away, rearranged the kerchief on her head. Jason felt a baffled amusement at this strange modesty. “I want to touch your hair,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “I haven’t looked after my hair in over a week.”

“That’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a mess. Every day’s a bad hair day for me.”

He let his hand fall from her hair, clasped it around her waist instead. “Okay,” he said. “But I can still kiss you, right?”

“Sure.”

“Could you lean on my other shoulder? My throat hurts if I turn that direction.” Arlette shifted her position. “It’s okay if I kiss you from here?”

“Yes. And you can touch my cute little sideburns all you like.”

Arlette giggled. “Okay.”

She touched his cheek, then brought her lips to his. They kissed again in the clinging darkness. Then Arlette gave a cry of alarm and Jason’s heart leaped; he turned to see a strange figure silhouetted against the stars, standing above them.

The man was burly, dressed in a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Jason saw a long beard silvered by starlight, hair tumbled over the shoulders, strange yellow eyes that gleamed in his black face. The man brought with him an earthy smell that Jason tasted on the night air.

“I come from outside, me,” he said, in an accent so thick that Jason could barely make out the words. “I need talk the man in charge, eh?”

Nick sat in the cookhouse, making bombs. He had the overhead light on, but he kept the doors shut so he wouldn’t attract attention. It was hot and stifling in the cookhouse, and his head swam with the scent of fuel. He worked slowly and deliberately, not daring to make a mistake.

Nick took one-pound coffee cans from the camp’s meager stores, then packed them two-thirds full with an explosive made from fertilizer and motor oil. He put all his weight into compressing the explosive, because he wasn’t sure if the picric acid he was using as a booster explosive would be “fast” enough, when exploded, to detonate the fertilizer, and the more fertilizer hit by the shock wave of the detonator, the better. He pushed his finger into the compressed explosive, and then in the hole he made he placed a homemade blasting cap. Each cap was made from one of the spent pistol cartridges that the deputies had scattered in the camp on their raid that afternoon, a fact that Nick considered poetic justice. Nick had punched the used primer out of the bottom of each cartridge with a nail and inserted an electric fuse put together by Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice who had been stranded in Shelburne City on his way to look for a job in California. Once the fuse was in place, Nick then packed in charges of lead picrate and picric acid, the primary and booster explosive.

Nick put in some scrap paper to hold the explosive in place, then began packing in pieces of metal. Nuts, screws, bolts, nails, bits of pipe, old hacksaw blades, coins, more of the spent cartridges—everything the Escape Committee could scrounge, including their own wrist watches. Anything that might make a hole in a deputy if it was shot at him with sufficient force.

When he was done, he’d created homemade claymore mines, a more primitive version of the notoriously effective antipersonnel weapon that U.S. forces had used in Vietnam. Each mine, when planted in the ground with its open mouth pointed toward an enemy, would spray out its scrap metal in the direction of the foe like a huge shotgun, shredding flesh with hundreds of small projectiles. Nick had no certainty that any one mine would work—there were too many variables in these homebuilds, too much improvisation in the formulae, too many things that could have gone wrong in the assembly—but Nick hoped that enough mines would actually work to blanket the area occupied by the deputies when they next came into the camp.

There was a soft knock on one of the cookhouse doors. “Nick?” Manon’s voice. “You in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

“I’ll come out. Just a minute.”

He finished packing explosive into a coffee can, then rose and switched off the light. Blinking dazzled eyes, he groped for the door knob. He opened it carefully, then slid out of the cookhouse and closed the door behind him.

Fresh air. He took in a few deep, grateful breaths. He couldn’t see Manon in the starlight, but he felt his flesh prickle as he sensed her nearness.

“Nick, I’m worried about the children,” Manon said. “I haven’t seen Arlette since nightfall.”

“Where can she go?” Nick said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she whispered. “What if that boy’s talked her into going over the fence?” Nick breathed in the fresh air and considered this. “We haven’t heard shots, right?” he said. “So if they’ve gone, they’ve got clean away. We should be grateful they won’t be here for what will happen tomorrow.”

“Damn it, Nick!” Manon flared. “I want you to help me look! This is your family—this isn’t an army, this isn’t some soldier you’ve sent away on a mission; this is our baby we’re talking about.” Nick looked at her. “If they’ve escaped, it’s a good thing. Jason knows enough about survival and the river to get away if he can find a boat. If he can get to the authorities, he may be able to save our lives.” Nick’s eyes were adjusting slowly to the darkness. He saw Manon outlined before him, her tall, proud figure standing by the corner of the cookhouse. “And what if they haven’t tried their escape yet? What if they didn’t try to escape?” Manon demanded. “What if they’re together somewhere? Off in the night doing what they shouldn’t?”

Nick took in a breath of night air. “Good,” he decided.

“Good? Good? Is that what I heard you say?”

Nick licked his lips. “I wouldn’t want either of them to die without knowing love.” There was a moment of silence, and then Manon moaned. “Oh, my God.” He could hear the keen-edged grief suddenly enter her voice. “Oh, my God, that you would say they will die.” Nick’s head swam. “I’ll do my best to see that they don’t,” he said. He was tired, far too tired, to offer any degree of false reassurance.

“You’re blaming me. I know you are.”

Nick looked at Manon in surprise. “Why would I do that?” he asked.

“I know it’s true.”

“Daddy! Daddy!” Arlette’s urgent whisper cut through the night. “We found someone! Someone from the outside!”

Nick looked up in surprise as Arlette and Jason came out of the darkness followed by a strange figure, a bizarre bearded apparition, as if a scarecrow dressed in second-hand clothes had come suddenly to life. To his astonishment, Nick saw that the scarecrow was carrying a gun over one shoulder.

“Bonsoir,” the man said. “I am Cudgel, me. I come see how you get along.” Nick took Cudgel to the Escape Committee, and they set out to round up as many of the absent members as possible, along with any from the Camp Committee who could be found. Rumor spread swiftly, and a small crowd gathered, murmuring in the darkness as speculation spread among them. Cudgel seemed taken aback by all the sensation. Nick urgently whispered for everyone who didn’t have business here to get away, that such a crowd would only attract attention and, maybe, bullets. Reluctantly, the crowd melted into the darkness. Jason and Arlette remained, and Nick saw a defiant look in Jason’s eye. Nick decided he might as well let them stay. They’d found the man, after all, or he’d found them.

Manon stayed as well. Nick suspected that he would have a hard time prying her away from Arlette tonight, even if he were willing to try.

Cudgel sat down amid the remaining people, slid the rifle off his shoulder into his lap. He wore a bartered wide-brimmed hat decorated with feathers, and his long hair was so tangled that it hung down his back like a wiry horsehair mat. His beard, spread over his chest, looked like Spanish moss, and his eyes glimmered yellow in the night. He smelled as if he’d been wrapped in newspaper and buried for twenty years.

“How’d you get here?” someone on the committee asked. “How’d you get past the guards?”

“I move quiet, me,” Cudgel said. For all his outlandish appearance, his voice was soft, and he seemed a little intimidated by the presence of all these curious people. “You go hunting, you, you want nice goose pour le diner, you sho-nuff creep that goose. You no let that bull-goose see you, that goose, so you creep him goose.”

There was a moment of bewildered silence. It took Nick a moment to work out that “creeping the goose” was some-thing done while hunting, slipping past the sentinel geese to get within shooting distance of the flock.

“I’ve been in your house!” Jason said suddenly. “Down in the floodway, that treehouse!” Cudgel looked at him. “I live there sometime, mais oui. In spring I go for crawfish, me, in fall for shooting.” He smiled, yellow teeth flashing in the starlight. “Plenty birds there, come autumn.”

“Can you take some others out?” Nick asked. “Can you take some of the children to safety? Or some messengers who can try to find help?”

Cudgel thought about this for a long moment. “I consider that could be hard, me,” he said. “You got a man can creep the goose for true?”

That looked like to set off an argument about who in the camp was qualified, and who not, and since Nick doubted that anyone in the camp had ever crept a goose or was likely to try, he wanted to cut the discussion before it got started.

“Why did you come here, Mr. Cudgel?” he asked.

Cudgel frowned. “I see them kill, them trash,” Cudgel said. “Down Cattrall’s old cotton field, la has, by where I go fish sometime in bateau, that sixty acres down by the bayou. They line them up, them black boys, and—” He raised a hand, mimed a finger squeezing a trigger. Made a sound, psssh, like a shot being fired.

There was a horrified cry from Manon. Stifled groans from the others.

“C’est vrai,” Cudgel said. “So I think, why for them do that, them. Saw the Paxton boy, son of the High Sheriff, that Paxton boy, so I knew them be Kluxers. So I come the camp here, me, see what I find.” He smiled again. “Creep the goose, me. Talk you fellas.”

“We need help,” said a woman on the Camp Committee. “Can you help us? You’ve seen what they do. Can you tell someone?”

Cudgel looked thoughtful. “I pretty grand fella, me, down Plaquemines Parish. Everybody know Cudgel there. But here—” He shook his head. “Nobody know Cudgel. I don’t got but ten cents, me. Ain’t nobody listen Cudgel up here.”

The woman persisted. “Can you take someone out to speak to the locals? Or phone for help?”

“No phone here, no,” Cudgel said. “Not since the earthshake. But someone come out, some fella, come out the camp, I take him where you say, me.”

“The A.M.E. people used to come here, bring food and look after us. Brother Morris and his family, other people from the community. Then they stopped coming. And the—the hateful things—began to happen. Can you get word to Brother Morris?”

“Morris, he dead, that Morris.”

There was another collective sound from Cudgel’s audience, another half-gasp, half-groan.

“They say he been shot, Morris,” Cudgel said. “Say a man from the camp did the shooting, them. But I take a man wherever you say, me. I take him Morris wife, you want.”

“Yes. To Mrs. Morris. Yes, that would be good.”

Nick listened to this discussion with only partial attention. His mind was factoring Cudgel’s presence into his plans, this strange, stealthy swamp man who lived by his wits and by hunting, who carried a rifle over one shoulder and knew the country like the back of his hand.

“Mr. Cudgel,” he said, “I think we may have to fight, whether you get a chance to talk to Mrs. Morris or not. If we don’t fight to defend ourselves, we may have more people taken from the camp and killed before any help can come. You have a gun, you hunt and trap—can you help us fight?” There was a sudden silence in the small group. Cudgel considered Nick’s words, then nodded. “I do what you want, me. But if you can fight, what for you here? You got guns, you men, why never you shoot a mess o’ Kluxer ’long time back?”

“We only have a few handguns,” Nick said. “Everything else was taken. But I’m making other weapons—claymore mines, if you know what those are.”

“He quoi!” Cudgel said in surprise, and a moment later a sudden broad smile lit his face. He held up a hand, thumb crooked over his fist, and he pressed the thumb down. “Took,” he said, a little falsetto birdlike sound.

Nick realized, to his astonishment, that Cudgel was miming his thumb pressing the button of a detonator.

“I know them claymores, me,” Cudgel said. “I serve in Army, fight them V.C. I fight in Delta, me, I fight in Vinh Long, in Can Tho.” He raised his fist again, crooked his thumb. “Took. No more V.C. I creep them Congs, them V.C, just like I creep the goose. I get my name in Delta, me.” I get my name in Delta. Realization flooded Nick’s mind as he looked into Cudgel’s beaming face.

“Your name isn’t Cudgel,” he said suddenly. “It’s Cudjo, isn’t it?” The man nodded. “Cudjo, c’est moi. I get the name in Vietnam, me.”

“That’s an African name,” Nick said. “A warrior name.”

Pride straightened Cudjo’s shoulders, glimmered in his yellow eyes. “C’est vrai,” he said. “I a warrior, me. Get in trouble down Plaquemines Parish, come here to live. Never touch them liquors and drugs no more, for true.”

Astonished hope beat in Nick’s heart. “You can help us fight, can’t you?” he said.

“Si, with them claymores.” He took the rifle gun from his lap and held it out to Nick. “You take my gun, you. Kill them Kluxers. I help.”

Nick took the gun, looked at it in surprise. “I’m not very good with a rifle,” he said. “But I’ll make sure it goes to someone who can use it.”

“Take these shells, you.” Cudjo dug in the pockets of his old coat, dropped cartridges into Nick’s hand. Little ones, he realized, .22s.

“I don’t want to leave you without a rifle,” Nick said. “I’m sure you can use this better than anyone.”

“That my squirrel gun, there,” Cudjo said. “Only a two-two. When I come back tomorrow, me, I bring my deer gun, yes? Thirty-ought-six.”

Nick was almost blinded by sudden possibility. Even Cudjo’s little .22 would make a difference to the camp. Fired from cover it could make the deputies keep their heads down, if nothing else. And when Cudjo returned with his deer rifle, his .30-’06, he could do a lot of damage from the cover of the woods, and with reasonable safety to himself.

Eagerness seized Nick. “Let me tell you what I’m planning,” he said. He unrolled his entire plan for Cudjo, while the woodsman listened, nodded, and asked questions. Then Cudjo analyzed Nick’s plan, took it apart, and reassembled it in an altered, more perfected form.

“Yes,” Nick said. “Yes, I see.”

“Kill them Kluxers, take them Kluxers out, before you push the people on, yes? You no run them into guns, you.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Direction you want run, that depend. No use planning too much, plans go to hell when shooting starts.” No plan survives contact with the enemy, Nick thought. His father had said that. “I understand,” he said.

“Can you take the women and kids to where it will be safe?” Nick asked.

“I try, me.”

“But what about getting someone out?” someone else asked. “What about Mrs. Morris?”

“You give me someone, you, I take him,” said Cudjo.

“It’s important that Cudjo be there with his rifle,” Nick said.

“If we can get word out, there won’t be a need for guns.”

Nick considered an argument in favor of keeping Cudjo near the camp instead of running errands. Cudjo was an asset; he was the most hopeful thing that had occurred in the camp’s entire miserable history. Sneaking someone away with him, someone who might not be so good at creeping the goose as Cudjo, seemed an unnecessary risk to Nick’s asset. And sending Cudjo off on an errand to Mrs. Morris’s house, when he might be needed in the camp, seemed dangerous.

But on the other hand, the idea of contacting the outside was seductive. It meant no one inside the camp had to take any risks, or fight other battles. All they had to wait was for Mrs. Morris to call in the U.S. Cavalry. Nick could see how the others were attracted by the idea, how much they wanted to escape this situation without having to fight a war.

“Listen,” Nick said. “We don’t want to risk Cudjo. We don’t want to risk him in the company of someone who’s less expert at—” his tongue stumbled “—at creeping the goose.” Whispers flurried at him in urgent debate. The only person who held Nick’s point of view was Tareek Hall, the conspiracy theorist, who said that there wasn’t any point in sending for help, that the authorities were all part of the conspiracy anyway. But Tareek and Nick were clearly outnumbered.

“Send Cudjo out first,” Nick finally said. “Your messenger can go next. That way if he’s—” He was about to say killed, then changed it. “If he’s caught,” he said, “then Cudjo won’t be caught with him.” There was more whispered debate, but Cudjo ended the debate himself. “I reckon Nick right, me. I be better alone, for true.”

The committee members chose one of their number as their messenger, a thirtyish woman named Nora. She was small and nimble, had taught gymnastics, and it was hoped that speed and agility would aid her escape. The fact that she was a woman might make her less threatening to the locals she would approach for help. She listened eagerly when Cudjo gave her instructions—vague hints, really—for avoiding the guards’ attention. Nick approached the chain link with Cudjo, then hesitated. “I shouldn’t come to the fence,” he said. “I might be seen.”

“Can’t see nothing, them guards,” Cudjo said. “That light along the fence, it make dark behind. Can you see the woods from here, Nick? They should point their lights into the camp, those Kluxers, they want to see in here.”

Nick gazed past the fence in surprise. Cudjo was right. The spotlights, trained parallel to the fence, created a comparative darkness on either side. The pathway along the fence was brightly lit, but the camp itself was shrouded, and so were the woods on the other side of the lane.

“You kiss you lady for me, yes?” Cudjo said. His yellow teeth flashed for a moment, and then he stepped from Nick’s presence and was gone.

Nick stood in silent surprise, his heart hammering. For a long moment his eyes searched the darkness, and then he saw Cudjo crouched just inside the fence, his big hat slowly scanning left and right as he observed the guards. Then there was swift movement as he lay flat and rolled under the fence into the tall, untrimmed grass that grew beneath the wire.

For an instant, Cudjo was standing in the light outside the wire, frozen as if motionless. Then the man was gone.

Nick realized he was holding his breath, and he let the breath go hissing into the night. Creeping the goose. It had seemed uncanny, magical.

“My turn,” Nora muttered. Her eyes were wide, and there was a tremor in her voice.

“You don’t have to go,” Nick said. Nora was brave, he thought, she was lithe and fast. But she wasn’t magical. She wasn’t Cudjo.

Nora gave him a look. “Yes, I do.”

Nick saw her do as Cudjo had done, crouch low by the wire while she looked left and right at the deputies. Then she was down, rolling under the wire. And up, arms and legs pumping as she ran for the woods.

There was a sudden boom, the blast of a shotgun stunning the night, and Nora fell onto the earth, a sudden, limp tangle of awkward limbs. Nick’s stunned retinas retained an afterimage of bright blood staining the air.

He heard groans, cries from the people around him.

There was another shot, just to make certain Nora was dead.

Then more shots, this time into the wire. Shot whined off the chain link, strange Doppler noises. Nick was on the ground then, crawling into cover, so he never saw the deputy walk up to Nora, pull his pistol, and shoot her in the head.

Nick lay in the night, pulse throbbing in his skull. His nerves leaped with every sound. Finally he rose and made his silent way to the cookhouse, to finish building his bombs.

THIRTY-FOUR

Flash. Flash. Flash. The laser pulsed on Jessica’s retina.

“There.” The doctor’s voice. “Can you see anything now?”

Jessica covered her right eye. The doctor’s face floated toward her out of the darkness. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know whether to be hopeful or not. “But it’s like tunnel vision.”

“I’ve just started.” Jessica lay back in the padded head-rest and felt the doctor lean over her. “I saw you on television the other day,” the doctor said. “With the President.”

“Yes.” Flash.

“What’s he really like?” Flash flash.

“I don’t know him well. I’ve only met him a couple times.” She smiled. “But he did appoint me to my job, so I think it’s obvious that he’s a great statesman.”

Flash. Flash flash flash.

“I voted for him,” the doctor said. “But it was just a stab in the dark, you know. You can’t really tell with those people.”

The first time Jessica had met the President, all she had felt was the man’s charisma. When he looked at you, your insides went all warm and tingly. You wanted to roll on your back and have him rub your tummy. Even for someone as professionally accustomed to alpha males as Jessica, the effect had been surprising.

All big politicians were like that, though. Jessica had met a few. They all carried that enormous top-dog energy. The lucky ones could project it on television.

This last time, though, the meeting on Poinsett Island, the President’s affect had been different. It wasn’t so much as that the glow wasn’t there, but that it had gone somewhere that Jessica couldn’t reach. Though there was nothing Jessica could put her finger on, she had the sense that, at least part of the time, the commander-in-chief wasn’t home.

Hey, she told herself. Give the guy a break. He’s just lost his wife. Flash. Flash flash.

She had lost the last of the vision in her left eye on the return helicopter trip to Vicksburg. The doctor, though, had been encouraging when he spoke to Pat on the telephone. Jessica had probably detached a retina. It sounded frightening—and Jessica was very frightened—but the doctor assured Pat that the retina could most likely be tacked back on with a laser.

To Jessica’s surprise, she didn’t have to check into a hospital. Unless there was some complication, the procedure could be done in the doctor’s office.

And that meant she wouldn’t have to be absent from her command for more than few hours. By the time the paperwork for the procedure caught up with the Army—and that would take a long while, given the current emergency—she would have been back at her work for weeks, if not months. Which meant that it would be far too late to question her presence at her job.

Flash flash flash. “The vitreal humor,” the doctor said conversationally, “that’s the jelly in the center of your eye. Well, it was probably pulling away from the retina—it happens to most of us as we get older. But in your case the vitreal humor pulled the retina away with it. Probably the earthquake tore everything loose.”

“Not the earthquake. It was a bumpy helicopter ride.”

The doctor was amused. “We don’t get many of those,” he said.

Flash flash flash.

“How’s that?”

Jessica blinked cautiously at the world. Reality seemed more or less intact.

“I can see,” she said in surprise.

“You may have lost some detail,” the doctor said. “Time will tell.”

“I—thank you, doctor. Thank you.”

“Lie back and let me take another tour of your eye,” the doctor said. “I want to check and make certain I haven’t missed something.”

“Certainly.” Jessica leaned back on the padded headrest.

“And another thing,” the doctor said. “No more helicopter rides.” Jessica felt herself smile. She had got here on a helicopter, a smoother ride than driving the torn road between Vicksburg and Jackson.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

“Okay,” said Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice. “I’ve made this double safe. To set off the claymores, you’ve got to throw both these switches, right?”

“Right,” Nick said. He bit his lip, looked at the wires. “What if they cut power to the camp?” Armando gave a laugh. “They can’t. Look at the power line. They run their own floodlights off the same power source.”

Nick nodded. “Good.”

“So you throw the switches. And then all the claymores go at once. Boom.”

“Boom,” Nick agreed.

Nick blinked gum from his eyes. The sun was just beginning to rise behind the trees east of the camp. In the last hour of darkness he had buried his mines—he’d ended up with eleven—leaving nothing but the detonator wires sticking out of the ground. Armando had crawled after Nick and connected the wires to his homemade control board, then covered the gear with grass or bits of matting or plastic sheeting.

“I hope this works,” Armando said. “I’m from the Dominican Republic, man. I don’t understand this crazy scene at all. I keep thinking I’m here by accident.”

“We’re all here by accident,” Nick said.

“I guess so.”

Weariness dragged at Nick’s thoughts. He hadn’t slept at all during the night, and only fitfully on the boat the night before. The thought that he might have forgotten something important beat at his brain like a weak, insistent pulse.

“I’m going to talk to the committee,” he said. “Then I’m going to try to get some rest. Make sure you wake me if the bad guys come.”

“You bet.”

Nick dragged himself to the pecan tree, told the combined Escape and Camp Committees that he’d finished his job. “I’m getting a little worried about security,” he said. “What I’ve been doing isn’t exactly secret. Probably most of the camp knows about it by now.” He rubbed his weary eyes. “What if someone decides he can sell the information to the coneheads?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” someone on the Camp Committee said. “They aren’t going to let anyone out of here.”

“People don’t always think straight,” Nick said. “All you need is one parent panicked for the safety of a baby, or an alcoholic who will do anything for a drink…”

“Or a white man who got put in here by mistake,” said Tareek Hall. “Or who was planted in here as a spy by the conspiracy. Or some nigger traitor seduced by the conspiracy, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.”

The others were too tired to argue, but they took Nick’s point. “The deputies already said nobody but the Camp Committee can come near the fence,” someone said. “All we have to do is enforce that from our side.”

Tareek began to say something about microphones planted by the conspiracy, and laser beams in orbital satellites that could make people behave crazy, but there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do about that. “You people have to organize the fighters,” Nick said. “I can’t do that—I don’t know the people. You have to find someone to enforce the rules. And you’ve got to do it yesterday.”

“We got motivation,” one man said. He pointed to the fence, where Nora’s body still lay. “We know what happens if anything goes wrong.”

Nick could barely breathe in the hot and humid air. His mind swam. “I’m going to try to rest,” he said, and left them to their arguments.

He’d done what he could. Maybe later he’d think of something else to do, but right now he was too weary to think of anything but sleep.

He went into the storage shed where he’d found the fertilizer and motor oil and lay on the soft, oil-soaked planks. Sleep took him in an instant.

Nick was vaguely aware of Arlette waking him with some breakfast on a plastic plate, but he was less interested in food than in sleep. When he next woke the sun was high, and his body was soaked with sweat where it lay against the floor-boards.

They didn’t come, he thought vaguely. The deputies had not come. No one had discussed this possibility. He sat up, and pain hammered through his stiffened body. He saw the plastic plate where Arlette had left it. It held two of the strange greasy crackers and a small mound of an opalescent gelatinous matter. He pushed the stuff around with one of the crackers and concluded that the mysterious substance was made from powdered eggs, but lacked the usual yellow food coloring that turned them into a reasonable facsimile of fresh, scrambled eggs.

Nick scooped some onto a cracker and took a bite. The taste wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good, either. He ate it all.

He wandered out of the cookhouse and saw people lining up for lunch. He blinked in the sun. The deputies hadn’t come. He had been so certain that the deputies would arrive that morning, would enter the camp and drive the refugees like cattle to the slaughterhouse.

It looked as if they would be given a breathing space. He should check all the work he’d done that night, make sure there wasn’t something he’d overlooked in the darkness.

The plan could be refined. Everybody could be made to better understand their roles, to understand the necessity of what Nick needed them to do.

He set about the task.

Jason gazed at the woman’s body lying beyond the fence. One-eighty-six, he thought. Murder. Stars eddied in his head. He could feel his breakfast surge in his stomach, and he swallowed hard. He crouched on his heels on the grassy earth and looked at the body. He had seen so many bodies, he thought, bodies drifting down the river, blasted by bullets in Frankland’s camp, bodies whimpering life away like Miss Deena, now this woman one-eighty-six’d by the guardians of this prison. The world was probably paved with bodies.

And not just the world, he corrected, but the universe. Sometimes stars blew up. His throat ached, the pain greater than yesterday. Awareness of the precarious fragility of existence filled his mind. The woman had thrown her own existence away, deliberately tempted death by walking into the lane of death outside the camp. People said her name was Nora. Nobody seemed to know her last name.

Half her name, forgotten already.

Jason had not seen the killing. When Nick, Cudjo, and the others began to argue their various plans back and forth, Manon had firmly drawn Arlette and Jason away from the circle and brought them to a place where they could sleep under one of the cotton wagons. Manon also made a point of sleeping between Arlette and Jason, keeping them apart during the night. Her determination made Jason smile quietly in the darkness as he drifted to sleep.

The shots had torn Jason from sleep. Manon, beside him, woke with a cry, and Jason, in sudden fear, had put his hand over Manon’s mouth and whispered “Be quiet!” in an urgent voice. He could see the starlight glimmering on her eyes as she submitted.

Don’t let them hear you, don’t let them see you, don’t become a target. A child, powerless by nature, knows these rules by instinct.

Nora had disobeyed the rules and died.

What did you die for? Jason thought at the corpse. Life was a flash in the darkness, brief enough without throwing it away. Life was the only thing life had.

A modest aftershock trembled in the earth for a moment, then passed. Jason looked away from the corpse as he caught movement in the tail of his eye, Arlette walking toward him. That’s what you die for, he thought with sudden certainty.

You die for what you love.

Jason rose and kissed Arlette hello. He put his arms around her. “How was Nick?” he asked, then winced at the pain in his throat.

“Asleep. I left his breakfast with him.” She looked at the body beyond the fence, then turned her head abruptly. “Let’s go someplace else,” she said in a small voice.

There’s no place else we can go, he almost said. But he said “All right” instead, and took Arlette’s hand as they walked away from Nora, toward the front of the camp. There was an undercurrent of excitement, people meeting in small groups. Jason saw some half-concealed weapons, clubs and knives. Nobody had included Jason in any of these schemes as yet. He and Arlette and Manon had a rendezvous, a place under one of the cotton wagons where they were supposed to meet in the event of an emergency. Other than that, Jason was at liberty, he supposed, to make his own plans, if he could work something out.

He could still try to escape tonight. Cudjo showed it could be done.

But Nora showed how it couldn’t. He had to think about that.

He and Arlette paused in the shade of one of the camp’s pecan trees. He kissed her again, looked into her somber brown eyes.

I would die for you, he wanted to say. Instead he tilted his head a little to the left, to ease the pain in his throat, and said, “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay.” She shrugged. “Shots, bodies.” Anger hardened her face. “I’m beginning to understand why you’re mad at God.”

“I’m not anymore,” Jason said.

She looked at him.

“The universe is too big to be angry at it,” he said. “It’s like being mad at this tree for being a pecan instead of a magnolia. It’s a waste of our time.”

She glanced over one shoulder in the direction of the gate. Her eyes hardened. “Is it a waste to hate a murderer for being a murderer?” she said.

“Murderers are different,” Jason said. “They’re more our size.” Arlette gave a little sniff, tossed her head. “They’re smaller,” she said. “Much smaller.”

“Yes,” Jason said. He glanced over the camp, the people in their small, hurried groups. “I was surprised that you or your mom didn’t talk to Cudjo in French.”

A smile touched her lips. “I think his French was probably as funky as his English. I’ve learned French French, not Cajun, and probably Cudjo speaks a pretty strange version of Cajun, at that.”

“Captain Joe could have talked to him, I guess.”

“From what I heard of him over the radio, he probably could.”

He took her hands. “I’m glad we had a chance to be together last night, before Cudjo turned up.”

“And before my momma came and separated us.” She smiled.

“I don’t think she’s looking at us now,” Jason said.

“No. I don’t think so.”

They kissed. Arlette leaned back against the tree. Jason pressed himself to her. Her presence whirled in his senses.

“God damn, girl,” said a voice. Jason turned, saw the three boys Arlette had spoken to the day before.

“What are you doing with this boy?” Sekou said to Arlette. “You think his color’s catching? You think those pecker-woods won’t hurt you, you kiss him hard enough?”

Fury flashed through Jason. He faced the other boys, fists clenched by his side. Then he saw that Sekou carried a heavy stick, just hanging casually against his leg, and that the boy called Raymond had a hammer stuck through his belt, and he took a step back.

“Why don’t you mind your own business,” Arlette said.

“It’s your business to be with black people,” Sekou said. “You’re disrespecting the race.”

“Sisters gotta support the brothers,” Raymond said.

Arlette looked at them. “Even when they’re being as charming as you?” she asked.

“We’re gonna fight for you,” Sekou said, “so why are you hangin’ with the little kid? Jason—” His tone turned mocking. “Jason! What kind of trifling Yuppie-ass name is that?” Jason considered kicking the nearest one in the crotch and then running for it. He thought that probably some adult would call the situation to order before he got his head beaten in. Anger flashed from Arlette’s eyes. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?” she said.

“Scandalous-ass bitch upset, now,” said Raymond.

“Jason saved my life,” Arlette said. “He saved my whole family from a boat full of crazy men. You want some respect, you go do something useful instead of fronting on this crap.” Raymond looked at Jason from under half-closed eyelids. “You better watch it with the white boy,” he said. “They set up a nigga every time.”

His pulse throbbed in Jason’s ears. He felt his toes curl in his Nikes. Getting the range on Raymond’s crotch.

“Jason’s black enough to be here!” Arlette said. “He’s black enough for them!” She flung a pointing finger toward the deputies. Arlette’s eyes flared. “He’s black enough to die with you!” The others fell silent. Arlette glared at them for a moment, then took Jason’s arm and steered him away.

“‘Scandalous-ass bitch’!” she fumed. “You heard what they called me?” Jason’s mouth was dry. Adrenaline sang in his veins. He’d been a half-second from violence, and it would probably have been violence inflicted mostly on him.

“Thanks for sticking up for me,” he croaked through his injured throat.

“You stuck up for me when it counted,” she said.

Jason strove for words to express his surging feelings, the thoughts that whirled in his head. Found himself baffled. “This race thing,” he said finally. “It’s really fucked.” The diarrhea at Clarendon was responding to treatment. Dr. Patel went home for his first sleep in days, and Omar returned to his office. Omar had ordered David to stay away from Woodbine Corners—had sent him out patrolling with Merle, in fact, on the other end of the parish, down by the Bayou Bridge. Merle and David were the two key people he absolutely wanted away from the A.M.E. camp. He wasn’t going to go anywhere near the camp himself, especially not today. Deniability was an absolute necessity. Containment. That’s what Omar was after. Build a nice fence around everything. Omar’s head throbbed. A sharp icepick pain flamed beneath his sternum. Sometimes it seemed he could barely breathe.

It was ten in the morning. Knox and Jedthus and their people should be about their work by now. Work he did not, officially, know about.

That’s why he was surprised when Jedthus walked into his office. Omar looked up in surprise. “What’s going on?” he said.

Jedthus carefully closed the door before speaking. “We’ve been ready to go,” he said. “You know, do the necessary at the camp. But Knox didn’t turn up. He was supposed to join us at eight o’clock.”

“Says which?” Omar was thunderstruck. “He’s gone?”

“He’s not gone, he’s asleep.”

“What?”

“I went to where he’s been staying—Sunny Spence’s old storefront, you know—and there he was. I tried to wake him up, but he just rolled over and went back to sleep.”

“Is he sick?”

“He’s—” Jedthus hesitated. “You’d best see for yourself, Omar.” Sunny Spence’s Dress Shoppe and Gifts, on Beauregard Street, had been closed for five years. No other business had wanted to rent the building, so the place had remained boarded up till the parish, under emergency decrees, had opened the place to house refugees. It had survived the quakes remarkably well for a building that hadn’t been maintained in ages. Omar had given it to the Crusaders as a crash pad. Knox was asleep, lying atop a down sleeping bag behind the counter. Clothing and sleeping bags belonging to the other Crusaders lay around the store. A pistol, a shotgun, and a deputy’s badge sat atop the counter, within arm’s reach of where Knox lay. Knox wore only his undershorts and was curled up on his side in a fetal position.

“Hey Micah,” Omar bent down—the movement sent pain ringing through his head—and shook Knox’s shoulder. “Micah, it’s time to get up.” His nose wrinkled at Knox’s acidic body odor. “Man,” he said, “this boy needs a bath.”

Omar shook Knox again. Knox gave a kind of sigh, and then his eyelids cracked open. “Oh, hi Omar,” he said, then rolled on his back, smiled a little, and went back to sleep.

“Son of a bitch,” Omar said. He straightened, and looked in stunned amazement at the needle tracks that ran up and down Knox’s arms.

“God damn,” he said.

“Yeah,” Jedthus said. “We got us a junkie, Omar. You figure he’s OD’d?” No wonder he always wore long sleeves, Omar thought. And the way he smelled—that was the drugs coming out in his sweat.

Fury sang through Omar’s nerves. “What’s he using?” he demanded. It had to be an upper, from the way Knox was always jumping around. “Damn it,” Omar said, “I searched this boy!” Omar tore through Knox’s belongings—upended the toiletry bag, flipped through the pages of Hunter, tore the lap-top computer from its foam packing—before he thought to open the big, heavy 500-count bottle of aspirin that had fallen out among the toiletries, and shake out the Crusader’s drugs. There was a set of needles and a syringe—the works were real doctor’s issue, not the sort found on the street and made from an eyedropper—along with a fire-blackened spoon and a baggie of brown substance, presumably heroin. There was another bag of pills: black mollies, methedrine. A third baggie with a minute amount of white powder remaining. Omar opened the baggie, tasted the substance. Crystal meth.

Speedballs, Omar thought. The classic speedball was a mixture of heroin and cocaine, but working-class stiffs used heroin and methedrine instead. You could go for days on the stuff until you hit the wall and crashed. The meth was acidic and ravaged the veins, and that would have produced Knox’s impressive rows of needle tracks in fairly short order. Though it was possible he shot only the heroin, and snorted or swallowed the speed.

“Damn it,” Omar said. “Why didn’t I see this?” Knox’s fidgeting, his slapping out rhythms on his knees or his chair, the way he kept talking, the words spilling out, the theories and the diatribes and the history and the fantasy, all run together, all confused…

Knox was deep in drug psychosis, wandering around the country, jabbering about revolution and race war while he robbed banks and spent the money on scag and crank. Omar wondered if the other Crusaders were junkies as well, if this was some kind of heavily armed, mobile drug posse. Jesus. David had been around these people. David had fallen for their line, had wanted to join them in their underground, follow this drug-addled psychopath as he lurched from one crime to the next.

“What do we do, Omar?” Jedthus demanded. “We can’t wake him up. We can’t arrest him.” He paced around the little store. “Do I go back to the camp? Do I do the—the operation without him?” Omar stepped away from Knox. He wanted a breath of fresh air, wanted to get Knox’s stink out of his nostrils.

If Knox wasn’t present to run the operation at the camp, Omar thought, then Jedthus was in charge. Omar, however, wasn’t inclined to trust Jedthus’s judgment. The boy was on the right side, but bone stupid. Yet if Jedthus wasn’t in charge, then Omar was in charge. And if Omar was in charge, then deniability went out the window.

Besides, he wanted Knox in control of eliminating that camp. Even if Knox was a psycho, he’d get the job done.

Knox was a weapon, Omar reminded himself. Made just for Spottswood Parish. And when his job was over—when the weapon had been fired—there would no longer be any reason for him to exist. Omar took a breath. “Wait for Knox to wake up. Bring him some coffee and some food.”

“But Omar,” Jedthus said. “He’s OD’d!”

“He’s crashed,” Omar said. “Speed freaks do that. They run for days, but they can’t live without sleep forever.” He looked around the Shoppe, at the sleeping bags, blankets, pallets, and belongings of the other Crusaders scattered around the dusty floor.

“Do you think they’re all users?” Omar asked.

Jedthus thought about it. “They’re not all as speedy as Micah, but sometimes they’re hyped. Yeah. We’re all on twelve-hour shifts; I wondered how they held up so well.”

Omar walked to Jedthus, put a hand on his shoulder, and lowered his voice. “These people are not reliable,” he said. “Knox is a psycho. I wouldn’t trust any of them behind a dime.” Jedthus nodded. “Yeah. I understand, Omar.”

“These kids are going to crack sooner or later,” Omar said. “And that will be bad for us. Real bad. So just be ready—we’ll have to do something about it.”

There was a moment of silence while Jedthus processed this. Then he licked his lips. “You mean—”

“I mean that action will be taken. But not now. We’ve got to deal with the camp first. Okay?”

“Yeah.” Jedthus tipped his hat back, passed a hand over his forehead. “Yeah, I understand.” Omar moved back to the table and began to stuff Knox’s paraphernalia back in the aspirin bottle. “For right now,” he said. “Just get Knox on his feet. Give him enough privacy to pop his pills or whatever. Then get out to the camp and do the job.”

Jedthus’s eyes turned hard. “I understand,” he said.

“I’m going back to the courthouse and cover y’all’s asses with the authorities, just like I planned.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“No. I’ll walk. You stay here with Knox.”

Omar stepped out of the shop and a lance of sunlight drove straight through his brain. He swayed on his feet.

This is going to be over soon, he told himself. Over.

And then he’d feel better.

“Head for that gate,” Nick said. “Fast as you can. Stop only to pick up guns and ammunition. Once you’re out, get in among the cars. Some of you are going to have to run for those roadblocks.” The young men looked up at him, nodded gravely.

“Don’t stop,” Nick said again. “We’re counting on you.”

I am telling them how to commit suicide, Nick thought. He wondered if they knew that. He had a military force of sorts, composed of almost all the able men in the camp, along with some of the women, all recruited overnight by the various camp committees. Nick was a kind of general, at least insofar as they all were supposed to be following his plan. They were divided into three groups. The Warriors—younger men and women, mostly—would hold off the bad guys while the others made their escape. The Home Guard—older but able-bodied—were supposed to look after the women, children, and old people, and escort them to a place of safety while the Warriors held off any pursuit. The third group were the ones Nick had called the Samurai, though he privately thought of them as the Kamikaze. They were the ones who were trusted with the camp’s meager store of firearms, because they professed themselves good with guns.

Their job was to kill guards. They said they were ready to do this. The odds said they would probably die trying.

It was small comfort that they had all volunteered.

“Don’t forget,” Nick said. “Keep moving. Don’t get bogged down. We’re counting on you.” His father would know just how to do this, Nick thought. His father had been trained in how to send people to their deaths. How to act. How to think about it all.

Just thinking about what was going to happen to his little army made Nick tremble at the knees. He’d talked to all of them, he thought. The afternoon sun was burning down on him and making his head throb. He needed something to drink. The deputies still hadn’t come.

His father would quote Sun Tzu, he thought. Chinese military strategy was one of his passions. Cold analysis, life and death, marches and battles, but written all in poetry.

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the zenith of achievement. His father loved that passage. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the zenith of achievement. We’ve already lost the chance not to fight, Nick thought. And one victory in one battle is all I ask. Okay, Sun? he thought. Okay, Dad?

Nick gave his doomed soldiers the floppy-wristed home-boy handshake—My God, he thought at the touch of palm on palm, we are surely going to die—and then he hobbled to the cookhouse. Pain throbbed through his kidney at every step. Drank his glass of water, then poured another glass over his head in hopes it would cool him off.

He shook his head, and droplets of water showered the ground around him. The air hung torrid and oppressive, so sultry that Nick felt as if he were moving under water. One of the workers in the cookhouse gave him a cracker and a scoop of rice, leftovers from the noon meal that he’d missed, and he ate them.

“Excuse me?”

Nick turned to the speaker, a youngish white man with short-cropped hair bleached white by the sun. Nick blinked at the strange figure. One day in the camp, he thought, and now the very fact of a Caucasian seemed odd. The man held out his hand.

“Jack Taylor,” he said. Nick shook the hand.

“Nick Ruford.”

Taylor’s green eyes looked sidelong at the others in the camp. “Listen,” he said. “I know something’s up. And I want to be a part of it. You know what I’m saying?”

Nick looked at him warily. “Why ask me?”

“Because it’s centered around you.” Taylor licked his lips. “Look,” he said. “Nobody will talk to me. And I understand why, okay. Nobody trusts me. But listen—” A dogged look entered his eyes. “My wife is black. My step-kid is black. My children are half-black. They’re all in here with me. And you’d have to be crazy to think I wouldn’t fight for them. I want to fight for them. I want to be a part of what’s happening. Can you fix it?”

Nick thought for a moment. Taylor was sincere, he saw, and angry. But this fight, when it happened, was going to be a mob scene, a giant gang rumble. With the exception of a deputy or two, nobody was wearing uniforms on either side. In a mess like that, that blond head might be all anyone would see. Taylor could have both sides trying to kill him.

Nick looked for him. “How many kids do you have?”

“Two. And my step-daughter. They’re all here.”

Nick took a breath. “Jack,” he said, “the best thing you can do in this situation is stick with your family. Try and keep them safe.” And let them keep you safe, he added mentally.

“Damn it!” Taylor said. “Why don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you fine,” Nick said. “But when these people get out past that fence they are going to turn into a mob, and it’s the mob I don’t trust.”

“I want to fight!”

Nick put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor shrugged it off. Nick sighed.

“Look, I can’t give you orders. If you want to do something, listen for orders for the Home Guard. Somebody says Home Guard do this, you do it. But wait till the mob calms down first, or you’ll get lynched.”

Taylor turned and stalked away without a further word. Nick looked after him, sighed. Lost one, he thought, and the fight hasn’t even started. What else haven’t I done right?

Nick found Manon sitting on the ground in the shade of one of the cotton wagons. He squatted by her and asked her how she was.

“All right. This is where the children and I agreed to meet when—” She hesitated. “When whatever is going to happen happens.”

“That’s good. Keep together.”

She looked at him. There was a distant, mournful look in her eyes, the eyes of a woman much older than her years. He realized with surprise that she resembled her aunt Penelope, her father’s half-sister, who had been twenty years older.

“I keep thinking about Frankland,” Manon said. “About Rails Bluff. It was crazy there, but—” She bit her lip. “Frankland was different from these people. He was kind of goofy. He meant well. He wanted to build Heaven there, in his camp.” She shook her head. “These people here, they set out to build Hell. And they built it. And nobody’s even noticed.”

Nick took her hand. “We’ll make people notice,” he said.

“I keep thinking about my family,” Manon said. “We left them in Rails Bluff. And we thought we were the lucky ones.”

“Baby,” Nick said, “one of those deputies—the little one who shot Miss Deena, the skinhead—he’s got your Gros-Papa’s watch.”

She looked at him in shock. “What?” she stammered. “What are you saying?”

“Some of these people, they must have been traveling around in all this chaos. Robbing people, and—” He shook his head. “They must have been in Toussaint before they came here.” Manon’s chin began to tremble. She clutched at his hand. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “Oh, Nick, you’ve got to stop them.”

“Yes,” he patted her hand. “Yes, I’ll stop them. I’ll stop them for you.”

“We got this by express,” said Nelda. She had a strange, expectant smile on her face. “I think you’ll like it,” she said. Jessica put her cup of coffee on its desk, took the air envelope from her secretary, hefted the envelope. It was surprisingly heavy and obviously had a lot of paper in it. Jessica sighed—she’d just had her eye repaired that morning and wanted to avoid too much reading—and then she slid out the contents.

A magazine slipped through her fingers and dropped into her lap. Her own face scowled back at her from under the brim of her helmet. “Oh, my God,” Jessica said.

It was a special edition of Newsweek dealing with the quakes and their aftermath. A particularly determined-looking photo of Jessica was on the cover, glaring at the camera through her black eye. The photo seemed to have been taken at the ceremony and press conference at Poinsett Island. general j.c. frazetta, it said on the magazine cover, america’s river warrior.

“Oh, my God,” Jessica repeated.

“That nice Mr. Sutter wrote it.” Nelda beamed.

Jessica stared at the picture of herself in shock. I need to lose ten pounds fast, she thought.

“Which one was Sutter?” she asked.

“He was here for several days, remember? He talked to all of us about you.”

“Was he the one with the hair?”

“The hair. The face. The body. You know.”

Apparently Jessica didn’t know. She was surprised at herself. She’d been so busy she hadn’t even had the chance to ogle a good-looking guy.

She’d probably seen only the press pass, and then did her best to politely ignore him. She opened the magazine and scanned at random. “Frazetta’s lucid briefings,” it said, “did much to clarify the situation in the Delta during the days following the first May quake.” So that’s what they did, Jessica thought in surprise. She’d had the impression she’d been talking to a roomful of deranged, bloodthirsty, invincibly ignorant maniacs who insisted on interpreting her every word in the most sensational, dangerous, provocative way possible. An opinion that seemed borne out by the next part of the article that fell beneath Jessica’s eye.

“Sources report that Frazetta, inspired by her vision of turning Poinsett Landing into an island, ran over all opposition at one of her daily council briefings and successfully commandeered the resources to carry out her project.” Untrue! she thought. No one had objected to the project at all, at least not to her. And the project had been Larry Hallock’s idea, not hers.

She briefly meditated a letter to Newsweek on this matter.

While gratified by your otherwise flattering portrait, I beg to state…

“Such steamroller tactics,” the article continued, “were unlikely to work with the President, whose defenses were put to the test when Frazetta personally phoned him to insist on the controversial evacuation of the Lower Mississippi…”

“Hey, babe,” said Pat as he came into Jessica’s tent. “I heard you got a present.”

“It has a nice picture of you,” Jessica said, presenting her husband his picture, which showed him with the banjo he’d brought to the camp.

His eyes narrowed critically. “Do I really look that old? I look like a geezer.”

“In my eyes you’re forever young,” Jessica said, and glanced down again at the article to read the summary of her “most controversial” decision: the intervention at Rails Bluff. There was a sidebar concerning the reactions of unnamed but highly miffed Justice Department officials, who claimed that the situation in Rails Bluff clearly called for Justice Department expertise, that the use of the military in a situation of this sort was a dangerous precedent.

Oh yeah, Jessica thought. Like the Justice Department could even get their people to Rails Bluff. We’d have to carry them in our helicopters, she thought, and hold their hands all the way to the camp. And even then they’d bungle it.

Still, she would have to bear the Justice Department in mind. Her superiors had warned her that the Civil Rights division was looking into her handling of the matter, in case she’d violated peoples’ rights while freeing them from gun-toting lunatics, but she’d been too busy to worry much about it. Maybe she should talk to someone high up in the Judge-Advocate General’s office and make sure her ass was sufficiently covered.

“Hey,” Pat said, “no fair skipping around. Let’s start at the beginning.” They read the article from beginning to end. Jessica decided she was pleased with it on the whole.

“Though it makes me seem like such a pushy broad,” she said.

“You are a pushy broad,” Pat said chivalrously.

“Yeah, thanks.” Jessica reached for her cup of coffee.

“You’d better call your mom,” Pat said, “and tell her to go to the news dealer and reserve her twenty copies.”

“Twenty?” Jessica mused. “No—for Ma, more like fifty.”

It was then that Nelda came through the tent flap again. Once again she had a pleased, I’ve-got-a-secret look. “General?” she said. “There’s a call for you on the radio. Secured line. From the President.” As she rushed to the communications tent, Jessica found herself brushing at her clothes as if for an inspection. She picked up the handset, said, “Sir? Mr. President?”

There was a moment of silence as words passed back and forth between satellite relays. “Jessica?” he said. “How do you do?”

“I’m fine, sir. And you?”

“I am fit as a fiddle and strong as a bull. I dominate the world as a colossus. I rival the sun as a source of radiance, and I am a nexus of power acknowledged by all the world.”

Jessica blinked, uncertain quite how to respond. “I’m pleased to hear it, sir,” she said finally.

“The only cloud on the horizon, Jessica,” the President said. “The only fly in the ointment, the only blot on my escutcheon, in fact the only taint on my total omnipotence, is the fact that someone has usurped my rightful place on the cover of Newsweek.”

Jessica’s heart gave a lurch. “In fact—” The President’s voice rose in volume, “In fact, I shall have to devote much of my attention to making that person’s life a complete and utter hell on earth.”

“Um,” said Jessica, paralyzed. “Well.”

The President barked a laugh. “Congratulations, Jessica. Well done. I really had you going there for a moment, didn’t I?”

Jessica felt sweat trickle down her nose. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you did.”

“My staff insisted that I take a few days off and relax at Camp David. That’s where I’m calling from. It’s so dull here that I have no choice but to amuse myself by making prank phone calls to my subordinates.”

“I hope it’s not that dull, sir.”

“Well, no, not entirely, not with Chinese missile tests and the menace of the Gamsakhurdians. I just wanted to congratulate you on your celebrity. And besides, I got the cover of US News and World Report. Unfortunately those swine at Time decided to devote their cover to some little pasty-faced urchin being rescued from the roof of his momma’s car by one of your helicopters.”

“Better luck next time, sir,” Jessica said.

The President laughed. “Yes!” he said. His voice was manic. “Better luck next time! Exactly!” Jessica’s head swam. This was decidedly strange. The President seemed to be calling her from well beyond the ozone layer.

“I wanted to give you a little friendly advice in view of your current celebrity,” the President said. “You’re going to start hearing from people now—people in my line of work, you understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’re going to want to talk to you about running for office. Maybe even for my job.” Jessica answered quickly. “Mr. President, I have never even for a moment considered—”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Jessica,” the President said. “I don’t give a hang if you run or don’t. What I wanted to say is this—they won’t be approaching you because they admire your brilliant political thinking. They’ll be approaching you not because you’re the best candidate, but because you’re a viable candidate. Because of that Newsweek cover and because you’ve got a very prominent job where you can score a lot of points with the public. And it won’t be about you—it will be about them, you understand? It’s their job to find people like you and groom them for office. It’s their job to approach people and awaken ambitions that people never knew they had, and the more ambition they can find in you, the more they can generate business for themselves. That’s how these people work.” Jessica’s head swam. “I understand, Mr. President.”

“Now if you’ve always wanted to run for office, that’s fine. I can even introduce you to some people—people who work for my party, you understand. But if you have never thought of a career in public service, then I urge you to think long and hard before you give any kind of answer at all to these people.”

“The only career in public service I’ve ever wanted,” Jessica said, in all truth, “was in the military.” The President cackled. “That’s a good one, Jessica!” he said. “That’s exactly what you tell those bastards! That’s my little politician!”

Jessica blinked. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

The President cleared his throat. “Now, if you don’t mind one last piece of advice…”

“By all means, sir.”

“If you value your career, Jessica, try not to shoot up any more churches. Because then even I won’t be able to save your ass, okay?”

Jessica hesitated, trying to read the tone of the President’s voice in order to determine whether he was joking again or not. She decided she might as well reply with the truth, pedantic though it might be.

“Well, Mr. President,” she said, “it wasn’t actually a church. It was a radio station.” The President paused for a moment, then barked out another laugh. “Oh, it was the media!” he said. “In that case, I’m sure they got everything they deserved!”

The conversation ended shortly thereafter. Jessica put down the handset and walked past expectant-looking techs to her tent.

Gamsakhurdians, she thought. The President had mentioned the menace of the Gamsakhurdians. She made a note to herself to find out who the Gamsakhurdians were, and what they were up to. Once her present job was over, the President might need an officer who was on top of the Gamsakhurdian situation.

She passed Nelda at her desk, then entered her tent and sat behind her desk.

Pat looked at her. “What’d the man say, Jess?”

Jessica pitched her voice so that Nelda could hear. Give her a thrill, she thought.

“He said it was okay by him if I run for President,” she said.

The President returned the handset to an aide, then looked at Stan Burdett. “There we go,” he said.

“Do you think she’ll bite?” Stan asked.

“I think it’s more than possible. Give her a couple days to let it all sink in, then have Bill Marcus give her a call.”

“Bill’s the best in the business. If he can’t talk her into running, I don’t know who can.” The President leaned back into the deep leather armchair and put his feet up on the coffee table. One thing you could say for the semirustic decor of the presidential retreat of Camp David, nobody cared if you got scuff marks on the furniture.

The President scratched his chin. A faint sadness penetrated his detachment. “Jessica’s a nice lady,” he said. “I should feel like a complete shit for doing this to her.”

But the Party needed a winner, and here was Jessica Frazetta piling up endless good-will points throughout the heart of the country. It was hard not to endear yourself to people by feeding starving families and plucking their children from floods. In the next election, three senatorial seats and a half-dozen governors’ positions would be up for grabs, all from the Mississippi Valley. Jessica had made herself a viable candidate for any one of them.

“The only question,” the President said, “is whether she decides she’s a member of the Party or not.”

“She’s always registered as an Independent,” Stan said. “A lot of those military types do.”

“Well,” the President said, “if she has the good sense to decide to come to the aid of the Party, I can help her out before she declares, pin a nice big medal on her—the Soldier’s Medal, maybe? And if she decides she’s a member of the opposition,” he sighed, “then we conclude she blew religious freedom to tiny pieces when she went into Rails Bluff, and the attorney general takes her down while our hands stay clean.”

He swung his legs down from the coffee table and rose to his feet. He looked at Stan. “It’s a no-brainer,” he said. “You want to go for a walk?”

Pine scent filled the air as the President strolled along the open paths. Wind floated through the trees with the sound of a mother hushing her child. It was pleasantly cool here in Catoctin Mountain Park, and a pleasant change from Washington, where summer heat and humidity was already smothering the city. It was a beautiful, tranquil moment. But then all the President’s moments were tranquil these days. All moments were more or less like the next. It was an illustration of the Steady State theory of the President’s psyche.

The President let his eyes drift over the tree-lined crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hawks circled overhead, thermals lifting their outspread wings. “The Chinese fired three missiles,” he said. “They all landed more or less where they were intended to land. The U.S. Navy gallantly protected Taiwan by being nowhere in the vicinity. The Chinese government has announced that this round of tests is over, and it looks as if their military forces across the Straits have stood down.”

“The Seventh Fleet saves the day,” Stan said.

“But for how much longer?” the President asked. “We’re in no state to fight a war. The quakes have wrecked all that. Even if we have the capacity, the people won’t stand for it—we can’t fight any kind of conflict while millions of our own citizens are condemned to living in tents. We’re going to have to pull in our heads for ten years or more.” He looked at Stan. “You’re the expert on spin. How long can you spin that?”

Stan adjusted his spectacles. “Sooner or later, you think someone will call our bluff?” The President watched clouds drifting beyond the Blue Ridge. He’d had an insight about clouds some days ago, he seemed to remember, but he could not bring it to mind.

“Some people have nothing left to lose,” the President said. “Others have everything to gain. There’s a worldwide recession in progress, and that will make some people desperate. And there are so many flash-points now. Conflicts are almost all ethnic or religious these days, and those are the kinds of wars that are most difficult to stop once they get started. Once you start to kill your neighbors, you can’t stop, now, can you? Stopping just gives them the opportunity to kill you. And it’s worse when God starts telling you to kill. You can’t stop if it’s God doing the talking. The Ayatollah business is really prospering. Like that fellow in Arkansas that Jessica had to put down. How do you stop someone who wants the world to end? There’s no way to negotiate. There’s no common ground.”

“Sometimes, Mr. President,” Stan said, “you can’t negotiate. You just do what you’ve promised to do.” The President looked at him. “Are you suggesting that a politician should keep his promises? How unlike you. I’m almost shocked.”

Stan frowned. “Only when your back’s to the wall, sir. And then when someone calls your bluff, I think that person, or his followers, should be swiftly and efficiently reduced to smoking debris. If you pick your target properly—if it’s someone you can reduce to smoking debris—it will make an impression on other like-minded individuals.”

A smile drifted across the President’s face. “I was just thinking how much I would welcome not having to be the head of the world’s only superpower. And now you want me to start blowing things up.” Stan gave a tight little smile. “It should be a very controlled explosion, sir.”

“Ah. Battling on the symbolic plane, but with live ammunition. Always a delicate business.” The President walked for a while in silence. Bluebirds flickered through the trees like bits of the sky fallen and blown about like snow.

“We shall have to try to strengthen our international institutions. NATO, the UN, the various regional alliances. I’ll have to send Darrell abroad to talk to them all. Tell them we can lead, but that they will have to follow with more willingness and more force than we’ve seen heretofore.” He shrugged. “Maybe it will work. I don’t have a lot of hope, since nations tend to be run either by cowards or psychopaths, and we’ve mostly got the cowards. But it seems the best we can do, and if anyone can wring commitments out of them, it will be Darrell the Happy Warrior.”

“He can be persuasive, Mr. President.”

“He has the advantage of actually believing what he is saying.” He stopped, frowned at the sight of hawks rising on the afternoon thermals. “And our national institutions could use some strengthening, as well. When I flew over the Mississippi Delta the other day, I saw nothing but islands. Everything that holds a people together was severed—communications, commerce, community. Boris Lipinsky tells me that large parts of the country will go for six to nine months without basic services—not even electricity. Not even telephones. And hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, will be living in refugee camps for much longer than that. You can’t expect them to be civil forever, not under that sort of pressure.

“How many will fall through the cracks?” the President wondered. “How many thousands can just disappear without anyone noticing they’re gone? That Arkansas pastor and his private refugee camp—that man had a radio station broadcasting across the whole Delta, and nobody noticed he was there. I wonder how many others are setting up in their eerie little tribal habitats without anyone seeing them? It was sort of like the Balkans, in a way. Except,” he conceded, “that the Balkans are mountains and this was a river, but it was the same, almost. Everyone cut off from everyone else. In the Balkans, they’ve been hating and fighting each other for thousands of years, as far back as history goes. And in the Mississippi Delta—well, who knows? They’re all on islands.”

He looked at Stan. “How are you going to spin your messages to them, Stan, when there’s no way to find your audience?”

Stan Burdett looked pensive. “There was a way once. People lived out there before there was electricity or radio, and they were still a part of the republic.”

“They had a ruling class. All those planters. The people did what the planters told them.” He smiled. “Like Judge Chivington’s family. They could deliver fifty thousand votes; they ran that part of Texas like they were little kings. But nobody can deliver those votes anymore, not consistently. It’s still corrupt there, but it’s nothing like it was.” He shrugged. “But now, who knows? Who knows what’s out there?” The President gave a big smile, then laughed. “If you spin a message but there’s no one to hear it, is there a message? That’s what we should be considering.”

Stan seemed glum. “If you say so, sir.”

“I had a dream about bread yesterday. Did I mention my dream about bread?”

“No.”

“UFOs are made of bread. It’s a true fact.”

Stan just looked at him. The President clapped Stan on the shoulder. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “Let’s just walk along and enjoy the country.”

Islands, the President thought, the Balkans. He was finding equivalencies everywhere. The previous day’s breeze had died away entirely, leaving a sultry, expectant stillness in its wake. Nick slept the latter part of the afternoon away beneath the pecan tree used by the Escape Committee. Aftershocks shivered the leaves over his head. The camp was quiet in the moist afternoon heat, everyone trying to stay cool, and the deputies didn’t come. Nick’s thoughts drifted like the distant clouds, remote from the world.

The longer before the deputies came, he thought as he lay beneath the tree, the more time the deputies had to make plans. Nick didn’t like to think about that.

His father, he thought, would have a quote from Sun Tzu that was appropriate to the occasion. If you have a clue, let the enemy think you are clueless. Let the enemy believe you are wise on the occasions when you don’t know shit from Shinola.

Or something like that.

The westward-drifting sun shone hot on his eyelids. He shifted beneath the tree, put the shadow of a branch over his face. The leaves rustled pleasantly overhead.

What is of the greatest importance in war is to strike at the enemy strategy. Sun Tzu’s words, in the accents of General Jon Ruford, floated into his mind. So, he thought, what was the enemy strategy?

Obviously, to keep the refugees in the camp, and to keep the world from finding out what they were doing.

Escaping from the camp would strike at the first object of the strategy. But what would strike at the second?

Making phone calls to the media and the authorities, he supposed. But both were far away, and the locals phones supposedly didn’t work, and even if the state police or the Army heard of the horrors in Spottswood Parish they might not be able to respond quickly.

There were a couple dozen deputies involved with what was happening in the camp, and some of them, like the sheriff, hadn’t been seen in days. This suggested that the other inhabitants of Spottswood Parish—and there had to be thousands—either knew nothing of what was happening here, or were taking good care not to know. The Klan sheriff, or someone, was managing events so that it was difficult to find out what was happening here.

Nick wished he could grind the whole sordid scene right into the faces of the world. Then he sat up suddenly. The sun shining through tree limbs blinded him for an instant, and in the flash of unexpected light he knew how to proceed.

“We go to Shelburne City,” he said aloud. Two members of the Escape Committee looked at him.

“I take the Warriors to Shelburne City,” Nick said. “Just like Sun Tzu.” Nick remembered the details only vaguely. Back in ancient China, Kingdom A had been on the verge of defeating Kingdom B. Sun Tzu, who commanded the army of Kingdom C, was ordered to go to the aid of the beleaguered Kingdom B. But instead of reinforcing Kingdom B, he took his whole army and marched straight for the capital of Kingdom A, which forced the enemy to retreat from Kingdom B to defend their own country. Sun Tzu caught the army on the march and destroyed it, winning the war. Nick had planned for the Warriors to stay in the area of the camp as a rear guard while the rest of the refugees evacuated to a more defensible area. But that was surrendering initiative to the enemy. It would allow them all the time they needed to gather their forces and respond.

What Nick needed to do was to force the issue by attacking Kingdom A. He needed to take the Warriors right into Shelburne City and seize a big, defensible building in as public a place as possible. The people in the parish couldn’t ignore that. They would have to start asking questions. The enemy would have to respond to that first, they couldn’t go haring off into the countryside looking for escaped refugees. They would have to meet Nick on their own ground.

Stumbling over words in his haste, Nick told his plan to the Escape Committee. Reaction seemed divided.

“Running into town like that, you could get surrounded by a thousand crackers,” said one. “It could be like John Wayne at the Alamo.”

“The Alamo was a success,” Nick said. “The Alamo delayed things long enough for the rest of the Texans to get their act together and win the war.”

In the end, Nick got his way. The others had no better plan to offer.

The shadows had grown long. People began to line up for dinner. “Best go get our sand buggers,” one of the men said, and the Escape Committee rose to their feet and began to trudge toward the cookhouse. The silence of the early evening was broken by the sound of truck engines, revving as they rolled along the broken roads from the direction of town.

There was sudden stillness in camp as everyone paused, frozen in the midst of their motion, to listen. Nick’s pulse was suddenly loud in his ears. “They’re coming!” someone said, and suddenly everyone was moving.

“Calm, people!” It seemed to Nick as if the reluctant words had stuck to the inside of his throat, and he had to peel them off with an act of will and throw them into the air. “No running! No shouting!” Guards surrounded the camp. What they saw had to be refugees milling around, not fighters taking their posts.

Nick made himself walk carefully to the cookhouse, where Armando Gurule had set up the master control for the claymores. He felt strangely lightheaded, as if he might topple over at any minute. At one point he realized he’d forgotten to breathe, and when he let the breath out and took in another the air was sweeter than anything he’d tasted in his life.

He found Armando standing by the control board in the shade of the cookhouse. People were running madly through the camp, parents scooping up their children and trying to find cover. Nick hoped that to the guards this looked like a normal reaction to an approach by the deputies. Nick stood in silence. Just let them get close, he thought.

Two five-ton trucks pulled off the road in front of the camp, and began backing toward the gate. Over intervening heads, tents, and awnings, Nick saw some other vehicles and some Caucasian heads bobbing around. Nick didn’t see the crop-haired runt who had Gros-Papa’s watch, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. He glanced left and right and behind and saw, glimpsed through trees and tents and awnings, deputies taking up station on the perimeter.

To Nick’s right, wrapped in plastic and blankets, were the bodies of Miss Deena and the other gunshot victim. Nick felt a chill brush his spine as he saw them. Just behind him an old woman was flipping sand bugger patties on the big outdoor grill. She frowned at her work in a business-like way and wielded her big spatula as if there weren’t a pair of bodies within thirty feet of her, and as if all hell wasn’t about to break loose any second.

“Maybe it’s a food delivery,” Armando said.

“Maybe,” Nick said. He didn’t think so.

One of the trucks backed right up to the entrance. A big, thick-knuckled uniformed deputy—the man who had made the announcements yesterday—got on the back of a truck and raised a bullhorn to his lips.

“The other camp has been completed,” he said. “And we’re moving you-all there, so that the A.M.E. can have their property back and get this mess cleaned up. I hope there is not a repetition of what happened yesterday. So what I want y’all to do is get your needcessities, make a nice line on your side of the gate, then just set there and wait for your name to be called.”

There was silence in the camp. No one showed any sign of gathering their belongings or getting into line. Then, from somewhere out on the right, Nick heard someone begin to boo, as if he was protesting a decision by the umpire at a baseball game. The voice was deep and resonant and rumbled through the air like thunder. More people began to take up the call. The sound rose from the camp as if the earth was mocking the sky. Catcalls and jeers filled the air. Some people began banging on pans or other metal objects. The clattering noise echoed from the trees, causing startled birds to take to the air. Somewhere, someone started blowing on a whistle.

Nick saw the deputy using the bullhorn again, but beneath the defiant tumult heard nothing of what the man said. He saw the man look down at someone else, lower the bullhorn, give a shrug. They’ll move now, Nick thought. He craned for a view, saw little over the intervening obstacles. He looked behind him, saw the old woman still minding her vegetable patties. “’Scuse me, ma’am,” he said, and stepped up onto the brick wall of the grill, balanced between air and the gridiron. An irregular line of deputies was moving toward the front gate carrying weapons. Last time, Nick thought, they came in shooting into the air, tried to stampede everyone.

He licked his lips, looked down at Armando. “Better get ready,” he said. Armando looked down at his control board, flipped one of the two switches that would trigger the mines. The deputies were standing by the gate waiting for the big man, who had dropped off the gate of the truck, put down his bullhorn, and picked up a shotgun. Nick couldn’t tell if the gate had been unlocked yet or not. The leader approached the gate with a lazy stride, then made a gesture with one arm and moved his shotgun to port arms.

Any second now, Nick thought. Waves of heat rose from the grill, almost smothered him. He could feel sweat popping out on his forehead. The catcalls from the refugees rose to a crescendo. The gate swung inward behind a line of hustling deputies. The big leader pulled trigger on his shotgun once, firing into the air. That boom triggered more noise from the camp, cat-calls mixed with a rising defiant screech. The hair on the back of Nick’s neck rose at the sound, at the primal challenge that must have first sounded in Africa a million years ago, when one prehuman clan first challenged another for mastery of the savanna.

The deputies came into the camp at a run, weapons carried high. The crowd fell back, yelling and whistling. The attackers moved fast, faster than Nick had expected. Another second or two they would run right over the mines.

“Jesus!” Nick said in a burst of terror. “Fire!”

Armando threw the second switch. The mines went off with a deep concussion that staggered the earth like an aftershock—Nick swayed on his perch—and then the air was filled with weird whirring, yowling sounds, airy demons unleashed, as the mines flung their strange munitions, the screws and stones and bits of jagged metal, the nails and cable and used razor blades. Nick heard a sound like a’ tortured animal as something flew past his head.

There was an instant of silence. Nick couldn’t see anything—there was dust and debris in the air—and then there was a shot, another deep shotgun boom.

“Go!” Nick shouted. “Go! Now! Go, go!”

A sudden howl rose from the camp, a song of triumph and blood and vengeance, and Nick saw a wave of people charging forward into the murky air. Nick’s nerves answered with a mad song of berserk joy. There were more shots, and Nick heard a crack close to his ear like someone snapping his fingers. With a sudden jolt of fear he realized that a bullet had just flown by his head, and that standing on the grille made him a perfect target. He swayed for a moment in sudden vertigo, then jumped to the ground to see Armando carefully turning both the switches on his control.

“If there was a misfire,” he said, “we don’t want them going off now.”

“Gotta get up there,” Nick said, as much to himself as Armando. There were a lot of shots now, including the sustained, stunning clamor of at least one of the deputies’ machine pistols. Nick looked around for a weapon—he hadn’t thought to provide himself with one—and saw the old lady carefully crouched down behind the brick walls of the barbecue grille, clutching her spatula as if it were a spear. It was probably the safest place to be in the whole camp.

Nick didn’t want to wrestle the old lady for her spatula, so he gave up his search for a weapon and ran forward into the melee. The dust in the air had dispersed, and Nick saw a dozen bodies lying in the dirt. Most were deputies, but some were not. The bodies of the deputies were surrounded by clumps of refugees stripping them of their weapons. A pair of deputies retreated through the gate, a wave of club-waving refugees close behind. One of the deputies was wounded and had his arm around the shoulders of the second, who was supporting him in his withdrawal while firing back into the advancing crowd with a pistol. One of the pursuers sprawled to earth, and then with a series of triumphant cries the two deputies were engulfed by the wave of attackers. Nick saw knives and cudgels rising and falling, heard bone-chilling screams from one of the fallen.

He kept going. Don’t stop except to pick up a weapon. That’s what he’d told everyone. The heavy air labored through his lungs. “Keep moving!” he gasped. “Keep moving!” The air was full of gunfire, but Nick couldn’t see who was shooting, or at whom. He burst free of the gate—a yell of defiance rose to his lips—and then he was in the parking lot. Some of the cars had suffered cracked windshields from the claymores’ munitions. Shotguns boomed. Nick crouched low between two cars.

Gather in the parking lot where there’s cover. Take your car keys. Start your cars and get ready to move out on a signal.

That’s what he’d told his army. But he didn’t have any car keys, he didn’t have a car; he’d have to wait for others. He leaned his back against one of the cars, tried to catch his breath, mopped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.

“Warriors!” he shouted. “Warriors! This way!”

He wondered what was happening in the camp. Bullets snapping overhead convinced Nick that it wouldn’t be wise to stick his head up and find out.

Whoever was firing the machine pistol had stopped. That was good, at least.

Nick heard a car door slam, then the grind of a starter and the roar of the engine. Bent in a crouch, he began moving in the direction of the sound.

And then he turned around the front end of a Chevy pick-up and came face-to-face with the enemy: the big deputy who had been giving the orders.

The deputy was in cover between the pickup and a Pontiac wagon. He crouched in front of the Chevy, leaning against its bumper. His hat had been knocked off, and his forehead badly gouged by one of the claymores’ weird munitions. Blood ran down his face, spattered his khaki uniform. He still carried his shotgun in both hands. His left hand was bloody where the middle finger had been shot or blown or blasted off.

At the sight of the man, Nick’s blood seemed to flash info steam. The deputy looked at Nick in surprise as Nick came running around the truck’s fender. Maybe he’d been deafened by the mines and hadn’t heard him coming. Nick could smell the man’s sweat. He screamed and lunged at the man. The deputy lifted the shotgun in both hands to fend Nick off, and Nick grabbed the shotgun and drove into the man, knocking the startled deputy on his back. They sprawled onto the soil of the parking lot, Nick on top. He scrambled to a crouch above his enemy, his hands still gripping the gun. The barrel was slick with the deputy’s blood. The deputy writhed under Nick, trying to throw him off, bucking like a horse. Nick bore down with all his weight onto the shotgun, trying to press the gun against the deputy’s throat and strangle him.

They both gasped for breath in the hot afternoon air. Nick drove the shotgun down, toes digging into the soil, slipping on the slick grass. His sweat dripped onto the deputy’s face. The deputy blinked blood from his eyes, saw the barrel coming near his throat. His eyes widened as he saw the danger, and then Nick saw determination enter the deputy’s face; the deputy gave a long, growling exhalation as he gathered his power and began to press Nick back like a weightlifter bench-pressing a set of barbells. To Nick’s astonishment the deputy lifted him upward, pressing him into the air no matter how much weight Nick put on the shotgun.

Terror sang through Nick. If the deputy could throw him off, then he could finish Nick through superior strength.

The deputy’s body gave a heave under Nick as he positioned himself for greater effort. From the way the deputy shifted, Nick realized he had one leg between the two legs of the deputy, and with a roar he shifted his own weight, pivoting off the shotgun as if it were a high bar in gymnastics, and dropped his knee with full force into the deputy’s groin.

The deputy’s eyes popped, and his breath went out of him in a great whoosh. Instead of bearing down further on the shotgun, Nick pulled at it, trying to snatch it out of the deputy’s grip. “Mine!” he shouted. The barrel of the shotgun came free from the deputy’s maimed left hand. Nick tried a final wrench to yank it entirely free, but the barrel hit the chromed front end of the Chevy, cramping Nick’s movement, and the deputy hung on with his big right hand. Nick yanked the gun back and forth, banging the weapon into the Chevy and the Pontiac wagon on the other side, until he realized that the deputy was reaching his left hand across his front, toward the pistol that was holstered at his belt.

“No!” Nick yelled. He hammered at the deputy’s wounded hand with his right fist. The deputy gave a gasp of pain and surprise and snatched his hand back. Nick gave a wrench to the shotgun, managed to break it free of the deputy’s grip.

“Mine!” he shouted, and smashed the butt of the shotgun into the deputy’s face. The deputy gave a convulsive heave under Nick and almost threw him off. The man’s hands clawed blindly upward, trying to grab the shotgun again or defend himself. Nick slipped the gun butt into the deputy’s guard and smashed him again in the face. Blood spattered from the gouge on the man’s forehead. “Mine!” Nick cried. “My gun!” He smashed another time. The deputy arched his back and Nick drove the gun butt again into his face.

“Mine! Mine!” The shotgun rose and fell. “Mine! Mine, you bastard!” Nick stopped striking only when he ran out of breath. Both Nick and the deputy were spattered with blood.

A cry of savage joy rose in Nick’s heart. He lurched to his feet, brandished the bloody shotgun over his head. “Warriors!” he screamed to the heavens. “Warriorrrrrrrrs!” The shout was taken up by the other fighters now streaming through the parking lot. Some waved guns, others clubs. The shooting seemed far less intense than it had been, though a shot that snapped over Nick’s head drove him again into a crouch.

He looked down at the deputy lying at his feet and felt his raging triumph die and turn to cold, creeping horror. Dazedly, Nick read the plastic name tag on the deputy’s uniform. Jedthus C. Carter. His head swam. He closed his eyes. He had done this, had beaten this man to death with his own weapon.

“Move! Keep moving!” People shouted to each other as they ran through the parking lot. Nausea eddied through Nick’s vitals. He put the shotgun down. He heard the thud of feet nearby. “Don’t stop!” a woman’s voice shouted close by.

Don’t stop, Nick repeated to himself. Don’t stop except to pick up a weapon. His own rules. He reached blindly for the deputy’s gun belt. The blood on the leather sent a surge of acid into his throat. His fingers felt thick as sausages as he tried to work the buckle.

“Go! Go!” someone shouted. “Get in the car!”

Go, Nick thought numbly. He finally got the belt open and pulled on it, rolled the deputy partly over and dragged the free end out from under. He rose to a crouch and stepped clear of the deputy and finally, now that he could look someplace other than the body, dared to open his eyes. The gun belt dangled heavy from his hand. He saw the deputy’s automatic pistol, a leather case for ammunition, another for hand cuffs, and a portable radio. Keys dangled from a spring-wound key ring.

“Warriors to the cars!” a woman shouted. “Home Guard give them cover!” Those were Nick’s own rules the woman was shouting. Nick listened dully as he blinked at the radio on his gun belt. Cars rumbled into life. Then Nick strapped the gun belt over his hips and picked up the shotgun and stepped from between the two vehicles, careful to keep his head down and lots of Detroit iron between himself and any likely enemy.

The deputy had a car, he thought. And these keys would fit it. It would be a good car, a fast car. And there would probably be ammunition and other supplies in it.

There was a shot from the southernmost of the two roadblocks, and a horrid scream from somewhere in the parking lot. Another voice began loudly to call on Jesus, a voice with a desperate keening edge that raised Nick’s hackles. Nick bit down on the bile that rose in his throat at the sound, stuck his head up for only a brief instant.

There was only one police car in the area, parked next to one of the two trucks that had been backed up to the gate. During his escape Nick had run right past it without taking notice. Nick ducked low, ran to the vehicle, and flung himself into the driver’s seat. He kept his head below window level, picked what looked like a car key on the deputy’s key ring, stuck it in the ignition, and turned it.

The engine roared into life like a beast emerging from hibernation. Air-conditioning began to blast cold air. The radio turned on as well.

“Miles,” a voice said, “what’s the situation now?”

“We got people runnin’ all over the camp,” another voice said. “I hear ’em startin’ up some cars. We’re keepin’ their heads down, but I don’t think we got any men left up there.”

“Jedthus?”

“I don’t know, Omar. I ain’t seem him since the ruckus started.”

“How about Knox an’ them?”

“I think they’re all gone, Omar.”

There was a moment of silence. There was a bang from outside the car, then a sort of crunch from the radio, the sound of someone making a fast movement while holding the microphone.

“They’re starting to shoot at us, Omar,” the man said. “I think we may have to pull out.”

“Fuck that,” a third voice said, some distance from the mike. “I got bullets left.”

“I’ll leave it to you guys,” said Omar. “I’m putting a posse together here, but if you think you need to hightail it out of there, you do that.”

Run for it, you crackers, Nick thought. Run for it, and we’ll come for you.

“Warriors to the cars!” people were shouting.

Nick opened the car door, stuck his head out, and shouted, “Ready to move! If you’re ready, honk your horn!”

He hit the horn, twice. Other horns began to take up the chorus.

The passenger door opened suddenly. Nick looked up in surprise, heart pounding. A man of thirty or so slid into the passenger seat—Nick knew he was among the Warriors, but didn’t know his name. The man carried a big club and a large revolver, and there was a wild look in his eye.

“I’m ready, man,” he said. “Ready to bust caps on some coneheads.”

“Right,” Nick said.

There was a chorus of horns outside, which Nick hoped were Warriors signaling they were ready, and not people blowing horns out of sheer exuberance.

“Let’s go!” Nick bellowed out the door, and he put the car in reverse and began rolling it across the grass parking lot to the road. “Left and right!” he shouted. “Let’s go!” He shut the door and looked over his shoulder out the back window. Voices chattered on the radio, and Nick gathered that Omar, whoever he was, was having trouble assembling his scattered forces. Don’t worry, man, Nick thought, we’ll be coming to you.

Cars bumped onto the road and accelerated. They were heading for the two roadblocks north and south of the camp. The deputies at the roadblocks were armed with high-powered rifles that could kill at a distance, and Nick had reasoned that it was hopeless to shoot it out from the camp with that kind of firepower, not with the sorts of weapons that were likely to be liberated from the guards. Nick planned a vehicle assault, cars filled with Warriors charging the road-blocks to engage the deputies at close range, where the hunting rifles could be outgunned by pistols, shotguns, and if necessary clubs and knives. Crossing the intervening distance, against those powerful rifles, was desperate. But Nick had already committed the Warriors to death, whether the Warriors themselves realized it or not. Enough of them would get through to kill the deputies, and that was all that mattered.

“Goddamn,” Miles said over the radio. “They’re pullin’ out. They’re heading for us.”

“Clear out if you have to,” Omar said.

The sheriff’s car bounced as it backed onto the road. Nick swung the wheel, turned the car north, in the direction he hoped to help the camp inmates escape. He wanted that route to be open above all. There were already several cars ahead of him. Nick accelerated.

A lengthy series of shots rang out. Nick couldn’t tell who was shooting: the guards or the escapees. Brake lights flashed ahead as the line of cars checked their speed. Nick growled his frustration and tapped the brakes.

One car rammed the roadblock. Cars swerved to the verge of the road, came to a stop. People burst from them, carrying weapons. Then the energy seemed to go out of them—they straightened out of their fighting crouches, let their weapons hang by their sides.

Nick pulled to a stop, ran from the car, and found out why the others had lost interest. The deputies were already dead. One had been shot through the heart. The other had been hit in the midsection, crawled into the bar ditch, and bled to death.

Cudjo, Nick thought. Sitting in the woods with his deer rifle, picking off every deputy he could see. There were crashes of metal-on-metal, a furious roll of gunfire from the other roadblock. Nick straightened, nerves leaping. He’d gone the wrong way.

“Get their guns,” he said. “Get the ammunition. Bring their car.” By the time Nick got to the other roadblock, the fight was over. The driver of the first car to charge the roadblock had been killed by the rifles and his car spun off the road, but the second rammed the deputies’ car, giving them the choice of jumping into the open or being hit by their own vehicle. The third car in line had hit one of the exposed deputies, throwing him fifty feet. He was hit so hard that he was literally knocked out of his boots. His partner had been run down in the field by a mob and shot to death. He carried a loaded rifle and a loaded pistol, but had been so terrified that he’d forgot to fire either one of them.

Nick got out of his car amid the crowd of fighters. They were jumping up and down, waving their liberated weapons over their heads, howling their victory.

Nick wandered among them, stunned.

He’d won. He’d won.

“Miles,” the radio said. “Miles. What is your situation?” Nick looked at the car. He got in the car, picked up the microphone, pressed the button on it with his thumb. Tried to still the tremor in his hand.

“Miles is dead, cracker,” he said. “So are the others. What do you have to say to that, cracker?” There was a moment of stunned silence. “Who is that?” said a voice. A voice that wasn’t Omar’s. Nick felt his lips draw back in a savage snarl. “Jon C. Ruford, brigadier general, U.S. Army,” he said. It was the least he could do in tribute to his father. It was all he could do to avoid mentioning Sun Tzu.

“You think I don’t know about camps?” Nick said. “You think I don’t know how to turn people in camps into soldiers?”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Nick forced a graveyard laugh.

“We got your friends’ guns, cracker,” Nick said. “We got more guns than you do now. You come visit the camp, cracker, and we’ll make you real welcome.”

He put the mike back on its hook. Let them think we’ll stay here at the camp, he thought. Let them think we’re waiting for them.

Please.

Jason spent the fight huddled beneath a cotton wagon with Arlette, Manon, and a half-dozen other refugees. His nerves leaped with every shot, every cry, every moan or scream. He was glad to leave this business to the grownups.

At the start, right after the earth shuddered to the detonation of the claymore mines, gunfire broke out all around the camp as Nick’s Samurai, with three handguns and one .22 rifle, opened fire on the six guards distributed around the back and sides of the camp. One guard was killed, another wounded, and a third fled unhurt. Two Samurai were killed when guards returned fire. Bullets sprayed the camp, whining eerily as they tumbled after striking parts of the chainlink fence.

Cudjo, by shooting two guards from cover with his deer rifle, turned the tide. Fighters eagerly slipped under the chainlink to seize the dead guards’ weapons. The remaining guards were killed as they ran for their lives across the adjoining fields.

Jason hugged Arlette during the battle, both of them on the ground, his cheek against the nape of her neck. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t tender; it was two terrified people doing their best to disappear into each other and into the ground. He could feel Arlette gasp at each cracking shot, shiver as buzzing bullets tumbled past. As the cars rolled out of the parking lot and the fighting moved farther away, he could feel her begin to breathe easier.

“It’ll be all right,” he whispered. For what it was worth.

She squeezed his hand, nodded. Pretending that he had reassured her, while tears rolled down her cheeks.

They stayed hidden until they heard cars returning, until the shooting was long ended and people started calling for everyone to come out of hiding. Jason rose into the long-shadowed day, and his heart gave a sudden leap of joy. He had lived through it. He would see another day.

“Take your belongings and go to the parking lot! Take some food with you if you can!” Jason took his telescope, his only remaining property, from beneath the cotton wagon and joined the others as they marched toward the exit. There were bodies lying on the ground near the gate, all displaying that limp, careless, boneless sprawl that let Jason know these were real bodies and not actors in some movie. Manon took Arlette and Jason firmly by the shoulders and marched them quickly through the area, though Jason couldn’t help but look at the bodies to discover if any of them were Nick. One of the bodies, he saw, was that of Sekou, one of the boys who had given Arlette grief for kissing Jason. Jason tore his eyes from the corpse and looked straight ahead. He didn’t want to think about Sekou, about how the boy had died fighting while Jason had huddled beneath the wagon. When they came out of the camp, they found Nick in the parking area. He was wearing a gun belt, leaning on a shotgun, and giving orders. He looked like a highly successful field marshal in some dreadful, highly personal African bush war. Jason gave a cry of elation. Arlette raced up to him and flung her arms around him.

“Baby!” he said, and lifted Arlette off her feet as he hugged her. Then he carried Arlette to Manon and threw an arm around his ex as well.

“Nick!” she said, eyes wide with horror. “You’re covered with blood!”

“It’s, uh, not mine,” Nick said. A shadow passed over the joy that glowed in his eyes. He turned to Arlette. “Careful, honey, you might get some on you.”

“I don’t care,” Arlette said.

He lowered her to the ground. Nick saw Jason, and a smile crossed his face. “Hey, Jase,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You hang onto that telescope, okay, Jase? That scope is your luck.” Jason looked at the Astroscan in its battered red plastic case. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe so.” There was a lot of rushing around, car engines starting. Someone started one of the big five-ton trucks. Nick looked sharply to one side, and then his smile widened.

“Cudjo!” he said.

Jason turned to see Cudjo tromping toward them on his sturdy boots, his hunting rifle over one shoulder. Cudjo looked more strange in the light of day than he had at night, with his homemade canvas pants held up by suspenders, his moth-eaten, wide-brimmed hat, and a checked shirt that seemed made up of the remnants of other checked shirts all stitched together.

Cudjo held up a fist, crooked a thumb. “Took,” he chirped. And laughed.

“You come visit the camp, cracker, and we’ll make you real welcome.” For a long, long heartbeat, Omar stared at the radio set in his office. All his people at the camp were dead, he thought. The Klan, the Crusaders, all of them. He could hear refugees howling and yelling over the radio until the signal abruptly cut off.

“Omar! Omar!” Eddie Bridges called. He was one of the deputies at Clarendon, trying to keep order amid all the sick people. Not a Klansman, not involved with the A.M.E. camp at all. “What the hell was that about?” Eddie demanded. “Did he say he was an Army general?” Omar didn’t have an answer for him.

He was almost thankful when the earthquake began to shake the world.

Nick walked to Cudjo, embraced him as fervently as he’d embraced Arlette. Moments of soaring relief floated through his mind, alternating with unreasoning jagged bolts of adrenaline lightning. “You saved it, man,” he said. “You saved the damn plan. You saved fifty lives.” Cudjo seemed a bit taken aback. “You did the hard work, you fellas,” he said. “You make the claymore, you fight the Kluxers vis-a-vis. I make the shoot from ambush, me.” He shrugged. “That not hard, no. Not for hunter.”

Nick stepped back, looked at Cudjo. “I need you to guide most of these people someplace safe.”

“Mais oui, I do that, yes. Take you-all down bayou, me, take you across on batteau. Small batteau, my batteau, take all night cross that bayou, but you-all on south bank by morning. Lord High Sheriff can’t follow you there, no, you be safe.”

“Good. Good.” Nick nodded. He glanced over his shoulder. “Is there a place in town I can take some of the fighters? Some place defensible. I figure the best chance of covering your withdrawal is to go right into Shelburne City and seize the most public building I can find.”

Cudjo was surprised by this idea, but as he considered it an approving light began to glow in his eyes.

“That sho-nuff gon’ put the weasel in that chicken house, for true,” he said admiringly. “But the Lord High Sheriff, that Paxton, he got his sheriff’s men in the courthouse.”

“Any place other than the courthouse?”

“There’s Clarendon. Big ol’ plantation house, that Clarendon, and that Miz LaGrande who live there, that Miz LaGrande, she hate Sheriff Paxton. Big refugee camp at Clarendon, that big house, all the white people go there.”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t think we’re going to get any of these people to walk back into a refugee camp. Do we have anywhere else?”

Cudjo thought for a moment. “Carnegie Library. Big ol’ place, that library. She got big lawns, that library, nice fields of fire, yes.”

“How do we get there?”

“You go down highway, that highway, you turn left Jefferson Davis Street.” Nick gave a weary smile. “I’m not likely to forget the name of that street,” he said.

“How Trout the wounded?” A stout middle-aged woman came up to Nick. “We got some people shot up and no doctor. Some can’t walk. These people gonna die if they don’t see a doctor.” Nick bit his lip. “I don’t suppose there’s a hospital?” he asked Cudjo.

“No hospital in this parish, mais non. But they put sick people in Clarendon, that big house, there.”

“And you say the lady who owns Clarendon hates the sheriff?”

“Mais oui. But your people there, they no be safe. Lord High Sheriff find them.” Nick turned to the woman. “I’m afraid we’ll have to take the wounded with us. That’s bad for them, but they won’t be safe if they’re not with us.”

“Some of them are bad hurt.”

“Yes, I know, but—” He stopped as he saw a bright, incongruous blond head crossing his line of vision. The white man he’d talked to that morning, walking across the grass with his black wife and three kids. Wild inspiration struck Nick. “Hey!” he called. “Hey!” For the life of him he couldn’t remember the man’s name.

Jack Taylor stopped, turned, gave Nick an inquiring look.

“Yes! You!”

Taylor told his family to wait, walked toward Nick. Nick looked at him.

“Your family get through okay?”

“Yeah.” Taylor seemed surprised by being singled out this way.

“You have a car? You still want a job?”

Taylor gave a little incredulous laugh. “Now?” he said.

“I want you to go to Clarendon and talk to the woman who owns it—” He looked at Cudjo.

“Miz LaGrande,” Cudjo said. “LaGrande Shelburne Ashenden, she.”

“Mrs. LaGrande Ashenden,” Nick repeated to Taylor. “I want you to follow us to Shelburne City in your car—not with us, see, but later. And then I want you to go to this plantation house called Clarendon and talk to Mrs. Ashenden.”

“What do I say?” Taylor asked, wide-eyed.

“Tell her what’s happened here. She’s part of the local power structure, and she hates the sheriff. She’ll be able to get word out.” Another thought occurred to him. “No,” he said. “Wait till after midnight. Make sure all our people can get clear.”

Taylor considered this. “Okay,” he said. “But I have to know someone will be looking after my family.”

“We’ll do that,” Nick said. “We’ll—”

Bang! The ground picked Nick up and dropped him again. “Incoming!” Cudjo yelled, and threw himself flat.

Nick dropped to the ground himself, hugged the long moist grass, but not because he thought the sheriff had somehow trained a howitzer on them.

It was the primary wave of another big earthquake. Nick knew quakes well enough by now to know that, at least.

He heard the secondary waves coming, a roaring sound like a great wind passing through a forest, and then the earth began to dance.

He had been dreaming more and more of New Mexico. The busier he got, the more demands his job made on him, the more his mind seemed to need that anchor, that sense of home. He woke in the morning to the scent of mountain flowers, to a memory of high meadows shimmering gold in the sun. And then rose to a day of heat, sweat, and Mississippi mud.

It was time to go home, Larry thought. As soon as he got things set up here, as soon as Poinsett Landing would relax its grip on him.

“I’ll be with you in an hour or so,” Larry said into his satellite phone. “Just as soon as we get this ol’ barge tied up.”

“I’ll have something hot waiting,” Helen said. “We just got electricity restored today, so I can actually cook.”

The second barge of spent nuclear fuel was ready to start its journey to Waterford Three. This one contained several of the hot, partly melted fuel assemblies from the reactor’s last unloading, and thus its mooring merited Larry’s particular attention.

Larry watched as the barge eased its way out of the short canal from the auxiliary building to the west side of Poinsett Island. A pair of crewmen stood on the barge, minding the steel mooring and tow cables, while an Army backhoe drew the barge slowly to the Mississippi.

The barge would have to moor alongside the flank of the island overnight. There was supposed to be a towboat here to take the barge downstream, but some last-minute hitch with insurance had resulted in a delay. Larry didn’t understand the problem: the last load had traveled to Waterford without special insurance, but now, somehow, things were different.

Larry explained this to Helen over his cellphone while he watched the barge slide into the Mississippi and swing with the current.

“A typical screwup,” he concluded.

“Isn’t it good,” Helen said, “to deal with a typical screwup for a change? Instead of something new and completely unprecedented?”

Larry grinned and tipped his hard hat back on his head. “Waaal,” he said, “I guess you’re right.” He watched the current swing the barge to its mooring place.

“Looks like we’re going to be finished here in just a few minutes,” Larry said. “I’ll call for my helicopter.” Helen gave a chuckle. “Just listen to yourself,” she said. “‘I’ll call for my helicopter.’ You sound like Donald Trump.”

“I’m still the same cowpuncher you married,” Larry said. “And I’ll prove it if we can ever get back to New Mexico.”

“The company owes you a long vacation,” Helen said.

“It surely does. And I’m planning to collect it as soon as I make sure this operation is working.”

“See you in an hour.”

“Bye, sweetie.”

Larry clicked off his cellphone and stood watching the barge. The backhoe cast off the tow cable, and the cable was made fast to a tall steel stanchion that had been sunk and cemented into the close-packed rubble of Poinsett Island. The backhoe spun nimbly on its wheels, gravel flying, as it began its journey to shift an empty barge into the auxiliary building canal in order to take on another load of spent fuel. Larry thought of horses. Low Die, sitting low on its hocks as it prepared to cut to the left. The backhoe, nimble as it was, simply was not an adequate substitute.

One of the men on the barge tossed a mooring line to one of the men on shore so that the barge would be moored more securely, bow and stern. Larry looked at the cellphone and began to punch in the number that would summon the helicopter pilot to carry him home to Vicksburg. There was a crash as Poinsett Island jumped into the air. Larry felt his mouth drop open in surprise. Not again.

He heard the chuffing sound of the quake coming toward him and figured he wasn’t going to be standing much longer, so he lowered himself to his knees on the gravel surface. When he looked north he could see Poinsett Island heave up in a long traveling wave that flung plumes of dust from its crest like foam. The wave rolled under him, and he felt himself picked up, then dropped face-first to the ground in a spill of gravel and dust. Pain shot through his broken collarbone. Grinding and booming sounds slapped against his ears. Then another wave lifted him bodily—the feeling of that awesome force pressing him upward was at once breathtaking and terrifying—and then again he spilled downward in a slide of gravel. His hard hat tumbled off his head.

The air was full of dust. Larry glanced left and right through the sudden gray-brown haze and saw the barge vibrating in a sea of white water, the backhoe sliding backward as it fell off the crest of an earth-wave. He could see the operator’s arms flailing inside the machine’s roll cage. And then the backhoe toppled backward, its front scoop flying into the air. Larry watched in surprise. The machine was stable, and he didn’t understand why it would somersault like that.

He found the answer when another wave lifted him, and with the advantage of height he saw that the sides of the canal leading to the auxiliary building had collapsed, and that the backhoe along with its operator had been tumbled into the water. Got to help that poor man, Larry thought, before he’s buried alive, and he tried to rise to hands and knees and scramble across the gravel toward the canal. But the island kept jumping out from under him, and then he felt the ground under him start to slide, and water splash his face.

Poinsett Island was coming apart. It was rubble, and it was sitting on nothing but soft river mud, and the quake was shifting the rubble around. He needed to head toward the middle of the island before he slid into the Mississippi. He couldn’t help the backhoe operator unless he first helped himself. He tried belly-crawling away from the water, but he had no traction—the ground under him was shifting, sliding toward the river—sharp-edged stone and concrete cut his knees and hands. He gulped in air as the river boiled up around him, as the water took him and his view turned white. Larry lunged upward, felt his head break the surface. Breath burst from his lungs and he gasped in foam-flecked air. The air filled with grinding sounds as the rubble island slid away into the river. He blinked through water-splashed spectacles, his booted feet kicking as he trod water. He sensed a shadow behind him and turned his head just in time to see the laden barge swinging toward him, its black, rust-streaked sides looming tall as a house. It must have come unmoored.

Oh hell, he thought.

Larry raised his hands and pressed them against the side of the barge, as if he could hold it off him by strength alone. He knew it was futile, but it was all he could do.

The barge carried him back to the island, and crushed him against the merciless stone with all the weight of the steel hull and the big container flasks and the nuclear fuel.

Larry felt his rib cage cave in. Pain roared like a lion in his skull. He thought of plains and mountain flowers and the way Low Die shifted under him, all the powerful muscle and tendon under his control. Stupid, he thought, a stupid way to die.

The barge rebounded from the island, releasing Larry to slide below the surface. As water poured into Larry’s unresisting lungs, the barge spun on down the foam-flecked river, trailing on the end of its cable the mooring stanchion that had torn free of Poinsett Island.

THIRTY-FIVE

“God damn, not again!”

Jessica sat with Pat beneath the kitchen table and listened to the house bang around them. They had moved back into their house only hours before—Jessica, her head echoing with the President’s bizarre call, concluded that the emergency had ebbed to the point where she didn’t need to be physically present at headquarters every minute of the day—and the quake struck just as they were eating their first home-cooked meal since before the emergency. Jessica had prepared tagliarini verdi ghiottona, lovely green pasta noodles with a sauce of onions, tomatoes, carrots, chicken livers, veal, and ham—the recipe called for prosciutto, which was not precisely available, but one of the civilians she’d helped in the early days of M1 had given her a smoked Cajun ham, which proved an effective substitute. When the P wave hit and the house gave a sudden leap, Jessica and Pat slid neatly beneath the table before the S waves had a chance to reach them. Each kept a firm grip on priorities, and therefore retained both plate and fork.

“Right in the middle of fucking dinner!” Jessica muttered as the moaning quake enveloped them. Platters bounced loudly over her head. Something went smash in the bedroom. She was beginning to miss her helmet.

“At least there aren’t any operations going on right now,” Pat commented. His voice was as conversational as the circumstances permitted, shouting over the banging furniture and moaning earth.

“I hope I don’t lose an eye,” Jessica said. Rayleigh waves rattled her teeth as she spoke.

“I was hoping to keep your mind off that.”

“That was good of you.”

A wineglass walked off the edge of the table. Jessica snatched for it in midair, but the earth took a lurch at that instant and robust red wine splattered over the dining room floor. The solid Baccarat crystal, the sort of glassware out of which a major general was expected to serve her guests, didn’t so much as chip. She closed her right eye and peered out with her damaged left, tried to determine if she was losing any vision. But the earth was heaving and leaping too much for her to keep her eye focused on anything long enough.

The earth thrashed a few last times and then the vibrations died down. In the precarious silence, Jessica took a defiant bite of her dinner, handed the plate to Pat, and cautiously ventured into the front room to find her cellphone in the corner, having leaped from where she’d placed it on the coffee table. It was already ringing.

She was in communication with her headquarters immediately, and with Washington in a few minutes. Her staff were well practiced by now; they smoothly gathered information and fed it to her as it arrived. Jessica had time to scarf her dinner before Sergeant Zook arrived with her car. Pat stayed behind to get the house in order. On her way to headquarters in the Humvee, she hit the speed dialer number for Larry Hallock, but didn’t get an answer.

She tried three more times over the next hour, then tried some other numbers. She was unable to raise anyone at Poinsett Island. Then she got absorbed in her work, in the information flooding in and the deployments that needed to be made, and didn’t try calling again.

It was while looking at a hastily made printout of Prime Power deployments that she absently raised her hand to her right eye and looked at the list with her left.

A chill whispered up her spine as she realized that her left eye had gone blurry. She looked at the list for the length of three long, slow heartbeats, then reached for her cellphone and hit Pat’s speed dial number.

“Do you know the gentleman I saw this morning?” she said. “The gentleman in Jackson?”

“Yes.”

“I need to see him again,” Jessica said. “I need you to make the appointment.”

“Are you—”

“It’s not like it was last time,” Jessica said. “The situation has improved, but I still need to see the gentleman.”

“Jessica,” Pat said, “you are not keeping this job at the expense of your sight.”

“I hear you,” said Jessica, and rang off.

Her phone chirped again the instant she returned it to her pocket. Her caller was Helen Hallock, Larry’s wife, wondering if her husband had checked in. “When I last talked to him, he was about to call for his helicopter.”

Jessica checked and discovered that the helicopter hadn’t been called. She called her own chopper and took off into the waning light.

It was after the sun had already set that Jessica landed on Poinsett Island and made contact with the handful of people waiting there. They’d been cut off because their radio antenna had pitched into the river. It was then that Jessica discovered that part of Poinsett Island had slid into the river, that Larry Hallock was missing, and that a barge filled with murderously hot nuclear waste was drifting, untended, down the Mississippi.

The Mississippi Delta is filled with magnetic anomalies. Known as “plutons,” these objects are believed to be extrusions of magnetic ore created by volcanic activity during the distant geological past. These structures are enormously dense, and they straggle along the middle Mississippi like pebbles being washed along a ditch. Their immense weight creates stress on the surrounding subsoil—and since the Delta’s geology consists of little more than layers of muck, there is very little save inertia to prevent a pluton from doing exactly what it wants to do.

Plutons have been associated with earthquake activity, particularly in places where no fault lines have ever been detected. A large pluton discovered off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, has been blamed for the earthquakes that struck Boston in 1727 and 1755, quakes that inspired a famous sermon by the revivalist Reverend Thomas Prince, “The Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure,” in which Prince demonstrated that the quakes were caused by the Lord’s opposition to the sinful behavior of Boston’s backsliding Puritans. Another pluton beneath Charleston, South Carolina, has been held responsible for the giant earthquake that shook the southeastern United States in 1886.

The first June earthquake, J1, began at 5:54 p.m., Central Daylight Time, when a pluton, sitting atop gooey Delta sub-soil beneath Jonesboro, Arkansas—subsoil destabilized by the series of quakes—dropped six meters through slumping ground. The shocks caused by the passage of the pluton set off a familiar chain reaction as stored tectonic force was discharged throughout the various New Madrid fault structures.

J1 registered at 8.3 on the Richter scale, one-sixth the strength of M1 and a third the power of M6, but still equivalent to the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Its destruction was mitigated only by the fact that so much of the affected area had already been destroyed. Anything that was likely to fall down had already fallen down, and much of the population had been evacuated. Those remaining in the area were wise to the ways of earthquakes. Deaths were later reckoned to be in the 100-plus range. Jonesboro, already hard hit by M1 and M6, was shattered. Memphis—by this point a near-desert of broken stone, torn roadways, refugee camps, and collapsed homes—received another pounding. More land slid, more fountains geysered skyward, more damaged buildings collapsed. Precarious infrastructure repairs, to power and sewer lines, to bridges and railroad tracks, were wiped out. Efforts by the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers to mark a safe navigation channel in the Mississippi and other major rivers were brought to nothing as the topography of the river changed once again. But relief workers were already in place. Supplies and funds had already been allocated. In spite of the quake’s great size, remarkably little disruption took place, if only because everything had been disrupted long since.

Most of the survivors considered themselves lucky.

The earth shuddered, trembled, hummed. Children screamed. The long evening shadows were darkened by dust and debris.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi… Nick, without a watch, counted the seconds slowly to himself. This was bound to disrupt the whole parish, Nick thought. Which would make things easier for him. The more emergencies the sheriff had to deal with at once, the better.

The world ceased its moaning after three minutes. Nick could hear the S-waves receding toward the south, the freight train moving away. Nick looked up, saw others cautiously lifting their heads. Children screamed as their parents tried to comfort them. Nick carefully raised himself to his feet.

“Everyone into a car!” he said. “Let’s get ready to move out!” He made sure that Cudjo was in the lead car. He kissed Arlette and Manon. He hugged Jason and rubbed the red casing of the telescope for luck, then made sure they were all three on a truck rolling south.

When the last of the Home Guard, the women, and the children were gone into the growing darkness, Nick waved the shotgun over his head and shouted for the Warriors to get on the road. Bringing the war to the sheriff, Nick thought. To the capital of the enemy’s kingdom. Micah Knox lay half-submerged in the ditch. His heart pounded louder than the shots that still rang out over the fields. His men were being killed. Run down and killed by niggers. It was like every nightmare he’d ever had. He should help his friends, he knew.

But he didn’t help. He didn’t even move.

It was the snake that saved his life. As he and the others approached the gate, Knox saw a snake whipping through the grass just ahead of his boots, and his heart lurched and his steps faltered, and the others swept on through the gate while he pointed at the snake and stammered at them to be careful. He’d been ten paces behind when the bombs went off, and suddenly the air was filled with shrieking, screaming bits of sharp metal. He felt it tug at his clothing and flesh.

And then he saw the niggers coming, a howling black wave with weapons held high, and Knox let his shotgun fall and took to his heels. He ran back through the gate, through the parking lot, and across the road. He flung himself into the half-flooded bar ditch on the far side of the highway and wormed his way along it, sloshing through the warm water without daring to lift his head above the level of the ditch. He stayed there. He stayed in the ditch, his nose barely above water, while cars raced past his hiding place and shots rang out. The shots died away. Cars ran back and forth. People shouted and cheered. Knox didn’t move. There were cuts on his hands, tears in his clothing. From the mines. He ignored them. The earthquake came and Knox didn’t move. He didn’t move until the earthquake was over, until dozens of cars drove past, until he heard other cars drive off in the other direction, toward Shelburne City. And even then he didn’t move. He stayed in the ditch, alone with his heartbeat and his terror and his breath. He didn’t move until he heard birdsong in the trees, until he heard wind fluttering the grass on the shoulder of the highway. Until he heard nothing made by the hand of man.

He raised his head carefully, put his eyes at the level of the road, and looked for three seconds. Then he ducked down, crawled twenty feet along the ditch, then looked again.

The fields on either side of the road were empty. The camp sat abandoned. The setting sun reflected in shimmering rose color on the fence. A few cars sat forlorn in the parking lot, or stretched along the road. Vultures circled overhead, uncertain whether or not to land.

Knox rose cautiously, then ran in a crouch to the nearest car. Then to the next. The only cars that remained near the camp were those that wouldn’t start, or those whose owners were dead. And the car that Knox had come in. The Escort belonged to David Paxton, and Knox had been driving it for several days. The back window had been caved in by gunshots or by the mines’ terrifying ammunition. No one had driven it away, because Knox had the keys.

Knox ran to the car, opened the door, scrabbled in the back for his duffel. He opened the duffel and brought out his overnight kit with his drugs. He opened the big aspirin bottle and shook out the contents. His hands trembled. He moistened a finger, and dabbed out the last of the crystal meth from the baggie. He rubbed the crystal on his gums, then shook out a pair of black mollies and dry-swallowed them. It was only then that he noticed flies settling onto a corpse fifteen feet away. Jedthus, he saw, mutilated horribly.

He stared for a while, too shocked to feel fear, and then he straightened, took his bottle of aspirin in hand, and walked into the camp.

They were there, his friends, his action group. He had recruited them in Detroit, or they had recruited him, and they had traveled around the country doing the noble work of the white man. They had been killed horribly, beaten and torn, and lay like broken sacks of meal in the grass of the camp. They hadn’t died alone. There were nigger corpses lying in the grass as well, and Knox walked to the nearest and kicked the body in the head. He kicked it again, and then he got down on his knees and punched the dead face, and in a spasm of rage he picked up the arm of the corpse and bit it. He licked the arm and bit it again and licked it and bit it. Speed began to crackle through his synapses. He thought he knew what he wanted to do.

It was growing dark. Swallows darted over the camp. He looked for weapons but didn’t find any. All he had was his .38 Special revolver hanging from his belt.

Well, that would have to do.

Speed sang through his blood. His body shivered and jittered. He was getting too hyper, so Knox went back to the car and cooked up some heroin and shot it into his arm. That mellowed him out fine. He could kill now, he thought. He needed to be hyper to want to do it, but he needed to be mellow so that he could do it well. Now he was hyper and mellow at the same time. He had reached the precise point of balance where he could accomplish anything he set out to do.

He put his things in David Paxton’s car and got in and started the engine. David’s father would take care of the nigs who went to Shelburne City. Sheriff Paxton was a man of vision and could handle things there just fine. Knox, therefore, should go looking for the others.

Most of the mud people had taken their cars north, away from Shelburne City and into the country. Knox would find them. Maybe take some trophies. That was clearly what the situation required. Knox headed north. He kept his lights off so that the mud people wouldn’t see him coming. He drove along the highway until it climbed the District Levee and dead-ended in the washout. He cursed and banged his fist on the wheel of the car.

Speed sang a song of death in his ears. He turned around and headed back the way he came. They had to be around here somewhere. He would check every road, every lane, until he found them. And then he would do what he had come to do.

After the quake had rumbled to its finale, Omar got on the radio and ordered all his deputies to report to his headquarters.

All seven of them. That’s all that was left, if all the special deputies at the A.M.E. camp were gone. Seven, not counting himself and David.

What could he do with seven men? There were almost two hundred in the camp, and they now had the guns of his special deputies. Their… general… was right. Omar was out-gunned now. But he couldn’t call in help, could he? The state police, the Federals, the Army… they wouldn’t be on his side.

So, he thought. Time to end it. Time to run.

That’s what he told David, when David came into the courthouse in response to his radio call. Omar took David into his office and told him it was time to run for cover.

“No!” David said. “I’m not leaving! They killed my friends! This is my fight, too! This is a fight for every white man in America!”

Omar shook his head. “Most of the white men in America aren’t on our side,” he said. “It’s too late.” He looked at his son. “We need to save the next generation, okay? Save the—” An aftershock rumbled for a few brief seconds. Omar cast a nervous look at the crack that ran up the exterior wall of his office.

“Save the seed corn,” Omar said. “We need you to carry on.”

“Dad—sir—I—” David shook his head. “I don’t want to run away. This whole thing is my fault, and I don’t want to desert you when the chips are down.”

“You’re not deserting me,” Omar said. “You’re obeying orders. I am your Kleagle, and I’m sending you out of here with a message.”

Omar turned to his desk and took out a piece of paper. He wrote the name and address of the Grand Cyclops of Monroe. He handed the piece of paper to David. “I want you to go to this address. Tell Otis there’s been some trouble, and you need to hide out for a while. Don’t go into details—either it’ll be on the news or it won’t, and if it’s not, you don’t want to start any rumors. I’ll make contact if it’s safe—and if it’s not, he can pass you on to some other people who can look after you.” He forced a grin. “You might even see me there in a day or two.”

He walked past David and opened his office door. “Merle,” he said.

When Merle entered, Omar closed the door. “Merle, I need you to get my boy across the bayou. Put him on the road heading south.”

Merle nodded. “I’ll take him across in my own boat.”

Omar turned to David, found himself without words, and instead put his arms around his boy. “You keep safe,” he said. Hopeless love and hopeless despair flooded his heart.

And then he heard shooting. A whole rattling volley heard clear as day through his screened-in windows. Thirty, forty rounds, all different calibers.

“What the hell is that?” David demanded. Omar was too astonished to offer an answer. A few minutes later citizens began to swarm into the courthouse, shouting out that they’d just seen a whole posse of niggers shooting guns into the air as they broke into the Carnegie Library.

“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey, that’s our boat.”

He pointed out the side window of the little silver Hyundai. He saw the battered hull of Retired and Gone Fishiri sitting on a trailer outside a chainlink fence that surrounded a tumbledown clapboard business. The outboard was tipped up over the boat’s stem. The homemade sign by the road proclaimed Uncle Sky’s A-l Metal Building Products and Agricultural Machinery Repair—No Drugs!

The place was padlocked and closed. No lights shone in the building or in the fenced yard.

“Stop!” Jason said. “That’s our boat! We can put it in the water and get out of here!”

“I can’t haul a boat and trailer,” the driver said. “Not in this car. I don’t have a trailer hitch.” Jason, Manon, and Arlette were crammed in the backseat of the small Korean car, stuck in the middle of the long caravan of refugees following Cudjo away from the A.M.E. camp. They’d left the highway and were heading west along an ill-repaired blacktop road.

“We’ll use one of the trucks behind us,” Jason said. “One of them will have a trailer hitch.”

“I’m not stopping,” the driver said. “It’s not safe to stop.” He was elderly and peered anxiously over the steering wheel at the car in front of them. His wife clutched his arm in terror, with a grip so strong he could barely steer. She hadn’t said a word since she’d entered the vehicle.

“Hush,” Manon said to Jason. “Cudjo said he had a boat.”

“That boat won’t have a motor, I bet,” Jason said. “If we get the bass boat, we can run to Vicksburg and go for help.”

But no one was inclined to pay him any attention, so Jason tried to relax, squashed against the inside of the car, as the caravan moved west down a sagging, rutted two-lane black-top, slowing to a crawl every so often to negotiate parts of the road ripped across by quakes. The country was mostly uninhabited cotton fields with rows of pine trees planted between them. The sun eased over the horizon, and the western sky turned to cobalt. The caravan moved south, then west again, on narrow gravel roads. Sometimes the cars splashed through areas flooded to the floorboards. Eventually the line of vehicles pulled to a straggling halt in an area filled with young pines. Jason could see car head-lights glinting off flood waters to the right.

After getting out of the Hyundai, Manon and Arlette thanked the elderly couple for the ride. Jason couldn’t stop thinking about Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting in Uncle Sky’s yard. He saw Cudjo walk past with some men carrying rifles, and Jason trotted alongside, his telescope bouncing on his hip. A wind stirred the tops of the pine trees.

“Sir?” he said. “Mr. Cudjo?”

The hermit turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the growing night. “Boy, I want you stay with you mama.”

“Could we use another boat right now? As we drove here, I saw the boat we came in sitting on a trailer. We could go back and get it.”

“Put this truck ’cross this road, you,” Cudjo said to the driver of a pickup. “You—” Patting the shoulder of one of his riflemen. “You, la has, down in them trees, you. Stay quiet, you. Lord High Sheriff come, you flank him, yes? The rest of you, you stay here, behind truck, yes? You no shoot, you, you don’t know who come. Could be Nick and them who come, yes?”

Then Cudjo turned to Jason. “You tell me ’bout this boat, you.”

“It’s a bass boat,” Jason said. “We came down on it from Missouri. There’s a fifty-horse Johnson on it, and we had fuel left. If we put it in the water, we could travel to Vicksburg, send for help.” Cudjo frowned at him. A gust of wind tugged at his long beard. “Where you see this boat, you.”

“Uncle Sky’s Metal Building Whatever,” Jason said. “The boat was right in the yard. It wasn’t even behind the fence, it was like somebody just dropped it there. The place was closed, nobody around. We could hitch the trailer to a truck and drive it off, no problem.”

Cudjo’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Skyler King, he a Kluxer, that man. But he an old man, that Sky, he live in Hardee with his daughter, that Rachel. Ain’t nobody at his business now, no.”

“That Sky place isn’t five minutes from here,” Jason said. “We can make a quick trip.”

“Jason—” Arlette came up the line of vehicles, took Jason’s hand. “Mama says—” Jason squeezed her hand. “We’ll go get the boat,” he told Cudjo, “if we can have someone to drive us out there.”

Jason and Arlette held hands on the bench seat as they were driven to Uncle Sky’s. Their van was alone on the old road—it was a plush vehicle, carpeted and with soft seats, a Chevy that still smelled new. The driver in front of them was a young light-skinned man named Samuel who scanned the road nervously as he pushed the vehicle to high speed in between slowing down for partially repaired tears and crevasses. Every so often Samuel would drop a hand to finger the pistol at his hip.

“Here it is,” Jason called. Jason leaned into Arlette’s shoulder as Samuel swung the van abruptly into Uncle Sky’s gravel drive. The headlights tracked across a yard over which was scattered building materials, agricultural equipment, then the battered bass boat on its trailer, parked on the grass to one side of the gate.

Samuel backed the van to the trailer. Jason left his telescope on the seat, and he and Arlette went out the van’s sliding side door. Jason felt the night wind ruffle his hair. They went to the trailer, and Jason looked down to see that a padlock had secured the ball on the trailer, making it impossible to hitch the trailer and tow it away.

“Damn,” Samuel said. “Wait here.” He opened the hatch at the back of the van and began searching through his large toolbox for something to cut the padlock.

Jason hoisted himself onto the bass boat’s foredeck. Rainwater sloshed in the boat’s bottom. Jason hopped over the cockpit to the aft deck, then bent to inspect the outboard motor. From what he could see in the dark, the outboard was as he left it, but when he felt with his hand in the well near the motor he couldn’t locate any of the jerricans of fuel they’d brought with them from Rails Bluff. Jason straightened. “There’s no gas,” he said. “They probably took the cans inside. I’ll go look.” The fence was two feet away, chain link twined with Virginia creeper. Jason launched himself at the fence, clung with fingers, dug his toes into the gaps between the chain link. He scrambled to the top, put both feet on the pipe that ran along the top of the fence, adjusted his footing, and raised himself to a precarious standing position, arms flung out for balance. The gusty wind tried to pluck him off. He grinned. “Wish I had my skates,” he said. “I could travel on this.”

“Be careful,” Arlette said. Jason knelt, reached a hand down to Arlette. “Want to come up?” he asked.

“You better hope there’s not a big dog in there,” Arlette said.

“Woof woof,” Jason said. He dropped his butt onto the pipe, then twisted around and lowered himself to the soft ground inside Uncle Sky’s compound.

Samuel found a hacksaw and began working on the lock that secured the trailer. Jason walked through the cluttered yard to the unpainted clapboard building. He stepped onto the porch that ran the length of the front. Planks sagged under his feet. He looked into the window, peering through a frame of his two hands pressed against the glass. He saw the glint of a glass counter, dark objects that were probably lawnmowers or lawn tractors. He walked to the front door and tried to turn the knob—

—Then jumped three feet as an alarm bell began to ring out. His heart hammered. The door had been wired. Jason gave a helpless look back toward the gate, saw Samuel and Arlette staring at him, Samuel with the tail lights of his van outlining his exasperated expression.

“Sorry!” Jason shouted over the clatter.

Then he walked to the end of the porch and peered around the side of the building. Another boat loomed there in the shadow of the building, a big eighteen-foot powerboat with a canvas top. Jason wondered about stealing it. It would certainly furnish more deluxe transport than Retired and Gone Fishin’. The ringing bell was on this side of the building, right over Jason’s head. The clamor rang in his skull. He clenched his teeth and walked around the boat, put a foot on the fender of the trailer in preparation to boost himself into the cockpit, and he saw that the tire on the trailer was flat. So much for driving off with it.

Jason boosted himself into the cockpit. A hulking outboard was tilted up over the stern. Jason groped in the recesses of the stern and found a pair of plastic jerricans—not, judging by the weight, the ones he had brought on the bass boat, but larger and holding more gasoline. “Bingo!” he shouted over the clamor of the bell, but he doubted that anyone could hear him.

One container was connected by rubber hoses to the engine, and the other was free. Jason took the free container and heaved it onto the gunwale, then lowered it to balance it precariously on the trailer fender. He jumped off the boat and managed to catch the jerrican just as it started to topple over. He took it in both hands and waddled across the yard with his knees banging into the container at every step. He was happy to be distancing himself from the clatter of the alarm.

While Jason had been exploring, Samuel had finished cutting the padlock free, and he and Arlette had hooked the trailer to the van. “Here’s some gas,” Jason said as he brought the gas to the gate. He tried to squeeze it between the gate and the upright to which it was chained, but failed.

“It’s too heavy to boost over the fence,” he said. “Can you cut a hole in it?”

“I’ve got some wire cutters,” Samuel said.

“There’s another gas can where I found this one. I’ll go get it.” Jason trotted back to the powerboat. While the alarm bell blared through his nerves, he disconnected the gas can from the outboard by feel, lowered it out of the boat, and began to carry it across the equipment-filled yard. Samuel had cut a modest hole in the wire of the gate, and he was bent over, dragging the jerrican through the gap. He was brightly lit by the headlights of his van. Arlette stood by, watching him. The clamor of the alarm filled the night.

And then a small car—its headlights were off—lunged out of the darkness by the road. Samuel sensed the car’s approach at the last second and turned to face it just as the car drove him into the chain link. Samuel’s arms were thrown out wide as the gate bulged inward beneath the thrusting force of the car, but the chain held and Samuel’s legs were pinned against the mesh by the car grill. He pitched forward from the waist and sprawled across the car’s hood. Arlette watched in stunned surprise, her mouth open in a cry that went unheard beneath the clanging alarm.

Then the driver’s door flung open, and a crop-haired man lunged for Arlette and seized her arm. She tried to wrench free, but he brought his other hand up, with a small pistol. He shoved the barrel into Arlette’s throat, and she froze, her mouth still wide in a frozen scream.

Jason stared at the scene, the heavy plastic container still hanging from his arms. The ringing alarm filled his skull. He couldn’t seem to move. Astonishment and terror froze him to the spot. The driver was one of the deputies, Jason saw. He remembered seeing the little man during the deputies’ attack yesterday.

The little deputy was shouting at Arlette. Jason couldn’t hear the words over the urgent alarm. But when the deputy swiped Arlette across the face with his little pistol, hot rage surged through Jason’s veins. He dropped the heavy container on the ground and ran for the gate.

The deputy backed Arlette to the side of the van, was pressing her against the driver’s door. Jason crouched behind an old Allison-Chalmers tractor parked near the fence. He saw headlights reflect off the little black gun in the man’s hand, felt helplessness jangle through his mind like the clap of the bell. He looked for a weapon, saw nothing in the darkness.

Jason saw a violent movement, the deputy punching Arlette with the pistol, and he heard Arlette scream over the clamor of the alarm. Jason’s nerves wailed. He clenched his fists. All he had to do, he thought, was get the man to let go of her for just a second.

He climbed the tractor, crossed over the seat and stood on the big rear tire next to the fence. The wind flurried at him, whipped his hair. The deputy was twenty feet away along the fence. He had Arlette pinned to the van with his left hand around her throat; the right hand brandished the pistol in her face. He was turned away from Jason. “Where are they, bitch?” The demand was barely audible above the clattering alarm. “Where are they all hiding?” Arlette cringed away from the pistol. There was blood on her face.

Jason took a giant stride into space, landed on the top rail of the fence. For a moment he balanced wildly, pigeon-toed on the rail, arms spinning like windmill blades, and then he managed to shift one foot and gained a firm purchase. Weird triumph sang through his soul.

Clicked in!

He took one step along the pipe, then another. Then a third. The deputy kept howling questions, prodding Arlette with the barrel of the gun.

Landfakie, Jason thought as he took another step. Landfakie and mule-kick the son of a bitch. The deputy must have seen Jason out of the corner of his eye, because he turned and looked up just as Jason took his last, swift step. Jason pivoted on the rail, saw little pebble irises in the wide, astonished eyes as he hurled himself into space. Jason saw the little gun swing toward him as, spinning in the air, he lashed backward and downward with both feet. “Run!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. Run. Everybody run.

It felt like a giant hand slapping him out of the sky. Suddenly he was on the ground, amid moist grass, teeth rattling from the impact. He’d brought the deputy down, too, because the man was lying there with a half-dazed expression on his face. Arlette stood over them both, staring. “Run!” Jason screamed again. He saw the hand and the gun outflung on the grass and launched himself at the weapon, putting his weight on the deputy’s arm. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The flesh had a strange, metallic taste. The deputy gave a shout and punched Jason in the body with a fist. Agonizing pain crackled along Jason’s nerves. He tried to hang on, but he felt himself growing weaker, weaker with each clang of the alarm, with each impact as the man’s fist hammered into his side. When the arm and the gun slipped out of his grasp at last, it felt like trying to hold flowing water in his two hands. Concussions slapped at Jason’s ears. He felt himself wince with each shot, felt tears squeezed from his eyes. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Couldn’t breathe at all.

Jason blinked tears away. To his surprise he was looking at the deputy again. The deputy was lying on the ground. And he was dead, small blank irises staring at the sky from his white, startled eyes.

“Well, excuse me, then, General,” the towboat captain barked. “I was told to pick up a barge filled with nuclear waste that had got loose during the quake. Well that’s what I come for, so when I was directed to a barge filled with nuclear waste I picked it up. And now this guy says it was the wrong barge of nuclear waste, and acts like it’s my fault.”

The towboat captain was a red-faced man in a baseball cap. His chin bristled with gray unshaven whiskers. He glared at Emil Braun, the power company executive. Braun glared back through his thick spectacles.

“This is the empty barge,” Braun said. “Those containers haven’t been filled with waste yet.”

“Why is that my fault?” the captain demanded.

“Wait a minute,” Jessica said. “The radwaste is still missing?” Emil Braun had been sent by the company to take charge at Poinsett Island in the absence of Larry Hallock. The towboat and its captain had been near Poinsett Island before the quake, on their way to retrieve the barge of nuclear waste that had just been unloaded from the Auxiliary Building. On the night of the quake, when the few people remaining on the island had finally realized that the barge was missing, Jessica responded by sending out helicopter patrols to scour the river downstream from the power station. A drifting barge had been located toward morning, and remained in the choppers’ spotlights until the towboat could take it in charge.

Now Emil Braun, having checked the numbers, was assuring everyone that the wrong barge had been rescued.

“The captain picked up the wrong barge,” he told Jessica.

“I picked up the barge y’all told me to,” the captain said. Jessica reached for her cellphone. “Can you give me the numbers of the barge we’re looking for?” Braun looked at a clipboard filled with computer printout. “You bet,” he said. Jessica gave the orders for a complete helicopter sweep of the river between Poinsett Island and Baton Rouge. Then she told the towboat captain to get his boat on the river and be prepared to undertake another rescue.

“I picked up the boat y’all told me to,” the captain said. “I don’t got to pick up another till my company gets another contract.”

“You picked up the wrong barge!” Braun insisted. “The contract wasn’t filled!”

“Enough!” Jessica said in her major general voice.

There was silence. Jessica looked at Braun. “Okay,” she said. “What happens if this radwaste gets into the river?”

Braun licked his lips. “Well, that depends on whether the fuel assemblies get broken or not. The rods are full of little uranium pellets, and those could spill out. And if the pellets were from the really hot fuel assemblies that just got removed from the reactor, then there would be a steady source of contamination in the river until the pellets eroded completely. But,” he added judiciously, “that’s not likely. I don’t think. Quite frankly, I do not believe any studies have been done in regard to this eventuality.” Jessica nodded. “So what could happen is somewhere on a scale between nothing at all to radioactive contamination of the lower Mississippi that could go on for years.”

Braun nodded. “Um. I guess.”

Jessica turned to the towboat captain. “This river is under martial law,” she said. “You can contact your company and tell them to generate a new contract if you have to, but contract or not, you’re going after that barge.”

The captain began to speak.

“Don’t make me put a guard on your boat!” Jessica snapped. “And don’t think you can just sail away, because I’m going to be flying right above you, in my own helicopter, until that barge is found and brought under control.”

The captain hesitated, then spoke. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

THIRTY-SIX

Jason sat in the cockpit of the bass boat. Midnight-black water hissed along the boat’s chine. Jason had turned his body to port because he’d been wounded in the back and he couldn’t sit properly in the seat, not without agonizing pain. He rested his chin on his left shoulder and upper arm. He tried to breathe, but it wasn’t easy—he had to take shallow, rapid breaths, because deep breathing had become impossible. He just couldn’t seem to expand his diaphragm far enough to take a full breath. Cypress floated across his line of vision, alien shadows reaching for the sky with moss-wreathed fingers. Stars floated overhead, shone in the still waters of the bayou.

He had been shot, it seems, when he’d jumped onto the deputy. The bullet had gone into his lower back on the right side and come out near the top of his right shoulder. The entrance wound was smallish and the exit wound a great tear across his shoulder. From the murmured, half-overheard conversations of the grownups, the chief question concerned what the bullet had hit on the way. Probably it had struck a few ribs. The chief question was whether or not it had punctured a lung. Jason’s inability to breathe properly seemed an ominous symptom, though the fact he wasn’t spitting blood seemed cause for optimism. He could feel Arlette’s hand stroking his head. She was kneeling behind him on the afterdeck. Barring a few cuts and bruises she was all right, had come through it all unharmed.

Her voice came into his ear. “Qa va?”

“Qa va,” he said. “Okay.”

The deputy was dead. Still lying on the grass, probably, starlight reflecting in his startled eyes. Samuel had shot him. Samuel hadn’t been killed when the car hit him, he hadn’t even been badly hurt. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, that was all. The chain link had absorbed the force of the hurtling car. When Samuel had got his wits and breath back, he’d seen Jason fighting with the deputy on the ground. He’d reached for the pistol he wore and got it free of the holster and taken aim and shot the deputy as soon as the little man had wrestled his own gun away from Jason and stood. It gave Samuel a clear shot. Samuel had got his breath back, but Jason hadn’t. He was in pain and the muscles of his back had swollen hard as iron and he could barely breathe.

And maybe he’d been shot in the lung. Was Jason dying? It was a question that seemed of great interest to the grownups. Jason himself was past thinking about it, though.

The grownups had put the boat in the water. Manon was piloting, and Arlette was aboard, and a man named Bubba who said he’d worked on towboats as a bowman and knew the Mississippi. They were going to Vicksburg. They were going to Vicksburg to put Jason into a hospital and get help for the refugees in Spottswood Parish.

Moss-shrouded cypress floated past, tall in the water. Stars glittered at their feet. Jason leaned on the side of the cockpit and tried to breathe.

The library smelled of dust and decaying book paper. It was a better fortress than Nick had expected—there were iron grills over the windows, which would certainly keep out unwanted visitors as well as the larger munitions, like tear gas grenades. The front door was solid cypress wood and so invulnerable that the Warriors had been unable to break it down: they’d had to pry off one of the iron grills, go in through a window, and open the door from the inside. The walls were thick concrete, covered with plaster that had partially peeled away in the quakes.

“Keep a lookout,” Nick said. “Two to each window. Nobody show a light.” He took his own station behind the reassuring oaken solidity of the reference librarian’s desk. In front of him, on the desk, he propped the radio handset he’d taken from the deputy Jedthus. Carefully, wary of the pains in his stiffening body, he lowered himself into the librarian’s padded swivel chair. He picked up the phone. Nothing. Just as Cudjo had said, the phones were out. He sat in the chair and glanced around. There had been surprisingly little quake damage to the building. The shelves were metal and bolted to the floor and still standing. A great many books had spilled to the floor, and papers from the librarians’ desks. All the windows were shattered—probably in earlier quakes—but the iron grills would work better than glass to keep out whatever needed keeping out. There were three different channels on the police radio, which Nick could reach with pushbuttons. He shifted from one to the other, but the sheriff’s deputies kept all their calls on Channel One. There were calls about earthquake damage and injuries, all of which the sheriff relayed to other emergency services, most of which seemed amateurish and improvised. There was chatter about putting up roadblocks around the library, about evacuating people who lived in the neighboring buildings. Nothing whatsoever about sending deputies after the refugees that had fled from the camp.

Nick heard nothing about sending in a negotiator, nothing about trying to find out what Nick and the Warriors actually wanted. Nick wasn’t particularly surprised.

Darkness slowly fell. The library grew full of shadows. Flickering on the wall behind Nick was firelight reflected from the burning police vehicle that Nick had driven onto the front lawn of the library, then set on fire.

Nick didn’t know whether it was a signal, or bravado, or something else. It had just seemed the thing to do.

The other cars were parked closer, nestled right against the library, in case the Warriors decided they needed a fast exit.

“Anyone have a watch?” Nick asked. “What time is it?”

It was after ten thirty. Cudjo, he hoped, had got the refugees well into cover by now. Nick rose from his chair and winced at the pain that shot through his kidney. He hobbled to the front window, but stayed well under cover as he shouted, “We’ll talk! Send somebody to talk to us!”

“What you doing?” said Tareek Hall from somewhere from the depths of the library. “We want to kill those crackers, not talk.”

“Send someone to talk!” Nick shouted out the window. “We want to talk!”

“The fuck we do,” said Tareek.

At least he wasn’t shouting out the window.

Nick turned to Tareek and limped toward him. “I’m going to try to get other people here,” he said.

“Someone from the Army, the Justice Department. Major network media.”

“Shit, they’re all part of the conspiracy anyway,” Tareek said.

“If the Army’s part of the conspiracy,” Nick said, “we’ll be dead in an hour or two no matter what we do. We can’t match their firepower for a second. But you don’t know the Army, and I do. I grew up in the Army. And I do not believe they are a part of this.”

“Shit,” said Tareek in disgust. “You still don’t get it, do you?” Jedthus’s radio began to chatter. Nick limped back to the librarian’s desk to listen. Nick’s offer to talk had been heard and was being reported to Omar, the sheriff. Omar just acknowledged with a “ten-four” and otherwise made no comment.

That was all right, Nick figured. He could wait.

Omar looked across the lawn at the Carnegie library from the relative safety of Georgie Larousse’s living room. The smell of the lasagne that the Larousse family had eaten for dinner made his stomach turn over. His head throbbed. He had no idea what to do.

He couldn’t seem to think. That was the trouble. All the careful fences he’d built were breaking down, and he didn’t know how to rebuild them.

All Omar had managed to do so far was choke off any attempt to talk to the people inside. But he didn’t know how much longer he could do that. The parish council could decide to overrule him at any time, and he suspected that the only reason they hadn’t was that they were distracted by earthquake repair work.

And he had called in as many local Klansmen that he could get ahold of, people like Ozie Welks, who hadn’t been directly involved with the business at the A.M.E. camp because they’d been looking after their businesses and families in the wake of the disaster. They were armed, reasonably committed, and dangerous so long as they stayed sober, but Omar knew perfectly well that he couldn’t launch them at the library without getting them all massacred.

I had no idea about the deaths at the A.M.E. camp, he said to himself. Rehearsing his defense. That must have been Jedthus Carter and those skinhead friends of his. I had no idea who those people were, but Jedthus said they were private security guards and I was so short-handed that I had to employ them.

“How about we gas ’em?” Merle suggested. “Shoot some tear gas in there, then gun ’em when they come out?”

“Grills on the windows,” Omar said.

“Oh.”

Merle seemed surprised. Probably he hadn’t been inside the library since he was in grade school. An aftershock rattled the shelves in the Larousse kitchen.

Did anyone see me at the A.M.E. camp after the second day following the quake? Omar thought to himself. None of your witnesses can put me there. I was dealing with the epidemic at Clarendon that whole time and didn’t have any time to spare to deal with the situation anywhere else. He considered this defense to himself. It was possible he could get away with it, he thought, if he had the right jury.

Maybe, he thought, maybe it was just time to run for it. Keep things going here as long as he could to guarantee David time to escape, and then follow him over the bayou and away.

“Is there a back door or something?” Merle said. “Is there a basement and a way into it? If we could get someone in there, he could gas the place out before they knew anything about it.” Omar thought about that one. “Let’s see if we can get the keys from the librarian,” he said. Nick listened to the plot developing over the police radio. He didn’t know whether the sheriff had completely forgotten that his radio security was compromised, or just figured that the car radio Nick used had burned up with Jedthus’s car. In any case it seemed not to have occurred to him that Nick might have taken Jedthus’s handset.

A party was going to creep up to the rear of the building, let themselves into the back door, and start flinging tear gas grenades up the back stair into the library. Then another group would charge the building and shoot down the Warriors as they came staggering out.

It was easy enough to counter the scheme. But as Nick placed his soldiers in the windows and told them to keep alert, he felt sadness drift across for the poor fools who were going to try to storm his stronghold.

They’d even waited for moonrise, so that they could be spotted all that much more easily. His people saw three figures slipping across the back lawn, aiming at the rear door, and held their fire until they couldn’t miss. A volley of shots boomed out, echoing in the wide space of the library. Nick felt his ears ring. One of the party fled, and the other two lay stretched out on the lawn. The larger storming party never left their assembly area behind one of the residential homes across from the front of the library. Instead they swarmed into whatever cover they could find and started shooting, a truly impressive amount of fire that crackled through the night, but all completely useless, most of it going into the air or thwacking solidly into the library’s concrete walls. Poor fire control, Nick thought. The Warriors fired back, increasing the racket. It required some effort for Nick to get his own people to stop shooting. Eventually the deputies’ fire dwindled away.

No one inside the library had been hurt. The sharp smell of gunpowder stung the air. Nick asked someone for the time. It was a little after two in the morning.

“We want to talk!” he shouted out a window. “Send someone to talk to us!” Warm night air drifted through the Larousse house. Return fire from the library had knocked out most of the front windows, letting out the air-conditioning. Omar’s headache beat at his temples. Merle had been killed trying to sneak into the library. Omar felt as if he’d just had his right leg shot out from under him. He didn’t know what to do. Those people in the library, under their… their general… were just too heavily armed.

“What I want to do, Omar,” said Sorrel Ellen of the Spottswood Chronicle, “is volunteer to talk to those people.”

“No, Sorrel,” said Omar. “No way.”

Sorrel gave his high-pitched laugh. The grating sound sank into Omar’s head like a sharp knife.

“I’m a trained interviewer,” Sorrel insisted. “I can find out what they’re up to.”

“I know what they’re up to,” Omar said. “They’re a bunch of killers. They killed my deputies, and if—” He gave up. “Sorrel, I’m too busy to talk to the press right now,” he said. “I need you to leave the building.”

“But this is your headquarters! Your nerve center! I want to be present at your decisions!” Omar firmly took Sorrel’s arm and led him to Georgie Larousse’s kitchen door. “Keep your head down as you go,” he said. “Those people are killers.”

And there, as he saw to his deep surprise, he saw Miz LaGrande crossing the lawn and heading in his direction.

“Mrs. Ashenden!” he said.

Even in the predawn darkness Miz LaGrande looked frail, not quite recovered from the dysentery. But she was dressed finely in a linen summer dress, with her hair done and a straw sun hat pinned in place, even though there was no sun. She carried a little clutch bag, and she was crossing the Larousse back lawn with precise steps of her sandaled feet.

Omar’s special deputies, the heavily armed locals he’d summoned to his aid, stepped back to permit the old woman to pass.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” Omar asked. “You’ve been ill—you should be in bed.” Mrs. Ashenden walked to the back door, looked up at Omar. “May we speak, Sheriff Paxton?” he said.

“I’m very busy, Mrs. Ashenden. We have a bad situation here.”

Her lips pursed. “So I gather. That is the situation we need to discuss.” Omar’s head whirled. He drew back from the door. “I hope we can make this brief,” he said. Mrs. Ashenden entered, and Sorrel Ellen, damn him, turned around and followed her. “This is not a safe place for either of you to be,” Omar said. “We’ve got a bunch of cold-blooded killers in the library, and—”

Mrs. Ashenden carried with her the scent of talc and rose water. “I have had a visit, Sheriff,” she said crisply. “From a refugee who had been at the A.M.E. camp.”

Omar stood in astonished silence. Think! he told himself.

“The gentlemen described some of the activities inflicted on the people in the camp,” Mrs. Ashenden said.

“The shootings, the riots. The—the activities that provoked this violent response.” Sorrel blinked for a surprised moment at Mrs. Ashenden, then reached for his notebook.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Omar said. His voice seemed to be coming from another place, from far away. “I haven’t been to that camp in days. You know that. You know I’ve been at Clarendon.” She looked up at him, eyes glittering in the moonlight. “That’s possible,” she said. “But in any case I fear that the situation has gone beyond our ability to cope with it. We shall need to open negotiations with those people in the library, and also summon aid from the emergency authorities, perhaps the national government. They can send in soldiers, FBI men, trained negotiators.”

Keep the fence up, Omar thought. Keep it up till dawn, at least. Then get over the Bayou on Merle’s boat and get out of here.

“They are murderers, ma’am,” Omar said. “They killed my deputies. They killed Merle out on the lawn not two hours ago. I am not negotiating with them.”

Mrs. Ashenden gave a precise little nod. “That is precisely why you should not negotiate,” she said. “That is why I want someone else to talk with those people in the library.”

“You know it will be a black eye for Spottswood Parish if we have to call in help. I think my department is capable of dealing with this once the sun comes up and we can get a better look at the situation.”

“Excuse me,” Sorrel said, his pen poised on his notebook. “Could I have some clarification regarding these shootings and riots that Mrs. Ashenden mentioned?”

Omar felt sweat breaking out on his throat, on his forehead. “You know two people got killed when we fenced the camp,” he said. “You know there was a riot when Dr. Patel and the Red Cross came to inspect the place. If anything else happened down there, Jedthus didn’t tell me about it.”

“Sheriff Paxton,” Mrs. Ashenden said, “you’ve lost control of the situation. Will you call for assistance, or will you not?”

Omar drew himself up, and hitched his gun belt higher on his hips. “Mrs. Ashenden,” he said. “You have no official standing in this parish. You can’t give me orders. Now, why don’t you go home and go to bed?

You’ve been ill and should get your rest.”

“I will speak to members of the parish council,” she said.

“We have just had a major earthquake. I imagine they’re very busy.”

“I will use the nice satellite phones the Emergency Management people gave us.” Omar looked down at her. Exasperation and headache beat each other to a standstill in his skull.

“Just let me alone to deal with this situation, Mrs. Ashenden,” he said. He reached out and took her arm.

“I would appreciate it if you would leave and let me get on with my business.” Mrs. Ashenden seemed a little taken aback as Omar took her through the kitchen to the back door—perhaps none of her inferiors had ever laid hands on her this way. Omar dropped her arm, then held the screen door open for her to pass out of the house.

“Just a moment, Sheriff,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “I have something here for you.” She reached into her little clutch bag.

“Watch out for those killers, now,” Omar said. “I don’t want you to get shot.” For a brief, hopeful moment he considered shooting the old lady himself—why not finish off as many of the people he hated as he could before vanishing over the bayou?—then concluded it wouldn’t be wise. Not in front of the press. Not in front of the boys, who might well understand eradicating a bunch of niggers, but maybe not an old white lady.

But the press, now, he thought. Why not send Sorrel Ellen off to the library like he wanted? Not as a negotiator but as a hostage? Hell, they’d probably cut his head off.

Now that was a happy thought.

Omar reached out, took Mrs. Ashenden’s elbow again. “Ma’am?” he said.

“Just a minute, Sheriff. It’s a thing I brought for you specially.” Her little bag didn’t have much room for anything, but she seemed to be taking her time finding it.

A silver teaspoon? Omar wondered. Some porcelain knick-knack?

“Ah,” she said brightly. “Here we go.”

It was a gun, Omar saw in surprise. It was small and silver and had two barrels, both of which were very large.

And when it went off, it made a very large noise.

Dawn rose over the water, turned the wavelets pale. The bass boat picked up speed, headed downriver as if those aboard knew where they were going.

But they didn’t. They were lost.

Bubba, the former bowman, thought they were in the Mississippi. Certainly the body of water in which they traveled was grand enough to be the great river. But the river had changed its course, he thought, and he wasn’t sure where the Mississippi was in relation to anything else.

They should have seen Vicksburg by now. They had been making fairly good time, at least for a small boat. Bayous were usually still, slack water, but there had actually been a perceptible current in the bayou as they’d set out, rainwater pouring off the land with two or three knots of force. The current alone should have carried them to the Mississippi by morning.

But there was a lot of lowlying back country in Louisiana, with many bayous and horseshoe lakes and chutes that had once been part of the Mississippi system. Bubba was inclined to think that the Mississippi had swallowed these old channels again, at least temporarily, and that they’d traveled along these during the night. They may have bypassed Vicksburg entirely.

In that case, however, they should have crossed an interstate highway and a line of railroad tracks. They hadn’t seen any such thing.

Though, if the highway and the railroad had been washed out over enough of its length, they might have passed through the gap at night without noticing.

Manon and Bubba debated this possibility as Manon headed downstream. The only map that either of them possessed was an AAA road atlas that one of the refugees had in his car, and the road map was singularly lacking in navigational data for inland waterways. Jason lay inert in his seat, turned to the port side, his body swaying slightly left and right as Manon turned to avoid debris. Since the river had broadened to its current magnitude the once-brisk current had grown sluggish, almost undetectable. The river was wide and gray and still, full of rubbish and timber. Sometimes whole rafts of trees moved downstream with their tangled roots uppermost, like floating islands overgrown by strange, bare, alien vegetation.

The water was so wide and still that it seemed almost a lake. It reminded Jason of something, but he couldn’t remember what.

Jason had drowsed through the night, half-conscious of the movement of the water, the trees shivering in aftershocks, the slow grind of pain in his back. By morning he had stiffened to the point where he could barely move. His face hurt. His throat was swollen from his near-strangulation of two days ago, and he could only relieve the sharp pain in his trachea by tilting his head to the left. He could breathe only in short little pants, like a winded dog. He suspected he now bore a strong resemblance to the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But Arlette was alive. There were cuts on her face, but she was otherwise unharmed. She sat on the foredeck opposite him, her legs dangling into the cockpit. In her hands she cradled her grandfather’s watch, something she’d seen dangling across the chest of the red-haired deputy when he’d threatened her. Just seeing the watch had so overwhelmed her that she hadn’t been able to say a word in answer to the deputy’s questions.

Jason rested one hand on her bare knee. She smiled at him, that close-lipped Mona Lisa smile. When he looked at her, his pain faded beneath a warm surge of pleasure.

“I think we passed it,” Bubba said. “I think Vicksburg is way the hell behind us.” He had replaced Manon at the controls of the boat. He had the AAA map of Louisiana propped in his lap, for all the world as if he was taking a car out for a Sunday outing.

He was a small, wizened man with skin parched and wrinkled as a raisin. He had a little mustache and knobby knuckles and narrow, peglike tobacco-stained teeth.

“What’s the next town, then?” Manon asked.

“Natchez. Thirty, forty mile, I guess.” His face broke into a grin. “Big ol’ gambling boat down there. I won two hundred dollar there, one time.”

“And if we turn around and head back to Vicksburg?” Manon asked.

“Same distance, maybe a little less. Best we go with the current, I reckon.” Jason couldn’t work up much interest in the matter one way or another. He was just glad to be out of Spottswood Parish, glad to be on the river again. The river had become his home, his fate, the thing that nourished him. The longer he and Arlette stayed on the boat, the farther they could get from the forces that would separate them. If only it weren’t for Nick—if only he knew that Nick was safe—he would happily follow the river forever.

But now the river was strange, limpid and stagnant and steel-gray in the morning sun. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what.

The boat swayed as Bubba steered clear of a raft of lumber. Gulls perched in the twisted roots. And then Jason remembered where he’d seen a river like this before. “Oh, no,” he said. Manon looked at him in concern. “What is it, honey?”

Jason straightened, clenched his teeth against the pain. “We’re in a, a reservoir,” he said. “The river’s all dammed up with crap. With—” He gasped in air, pointed at the raft of floating trees. “With that,” he said. The pain in his throat was intense and he tilted his lead to the left. “Nick and I ran into something like this upstream,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught in that dam, and we don’t want to be around when it breaks. You’re going to see rapids like you’ve never imagined, with timber instead of rocks.” Bubba frowned. “Twelve year on the river,” he said, “I never heard of nothing like that. Not on a river big as this one.”

“You’ve never been in an earthquake this big before, either,” Jason said.

“I don’t know,” Bubba said, and scratched his chin. “There ain’t much current, that’s for sure.” Jason looked up at Arlette. “Can you get my scope?” he said. “Look ahead and see if you can find anything ahead.”

Arlette put Gros-Papa’s watch in her pocket, then took the battered red Astroscan from one of the boat’s compartments and set it on the foredeck. Bubba throttled the outboard down, the boat settling onto its bow wave until the bass boat was barely making headway. Arlette put her eye to the scope. “It’s upside-down,” she said.

“Just look at the horizon,” Jason said. “Tell me what you see.” Arlette adjusted the scope the wrong way, overcorrected, then finally found the horizon. “The river bends around to the left, I can’t see much,” she said. “But what I can see is white. Like fog or something.”

“Mist,” Jason croaked. He gulped a shallow breath. “That’s from water going over the falls.” Arlette nudged the scope, panning along the horizon. Then she gave a start. “There’s a boat!” she cried.

“A big boat right ahead of us!”

Bubba grinned, showing his yellow peg teeth. “Now that’s the best news I heard in three weeks.” He pushed the throttle forward. Jason winced at a jolt of pain and turned again to hang over the port side of the cockpit. The bow planed upward, and Arlette put the cap on the telescope to keep spray from spattering the lens, then returned the Astroscan to the nearest of the boat’s coolers. Delight danced in her eyes.

“It’s over!” she cried. “It’s over!”

Jason didn’t know whether he was pleased by this prospect or not.

Debris clattered on the hull, then was left bouncing in the wake. Rafts of logs were overtaken and left astern. Bubba leaned out over the starboard side, frowned at what he saw ahead.

“That’s not a boat,” he said. “That’s a barge.” He reached a hand to the throttle to lower his speed, then hesitated. “Hey, they’s people on board!” he said. “They must have lost their tow in that quake last night.” Jason straightened again, biting back the pain, and peered over the bows. A slab-walled barge was clearly visible downstream, broadside to the current. He could barely make out two people on board, both waving frantically.

“Well,” Bubba said. “At least they can tell us where the hell we are.” He throttled down as the bass boat neared the barge. It was loaded with what looked like huge steel bottles, and mooring hawsers trailed fore and aft.

As the noise of the outboard lessened and the bow dropped into the water, Jason heard a rumbling sound ahead and looked to see the horizon ahead filled with white mist.

“Look!” Jason said, pointing, and he hissed with pain at his own abrupt gesture. “Mist from the falls!” he panted. “There’s a dam ahead! We’ve got to get those people off the barge before it goes over the dam!” Bubba looked startled. He maneuvered Retired and Gone Fishin’ alongside the rust-streaked flank of the barge, looked up at the two hard-hatted men peering over the gunwale.

White men, Jason thought. The pale faces looked strange after his time in the camp.

“Get in, you fellas,” Bubba said. “Before the barge goes into them rapids.”

“We can’t!” one of the men said. “You’ve got to tow us clear!” Bubba made a scornful sound, spread both hands to indicate the bass boat. “This look like a towboat to you? We got a fifty-horse Johnson here.”

“This barge is full of nuclear waste.” the man answered. “If it goes over the falls, it’ll poison the river for twenty years.”

“You’ve got to tow us clear!” the other man said.

Bubba looked bewildered. “Ain’t gonna happen, man! Look at this little boat! How many tons cargo you got there?”

“It doesn’t matter!” the first man screamed. “You’ve got to tow us out of here!” Nuclear waste, Jason thought. What he’d seen already on the river was bad enough, the rafts of dead birds, the terror of the harbor of Memphis and the gassed-out city of Helena, but this… poison the river for twenty years.

Jason looked at Bubba. “We need to try,” he said.

“Yes,” Arlette said. “There’s not much current.”

“Try,” Bubba snorted. Then he shrugged. “Okay. We try.” He looked up at the two crewmen. “Pass us a line,” he said.

One of the crewmen ran to the bows, pulled the dripping mooring line from the river. Bubba nudged the throttle, steered the boat to where the crewmen waited. “Look at that!” Bubba said, gesturing at the six-inch-thick hawser. “What are we going to hitch that to?”

Jason wrenched his head around to look at the little mooring cleats placed fore and aft on the bass boat. There was no way the hawser could pass around them.

“Tie it to my seat!” he said. “I’ll sit on the deck up front!”

“You’d just have your seat ripped out,” Bubba said.

“We’ll pass you a cable!” the crewman shouted.

He dangled a steel cable over the flat bows of the barge. Manon grabbed it, pulled, gave a surprised shout as the cable tried to rip the flesh from her hands. “Sorry!” the crewman said, removed his pair of leather gloves, and tossed them to Manon.

“There’s no way,” Bubba said. “Those little cleats will tear right off.”

“Use all of them!” Jason said. “I’ve seen how you tie barges together!” He moved over into the little jumpseat between him and Bubba. “You lash the cable onto the cleats. I’ll steer—I’m used to the boat.” Bubba gave Jason a dubious look, then jumped up and took the pair of gloves from Manon. The crewmen on the barge began feeding him cable. Jason wedged himself in behind the wheel of the bass boat. The seat and the side of the cockpit was in just the right position to put pressure on his wound, and a sudden sharp spasm made him draw in a shuddering breath.

He could hear the roaring of water ahead. He looked downstream and saw that more of the bend ahead had been opened as they’d come downstream. White mist rose between the trees. Bubba lashed the cable around all six of the boat’s cleats, the steel wire zigzagging over the casting platforms fore and aft of the cockpit. Manon and Arlette stepped clear as the cable passed beneath their feet. “I tell you one thing, man,” Bubba said. “One of these cleats tears free, this wire is going to cut us in half.” He looked at Jason. “All set, boy,” he said.

Ignoring the flare of pain, Jason looked over his shoulder at the bows of the barge that loomed behind them, took a gasping breath. “You guys ready!” he said.

“Go! Go!” one of the men screamed.

“God,” said Bubba. “I wish I had a smoke.”

Jason shifted the boat out of neutral, nudged the throttle forward. Retired and Gone Fishin’ began to move forward, then came to a sudden check as it reached the end of its tether. The engine took on a labored note as it began to feel the strain. Jason pushed the throttle forward, saw the cable tighten around the cleats. He was breathing in rapid pants, the oxygen fueling the adrenaline that snarled through his body. He could feel the boat vibrating at the end of the steel wire. He pushed the throttle forward again, slowly moving it as far forward as it would go.

The engine roared. The stern dug into the water, and the bow lifted, not because it was planing out of the water, but because the cable was holding the boat back. Jason turned the wheel, and somewhat to his surprise he found that he was swinging the bow of the barge upstream, toward safety. He straightened the wheel and the full weight of the barge came onto the cable. The stern dug in and the racing engine began to labor. Pungent engine exhaust drifted over the boat, stung Jason’s nostrils. He gasped for a breath of fresh air. Foam creamed aft of the boat, whipped to a froth by the racing propeller. Bubba, standing on the foredeck, began to dance a few nervous steps as he looked at the cable drawn taut over the deck.

Jason looked left and right, tried to judge his motion relative to the trees in the flood plain. “Are we moving?” he breathed. “Can you tell?”

Manon and Arlette peered at the cypress on the banks. Long minutes ticked by. The bass boat shivered and hummed as it strained at the end of its leash.

Manon turned to Jason, shook her head. “We’re still going downstream,” she said. “The current’s beating us!”

The current was slow, but it was remorseless, still stronger than the little outboard trying to tow the huge barge.

“Okay, then,” Jason said. “I’ll go across the current, not into it.” If he couldn’t get the barge upstream, he would try to drag the barge into the flood plain and moor it to a cypress.

He turned the wheel. Relieved of the weight of the barge, the boat jittered over the water like a junebug on the end of a string. Jason heard shouts behind him from the bargemen, who clearly thought he was abandoning the job.

“Tell them what I’m doing,” he said. He didn’t think his lungs were up to more shouting. Bubba bellowed at the bargemen through cupped hands. The boat shivered as weight came onto the cable again. The barge’s bows swung around. The Johnson outboard took on a throatier roar. Jason aimed forty-five degrees off the current, to bring the barge in to a landing on the tree-filled point short of the bend.

Bubba peered downstream, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. “I think you got less’n a mile ’fore we hit that bend,” he said.

“You tell me,” Jason gasped. “You tell me if this is working.” He could see the trees moving past the bow of the bass boat faster now, as he was no longer fighting straight into the current. If the trees were getting any larger, they were doing so very slowly. The boat bucked and spat and juddered. “We’re moving!” Arlette shouted with a triumphant grin. “We’re getting there!”

Even over the sound of the screaming outboard Jason thought he heard a rushing sound, the water rolling over the falls. He looked to his right—working around his injuries involved a corkscrewing of his body that had him looking out from under his own right armpit—and he saw the trees on the point nearing.

“Come on, come on,” he muttered. He beat an urgent tattoo on the wheel with his palm. “Move move move.” Then he stopped speaking, because it hurt too much.

Manon and Arlette were suddenly dancing their delight, their cries dimmed by the roaring that now filled the air. Jason saw a willow float cross his bows only fifty feet away, its dangling leaves trailing in the water. Jason looked under his armpit again and saw that he was right on the point, that a pair of trees were going to cut along the length of the cable between the barge and the bass boat. He turned the wheel, felt the cable slack slightly as he aimed the boat into the trees. There was a sudden lurch as the cable went around a willow, and Jason spun the wheel to the right. The propeller began to chew up willow leaves. Bark peeled in tight curls from the tree as it took the weight of the barge. Jason throttled back as he circled the tree, wrapping the taut cable around 270 degrees of stout trunk. The cable draped across two more trees. Through the trees on the point, Jason saw the barge fall wide of the point, saw it hang in the current with white water just a few hundred feet beyond its stern. Yes! Jason punched a hand in the air, then winced with the pain. He leaned over the boat’s wheel and panted for breath.

The roaring sound increased, and a dark shadow crossed the sun. Jason’s heart gave a lurch as he saw that the roaring he’d heard over the straining outboard had not been falls or rapids downstream, but a helicopter circling overhead.

The helicopter was losing altitude now, the dawn light edging its rotor blades with silver as it dropped toward them, safely upstream of the point and its foliage. The river water was chopped into a froth by the downdraft as the helicopter hovered with its skids just a few feet above the surface. Jason blinked and narrowed his eyes against the furious gusts of wind. The helicopter was modest in size and olive green in color. Jason could see through the canopy to a helmeted figure inside, someone talking into a microphone. With modest surprise Jason realized the figure was a woman.

And then the woman raised a hand in greeting, and her face broke into a spontaneous, devilish grin, a grin of shared joy and wild mischief. So unexpected was the smile that Jason found himself grinning back. At that moment Jason looked up to see an additional four helicopters, big ones, thundering over the water toward them.

The U.S. Cavalry, he thought. They’ve arrived.

“People seem to think I’m some kind of Tennessee Williams character,” said Mrs. LaGrande Shelburne Ashenden. “They think I spend my days languishing under a ceiling fan and dreaming about past glories. Well, they might have forgot that my family got where it is by knowing how to kill Indians and drive niggers, but I haven’t.”

General Jessica C. Frazetta gazed at Mrs. Ashenden with curiosity. What, she wondered, does a Southern gentlewoman of a certain age wear to a political assassination? A celadon chemise-cut summer linen dress. Straw summer hat with matching ribbon. Rolex with platinum-gold expansion band, tiny little earrings with freshwater pearls, sandals, and an Hermes tapestry clutch bag containing a very ladylike pearl-handled nickel-plated two-shot derringer.

Jessica was feeling decidedly outgunned, at least in the fashion sense. The fact that she could only see with one eye did nothing for her social confidence.

Mrs. Ashenden sat demurely in the straight-backed wooden chair in the coroner’s office in the parish courthouse. Knees and ankles together, hands in her lap, as she had no doubt been taught in dancing school. Her careful affect was only slightly spoiled by the plaster arm cast that had just been applied by Dr. Patel. The derringer had been loaded with .357 magnum rounds, which on discharge had broken Mrs. Ashenden’s wrist.

“The Paxtons were always trash, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “And they’re not one of the older families, not really. They arrived just before the War.” She sighed. “It’s a pity about his wife. She’s a Windridge, you know. She married beneath her in choosing a Paxton.” She looked up at Jessica with bright birdlike eyes. “Do you think I should undertake her social rehabilitation? Perhaps I should invite her into my bridge club…” She looked uncertain as a thought struck her. “Oh dear, someone will have to tell poor Wilona about her husband’s demise. I fear that task may fall to me.” She looked at Jessica again. “Unless I am under arrest? I’m afraid I don’t quite know my status.” Jessica didn’t know, either. Ever since she’d flown into this situation, she’d been unable to decide whether she’d wandered into Gone with the Wind or one of the more macabre works of Edgar Allan Poe.

“If you can assure me,” Jessica decided, “that you’re not planning on shooting anyone else, then I suppose I can let you go home.”

Mrs. Ashenden gave a little purse-lipped smile. “Oh, I don’t imagine I’ll need to shoot anyone else, dear. Sheriff Paxton was the sole remaining obstacle to a resolution of the crisis. The only one who was still dangerous.” She rose, smoothed the straight lines of her dress. “I think now that Omar Paxton has gone where the woodbine twineth, you will find things much easier.”

“I hope so, ma’am.”

“I think you should just take all of those people away, you know, the refugees. In your helicopters, or whatever they are. I do not imagine they would be comfortable here, nor do I imagine the people in the parish would be comfortable with them present.”

“I’ll consider that,” Jessica said.

Mrs. Ashenden made her way to the door, then paused. “Oh by the way,” she said, “I hope I will get my gun back eventually? My husband gave it to me some years ago, so I could protect myself when he was away, and it has sentimental value.”

“That may not be up to me, ma’am,” Jessica said. “But I’ll see what I can do.” Mrs. Ashenden gave a smile and passed out of the room, leaving behind the faint scent of roses. Jessica paused a moment, trying to collect her thoughts, then followed. In her helmet, BDUs, and heavy boots, she felt very unladylike as she followed in the wake of the Mistress of Clarendon. And she knew she sure as hell didn’t smell like roses.

Less than two hours ago, one of her big Sikorsky helicopters had simply sat in the water and, with the power of its six titanium-edged composite rotor blades, towed the barge of Poinsett Island waste up the river to a meeting with its towboat. Another helicopter had taken the people off the little bass boat and carried them to Vicksburg along with the boat itself, which had been lashed to the hull of the chopper. By the time they landed, the crew chief of the copter had called Jessica on the radio and told her that, according to his passengers, there were some serious developments in Spottswood Parish, and she had better talk to the people off the bass boat. One of whom, the crew chief added, had been shot. Jessica had therefore abandoned the rescue of the barge, which seemed to be well in hand, and flown to Vicksburg to interview the boat’s passengers. One of them, the white boy, was carried off by medics the second he landed, but the rest were able to give Jessica a coherent and horrifying picture of the situation in Spottswood Parish.

Prime Power, as usual, was a problem. The Ranger unit that had liberated Rails Bluff had returned that morning to rubble-sorting duties in Greater Memphis, the military police unit that had replaced them was fully occupied, and all of Jessica’s other units were fully committed.

But the situation in Spottswood Parish demanded instant attention, so in the end Jessica flew in with everything she could scrape together: part of her headquarters staff, a few military police, and a platoon of engineers. They took off in four big Sikorsky helicopters so as to seem a more impressive force. By this point she was receiving distress calls from Spottswood Parish itself, from members of the parish council who had first called the Emergency Management people, then been shunted around the various departments of the federal bureaucracy until at last someone had thought to have them contact Jessica. Landing at Clarendon, she’d been met by local dignitary—a little white-mustached fellow who introduced himself as a judge named Moseley—who had then taken her to the courthouse, where she’d met Mrs. Ashenden, who calmly announced she’d shot the sheriff dead with her derringer and settled the whole problem.

Jessica thought it smelled hinky. She’d been involved with Army politics long enough to know the scent of a cover-up, and she had the feeling a whitewash was settling very solidly into place here, that blame had been preassigned and that certain people—who very conveniently were dead—were going to take the fall. But she didn’t have enough force to simply take over the parish—not yet, anyway—and she didn’t have enough properly trained personnel to launch an investigation. She decided that for the moment she’d settle for keeping all the locals from killing each other.

She called the field near Clarendon where the helicopters had put down, and she sent one of them to the refugee camp north of town, and told them to wait there and prevent any of the locals from disturbing whatever they found there.

Whatever happened, she could preserve the evidence.

She told the sheriff’s department to stand down. She ordered the auxiliaries to go home. She replaced the deputies at the barricades around the Carnegie Library with her own people.

Which put her own soldiers in the middle, between the library and the locals, and this was something she did not like. She made sure more soldiers were on the way—she called the Old Man and asked him to send her a battalion of MPs ASAP—but that still left a lot of armed people in the Carnegie Library who could lose their patience and start shooting up everything in sight whenever they decided to do so. Somebody needed to talk to them.

And she, unfortunately, was the person on the spot.

According to the locals, the people in the library had been calling out that they’d wanted to negotiate since at least the middle of the night. That, at least, was hopeful. So she had a sheriff’s department bullhorn delivered to her, and she shouted out from behind one of the neighboring buildings that someone from the Army was coming out to talk to them, and then she straightened her helmet and her shoulders and took a long breath and walked around the corner, into the sunlight, and into the sights of anyone in the library who cared to shoot her dead.

She marched down the sidewalk until she was opposite the front door of the library, made a precise military 90-degree turn, and crossed the street and onto the uneven concrete walk that led between live oak to the library door. The library loomed before her, clear in the right eye, a blur in the left. Jessica stopped halfway to the door, by the blackened remains of a burnt-out police car, and dropped into the at-ease position, feet balanced and apart, hands clasped behind her back. She cleared her throat. Her hammering pulse rang inside her helmet like a bell.

If the locals want a massacre, she thought, this is where I’m shot dead. And if the people in the library want to make another point, they can shoot me, too.

“Is there a Nick Ruford in the building?” she called.

She hoped that tension hadn’t tautened her vocal cords to the point where she sounded like one of the Chipmunks.

There was a moment’s pause, and then a voice answered, “I’m Nick Ruford.”

“I’m Major General J. C. Frazetta, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I am taking command in this parish as of now. I spoke to your wife and daughter a couple hours ago, and they want you to know that they’re safe and well.”

There was another pause. “Where are they?” asked Nick.

“They are at my headquarters in Vicksburg. They came down the Mississippi on a little boat, and encountered some of my units conducting a search-and-rescue mission.”

When Nick next spoke there was a tremor in his voice, as if relief had almost sent him into a swoon.

“And the other families?” he asked. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Jessica said. “I have no reason to believe they are anything other than safe.” There was a buzz of voices from inside the library. Jessica waited a moment, then spoke again.

“Mr. Ruford, may I come inside? It will make things easier, I think.” There was more discussion. Jessica distinctly heard someone say, “We don’t let Whitey in our fort!” But in the end the front door swung open, and Nick Ruford’s voice came from the interior.

“Please come in, General.”

“I’ll take off my sidearm first,” Jessica said. She took off her pistol belt, put it on the trunk of the burnt-out car, then walked into the library.

The tang of gunsmoke still hung in the still air. There were about fifteen men in the library, and two women, all armed. All were bigger than Jessica. Not all of them looked friendly.

“I’m Nick Ruford,” one of the men said. He was in his mid-thirties, Jessica judged, with a week’s growth of beard and a pistol on his hip. He stood somewhat behind the open door, and he limped to the door and pushed it shut.

Jessica’s heart gave a leap. She had been hoping not to be shut in with these people. Instead she looked at them. Tried to make eye contact with each in turn. Allowed herself a slight smile.

“Mr. Ruford’s family has told me what’s been taking place here. That’s why I am placing this area under military control and calling in troops. The first units have already landed. The local sheriff, who may have been responsible, was shot dead last night. His department has been taken off duty. I believe the crisis will shortly be over, and you will be reunited with your families.”

She looked at them, saw wild hope mingled with scornful disbelief.

“I want national media here,” Nick Ruford said. “I want the networks. I want CNN.” Well that is smart, Jessica thought. “I can arrange that,” she said. “I have about fifty of those reporters camping out at my headquarters with nothing to do but bother my people, so I imagine we can send them here to bother you.”

“I suppose you want us to surrender!” one man said. “I suppose you want us to put down our guns and walk straight into jail!”

Jessica thought about this for a moment. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. I don’t have enough people here to guarantee your safety. I think you’re safest right as you are.” She nodded at the belligerent man.

“Eventually, when we can guarantee your safety and reunite you with your families, I hope you will put down your weapons. If what I have heard from Mr. Ruford’s family is anything like the truth, I don’t believe any of you will be charged. I will take you all out of Spottswood Parish on military aircraft, and I will take you to my headquarters. You will have your media coverage. And I will protect you—you have my word on it.”

She still saw loathing on the man’s face. Most of the others looked thoughtful. She looked at them all again, and as she did so a wild inspiration struck.

“And in fact,” she said, “until I can move you to my head-quarters, I propose to move my headquarters here. With your permission,” she nodded toward Nick, “I hereby declare this building the headquarters of the Mississippi Valley Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.”

“No, sir,” Jessica said, “I am not a hostage. These kind people let me move my headquarters into their building. I’m carrying on business as usual.”

Indeed she was. She’d persuaded the Warriors to allow her a couple of unarmed communications techs, and she’d moved communications gear into the Carnegie Library, set up a satellite dish on the lawn, and had been in touch with her command for the last six hours, deploying her people in response to the last major quake.

“This is a very singular thing,” said the President into Jessica’s ear. “Are you certain you know what you’re doing?”

“No, sir,” Jessica said. “I’m not certain at all. I’m way the hell off the map, is where I am, and I know it.” The President seemed amused. “Well, Jessica,” he said. “If you survive, you’ll be a hero. I suggest that you try to live.”

“I will do my very best to follow your advice, sir.”

“I should mention that the Justice Department is expressing a considerable interest in what has occurred there in—is it Spottywood Parish?”

“Spottswood, sir.”

“Yes. The Justice Department would like to handle all criminal investigations.”

“I don’t see that would be necessary,” Jessica said. “I’m sure the Defense Department has all the necessary expertise.”

“The Attorney General tells me that the FBI has the finest forensic investigators in the world.”

“I believe that the Defense Department can match them, sir. After all, we have people that are regularly called to identify corpses found on old battlefields.”

The President paused a moment. “Jessica,” he said, “I suggest you concede this one with grace. After all, they won’t be investigating you this time. You haven’t shot anybody yet.” Jessica smiled. Her argument had been pour Vhonneur du pavillion, as it were, strictly for the record. She was perfectly happy to hand the investigation over to Justice. What if we bungled it? she thought.

“I’ll do as you advise, sir,” she said.

“Very good. You call me if you need anything, now.”

Jessica put the handset of her secure phone into its cradle. She looked up at Nick Ruford, who was sitting on the edge of the reference librarian’s desk.

“That was my boss,” she said. “He wanted to make sure you didn’t have a gun pointed at my head.”

“Well, that’s good,” Nick said. “I’ve had bosses who wouldn’t have cared one way or another.” In the hours that had ticked by, Jessica had been able to make more deployments into Spottswood Parish. She’d put a guard at the broken Bayou Bridge to keep people from slipping out of the parish. Another guard went onto the Floodway. The guards were only of modest value, since people who knew the country could boat out elsewhere, but they would have to do until more personnel came along. She wouldn’t be able to accomplish much until the Rangers came from Memphis, which should happen late tonight or early tomorrow morning.

Her guard on the A.M.E. camp reported that the place seemed undisturbed. They’d chased buzzards and dogs off a number of corpses, but were otherwise keeping the place pristine until forensics people could show up. Whatever had happened there, no one had yet had the notion of cleaning it up. By tomorrow, she figured she’d have Spottswood Parish under wraps.

She’d also sent out for MREs and fresh water. It was the best she could do without setting up a field kitchen in the Carnegie Library. Still, she noticed that some of the Warriors didn’t eat a bite until she demonstrated the food’s safety by eating some herself.

Another call came in, from one of her scout helicopters she’d sent out to look for refugees, one with a mandate to check Spottswood Parish on the far side of the bayou in order to look for the refugees who had fled from the A.M.E. camp.

She received the message, acknowledged, then stood behind her desk, raised her voice so all could hear.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I wanted to let you know that your families have been located. They are on the far side of the bayou, and apparently they are all safe. My pilot would like to know if he should attempt to make contact.”

What she did, in the end, was order the chopper to land so that she could put the Warriors and their families in direct radio contact with one another. She stood back from the radio and watched as the heavily armed guerrilla fighters laughed and sobbed along with their wives, husbands, children, and parents.

She felt tears sting her own eyes at the sight. She looked up at Nick Ruford, saw him watching the scene with the expression of a man just dragged by his hair from quicksand. “I really thought we were all going to die,” he breathed.

“Nope.” Jessica grinned. “I bet it’s nice to have a life in front of you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The words sounded heartfelt.

Jessica looked at him. “I served with a General Ruford once,” she said. “He was my teacher at the War College. I don’t suppose you’re related?”

Nick absorbed this, then gave her a sly look. “Sun Tzu, right?” He laughed at her startled expression.

“General Ruford was my father,” he said.

“He was a good soldier.”

Nick nodded. “I know.”

“You look a lot like him.”

And then, to Jessica’s surprise, Nick turned away, and sobs began to shake his shoulders.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The President watched on television as Jessica Frazetta and the people who had been occupying the Carnegie Library in Shelburne City left the building, stepped into school buses escorted by Humvees filled with Army Rangers, and drove to the field near Clarendon where helicopters waited. He watched as the helicopters rose into the Louisiana sky, then descended onto grassy Mississippi soil near Vicksburg. The President watched as the refugees stumbled out of their doors of the Hueys and ran across the downdraft-beaten grass to be reunited with the families. He watched the weeping, the embraces, the celebration, the cries of joy.

He turned to Stan Burdett and his two principal speechwriters. “You boys better write me a hell of a speech,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. President,” one of the speechwriters mumbled.

They and the President sat on couches in the Oval Office, and watched the news on a console television carefully disguised as an antique piece of furniture.

“I want drama,” the President said. He waved his hands in the air. “I want compassion. I want a promise of punishment for the guilty along with protection for the helpless. I want to call for reconciliation. I want to appeal to the angels of our better nature. When I go to Mississippi, I want to deliver the best speech heard on this continent since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. I want this to go down in history as the Vicksburg Address.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Now get busy.”

“Sir.”

The speechwriters left. The days in which a President scrawled out a speech on the back of an envelope and kept it for safekeeping in his hat were long gone.

Stan Burdett stared for a long moment at the scene on the television. “I can’t believe this happened,” he said.

“I believe it,” the President said. He shrugged and reached for his cup of coffee. “What does it take to make evil come into the world?” he asked. “A can of beer and a cheap handgun. That’s all. In this case, we had a psychopathic sheriff who was in a position to enforce his orders through martial law. He was a weak and malevolent man put into a position of power during a period in which the normal checks on his power ceased to exist. His actions don’t surprise me in the least.”

The President shook his head. “Where Paxton seems to have been naive is that he apparently thought he could do it without anyone finding out. That was absurd of him—we have a whole class of people in this country who do nothing but hunt out the things that people want to hide.” He shook his head. “You’d better have Bill Marcus contact Jessica Frazetta real soon,” he said. “She showed good political instincts here. We need to get her on the campaign trail soon, and run on our ticket. Oh—look at this.” He pointed at the television. “This guy’s priceless.” The Grand Wizard had appeared on the television, gazing firmly at the camera through glinting spectacles.

“Omar Paxton was a great American,” he said. “He was a hero. Whatever he did, I’m sure it was for the safety of the good people of Spottswood Parish. But now the liberal media are blowing everything out of proportion and trying to make it seem like Omar was some kind of crazed killer! Well, who got killed, that’s what I want to know. Omar Paxton got killed, and his deputies! They got massacred! Cut down in performance of their duty! The liberal media can say anything they want about the dead, I guess, ’cause the dead can’t defend themselves against slander, but I know in my heart that Omar Paxton was right.” The news program switched to a commentator, one of the legion of pompous talking heads who provide instant analysis for the media. The President reached for his remote and switched off the set.

“How’s that Grand Wizard for spin?” the President asked. “How’s that for the new party line?”

“That’s vile,” Stan said. “That’s beyond putrid.”

“I bet the Klan gets a thousand recruits in the next week,” the President said. He sipped his coffee. It had gone cold, and he put the cup down.

Stan looked at him. “People say I’m cynical,” he said.

“Human evil is bottomless,” the President said. “I suppose we can hope that the same can be said of good, but in my job I don’t deal with good very often.” He looked at Stan, and amusement tugged at his lips. “Do you think if I went to Purgatory Parish, or whatever the place is called, and made a speech eulogizing Omar Paxton and calling for race war, that I couldn’t get a war started?” Stan looked horrified. “Sir!” he said. “You can’t be serious!”

“No point in it.” The President shrugged. “The experiment’s already been tried, in Bosnia and Rwanda.” He looked at Stan again. “It wouldn’t be hard, though. Plenty of people in rural areas would listen. Their way of life’s been destroyed, and not just by the earthquake. Fifty years ago the U.S. government decided there were too many farmers on the land. Programs were put into place. Congress passed laws. And rural America was wiped out! The farmers—the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth, the yeoman that Thomas Jefferson hoped would guarantee the independence and virtue of the republic—they were all nudged off their own land. Now almost all American agriculture is controlled by a few companies, and folks who work on the land are tenant farmers plowing the land their fathers once owned.”

“Why shouldn’t they be angry?” the President asked. “Why shouldn’t they look for someone to blame?” He pointed at the blank television screen. “Sheriff Paxton and that Reverend Dingdong Frankland there, they’re the only people helping the rural poor understand what’s happened to them. Their answers are violent and insane and based on a delusional understanding of how the world works, but at least they have answers. The only answer the government has for those people is, ‘Hey, you’re redundant, you should have abandoned the land and gone to work in a factory years ago.’ No wonder those people start joining apocalyptic cults. To them, the end of the world isn’t a strange idea. The Apocalypse already happened to them! Their whole world was destroyed.”

The President laughed. “And now those poor countryfied bastards have been hit again. Agribusiness won’t be hurt by the quakes, not for long—Congress will make sure that almost all the relief money will go to the big agricultural conglomerates, just the way they’ve done for fifty years—but all the small businesses, and the family farmers, and the small entrepreneurs will be kept living under canvas for months, and when they come out they’ll find out that all their dreams will have been repossessed. Then the next generation of Franklands and Paxtons will tell them who to blame, and then we’ll have a heavily armed rural proletariat—the backbone of the nation, we used to call them, salt of the earth—all lynching all the wrong people, the way they’ve always done.”

The President fell silent. Stan looked at him for a long moment. The President shrugged. “Don’t blame me, Stan,” he said. “I didn’t do it. It all happened practically before I was born.”

“Yes, sir,” Stan said.

The President looked at his friend. “It’s the American way,” he said. “We don’t respect our fathers, we don’t overthrow them, we don’t bury them. We just forget. It’s not like there was a hidden conspiracy to destroy rural America—it was all in the open. All the documents, all the policies, all the legislation… it was all public. People could have read all about it if they’d wanted. But they forgot. The earthquakes of 1811 weren’t a secret, either—people could have read about them if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t know the history. They forgot their fathers. That’s what Americans do—we think about the present, and often about the future, but never about the past. Our fathers have always been dead to us. We just forget.”

The President rose, put his hand on Stan’s shoulder. “Our job is to help them. That’s why I have to go to Vicksburg and make a speech that will help everyone put all this to bed… to help them forget. If no one remembers Omar Paxton in twenty years, then we’ll have done our job.”

He straightened, then walked to his chair behind Rutherford B. Hayes’s desk. “Better get busy, Stan,” he said. “And don’t forget to have Marcus call General Jessica, get her political career started.” Stan rose slowly from the sofa, took a few steps, then hesitated. “I can’t decide,” he said. The President took his seat behind the massive desk. “Decide what, Stan?” he said. Stan looked at him blankly. “I can’t decide if you’re crazy or not,” he said. The President gazed at the papers in front of him. “I’m doing my job, Stan. And if I stop doing my job, I have lots of bright young folks like you to tell me.”

Stan licked his lips. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“It’s much easier when you don’t care. Really it is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You should try it sometime.”

Stan left the Oval Office in silence. The President frowned at his paperwork for a moment, and then his glance rose to the photograph of the First Lady that sat on a corner of the broad desk. A knife of grief suddenly twisted in his heart, a pain so pure and exquisite that it took his breath away. For a moment tears spilled down his face.

Then the moment passed, and all was tranquil again. It was much better this way, the President thought as he wiped his face. Much, much better.

Jason could breathe again. This was the good news.

The bad news was that his journey was over. When he left the Army-run refugee camp near Vicksburg, it would be to join his family, his father in California or his aunt in New York State. He would return to a human environment that was in its essence intact, that nestled in comfortable dominion over Nature, a world that had not been destroyed and ravaged and remade, like the Mississippi Delta. Like himself. The world to which he would be called seemed alien and strange, its comforts false, its reassurance suspect. It seemed to him that the life of the refugee was somehow more genuine than any other form of existence. It seemed to him now that, whether he knew it or not, he had always been a refugee, thrown like a chip into the Mississippi, carried by accident and destiny down its broad, brown expanse. It seemed to him that everyone was a refugee, if they only knew it.

The deputy’s bullet had broken three ribs and burrowed a long, erratic path along the large muscles of his back. Neither the bullet nor the broken ribs had punctured a lung—his breathlessness was a result of a wrecked rib cage and trauma, not internal hemorrhage. Once he’d had his ribs strapped he was able to breathe again—strange how a tight bandage permitted breath rather than restricted it. Drugs had eased the pain and swelling of his torn back muscles.

The presence of Arlette had healed him faster than any drug. The breath he drew from her lips was sweeter than any air he had known. With his ribs strapped, he could walk with Arlette about the encampment, along the lanes between the ruler-straight Army tents where refugees lived with their families.

Now that the journey was over, Arlette wore her birthday presents all the time. Diamonds glittered in her ears, in the little golden lily in the hollow of her throat. And in her pocket she carried her grandfather’s watch.

Jason knew he had at most only a few days to enjoy his time with Arlette before he was shipped out. The Mississippi had relinquished control of his life, but that did not mean he was free. It meant he was now controlled by adults, adults whose decrees, so far as he was concerned, were as arbitrary and implacable as those of Nature.

Bright green wings flashed overhead, and Jason looked up to see a parrot perch on a nearby awning. In the chaos of the earthquakes and evacuations, the parrot had been set free. It had been living in the vicinity of the refugee camp for as long as Jason had been there. Some of the refugees had tried to catch the bird, but thus far it had evaded them.

“What will you do now?” Jason asked. “You and your mom, I mean.” His throat was still swollen, and he still needed to tilt his head to speak without pain.

“I don’t know,” Arlette said. “I don’t think she knows, yet. The house in Toussaint is all right, so far as we can tell, but the country is still flooded, and will be flooded for weeks, and there isn’t any way to get there unless we can use a helicopter.” She touched the pocket where her Gros-Papa’s watch rested.

“And—well, it’s not nice there right now.”

Jason took her hand and squeezed it. “I wish we could stay together. Maybe I can talk to my dad, to Aunt Stacy, to someone…” He looked up. “Oh, my gosh,” he said. His father was walking toward him, striding down the lanes between tents. He wore khakis and a Dodgers cap and a button-down shirt with a sky-blue tie, which was his idea of casual dress. But Frank Adams wasn’t alone: a whole mob trailed behind him, at least two television cameramen, a pair of skinny bearded men with microphones on long booms, a blond-helmeted reporter picking her way in high heels and short skirt past the refugees and their clutter.

Jason was stunned. He stood rooted to the spot while his father came close to him and threw his arms around him. “Careful!” Arlette yelped, wary of his broken ribs. But Frank didn’t put much strength into his hug.

“Hello, son,” Frank said. “Surprised to see me?”

Jason looked at the cameras. He could see the lenses focusing on him, zooming in for the closeup.

“Who are these people?” he asked. Pain knifed through his throat, and he winced. The blond reporter quickly explained that they were from a television news program—Jason recognized the name, a tabloid show so consistently sordid that his mother automatically shifted stations to avoid it—and they had flown his father into the camp on their helicopter so that he and Jason could be reunited. Jason tilted his head to speak. “Great,” Jason said.

The reporter asked him how he felt now that he and his father were together.

“Great,” said Jason.

Jason saw out of the corner of his eye that the camera crew were jostling Arlette away, and he reached for her arm and pulled her closer.

“Dad,” he said, “this is my girlfriend, Arlette.”

Frank seemed a little taken aback—not because Arlette was black, Jason assumed, since a man married to a half-Chinese scarcely had any room to object—more likely Arlette’s existence was a complication he’d never suspected. After a moment’s hesitation, he shook Arlette’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, Arlette,” he said.

“Sir,” said Arlette.

The reporter asked if Jason and Arlette had met in the camp.

“The camp in Rails Bluff,” Jason said.

The reporter asked more questions, starting from Rails Bluff and going on from there. Jason answered the questions in as few words as possible. He had spoken to reporters before—the camp was infested with them—and this interview was much like the others. He had the impression that his answers didn’t matter, that the reporter had decided in advance what his answers were going to be, and asked questions calculated to get the answers she wanted.

The reporter asked Jason if he thought of himself as a hero.

“No,” he said.

Then the reporter asked Arlette if Jason was a hero.

“Yes,” Arlette said, and a rocket of pleasure soared up Jason’s spine. The reporter asked Jason what he wanted to be when he grew up. “An astronomer.” he said, which got a surprised look from Frank.

Jason didn’t know whether he wanted to be an astronomer or not, not really. But he knew he still had a few issues with the cosmos, and thought maybe astronomy would help him think about them.

“Excuse me,” Jason said. “But I’ve got to go to the infirmary. The doctors wanted to see me about my—” His hands made scratching motions near his waist. “About my broken ribs.” Jason made his escape to the infirmary tent, where he had a cot and where reporters weren’t allowed. Frank and Arlette followed. Jason turned to his father.

“Why did you bring those people?” he demanded.

“I’m sorry, Jase,” Frank said. “But it was the only way I could get here. The government isn’t letting people fly into the earthquake zone, not unless they’re aid workers. I would have had to fly into Meridian, then rent a four-by-four and try to get here on my own. And even then I might have run into roadblocks. But the tabloids have their own helicopters, and fly in whenever they want, so I thought—” He hesitated.

“Well, I sold our reunion story for twenty thousand dollars, and that will help pay for your college.” Jason stared at his father. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

Frank looked at Arlette. “Honey,” he said, “can you excuse us for a little while? It’s nice to meet you, but I’d like to talk to my son.”

Jason snagged Arlette’s arm and kissed her good-bye before she made her dutiful exit. It was one of the last kisses he was likely to get, he figured.

He led his father to his own cot, and they sat down. The infirmary tent was large and smelled of canvas and antiseptic. It was light and airy, since the canvas sides were rolled up, but the mosquito netting was down and kept out the bugs. None of the people in the tent were hurt very seriously—the critically injured were kept elsewhere, in the field hospital. Half the cots in the tent were empty, because refugees were constantly being evacuated inland, where the water was safe and the quake damage much less severe.

“We’ll be leaving on the helicopter before dinner,” Frank said. “We’ll fly to Houston, stay overnight, then get on a plane to Los Angeles.”

Jason looked up at him. “I’m going to L.A., then? Not to Aunt Stacy?” Frank sighed. “I guess you won that argument, Jase.”

Sadness crept through Jason’s thoughts. Once he had wanted nothing so much as to fly to Los Angeles. Now he wanted nothing so much as to stay.

“Can Arlette come with?” he asked. He knew perfectly well the question was hopeless, but he also knew this was a question that had to be asked.

“Jase,” Frank said, “there’s hardly enough room in our apartment for you.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “I know.” A fragment of hope lodged in his heart. “Can I visit her later? Spend some of that money to fly out here, and—”

“We’ll see,” Frank said, in the tone that said, See how I humor my child?

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” Frank said. “This money from the tabloids—that could be just a beginning. Your story is getting out to the media now. There’s some real interest. I’ve been talking to some of the intellectual property people at the firm, and they’re very excited. We’re thinking of contacting some literary agents and publishers, some people at the studios. You could be famous.” He grinned and slapped his knees. “What do you think of that?”

Jason shrugged.

“All you’d have to do is cooperate,” Frank said. “Just tell the writers, or whoever, exactly what happened. And they’ll write it down, and it’ll be a book or a movie.”

“I can be famous,” Jason said, “but I can’t see my girlfriend.”

“I said we’ll see.” Irritation was beginning to creep into Frank’s voice. “The point is,” he went on, “there is some real money here. It will go into trust for you, and pay for your education. This is a terrific break for you.”

“Great,” Jason said.

Frank looked at him severely. “I thought you’d be more excited,” he said. “Don’t you understand how colossal this is?”

“I’ve been shot,” Jason said, “I’ve been beat up, and I’ve come hundreds of miles in a little boat with the whole world trying to kill me. I’ve fallen in love with a beautiful girl. Movies and books just aren’t very exciting right now. I’m sorry.”

Frank looked at him for a moment. Then his lips tightened. “It’s that Nick Ruford’s fault,” he said. “He put you through this. I’m going to talk to some of the litigators at the firm. We’ll sue him naked.” Jason looked at his father. “If you do that,” he said. “I’m testifying for Nick.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Frank said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jason rose from the bed. “I’m going to go say good-bye to my friends,” he said. “I’ll see you at the helicopter later.” He reached under his cot, pulled out the Astroscan. “This is all I’ve got,” he said. “Could you hold onto it for me?”

Frank looked at the battered red telescope in surprise. “What is it?” he said.

“It’s the birthday present Una sent me,” Jason said. “But don’t worry,” he added as Frank turned pale,

“she signed your name.”

“So,” Jessica said as she looked, with her one good eye, at the message from Bill Marcus, the President’s political consultant, “you think I should call him back?”

“That depends on whether you want to run for office,” said Pat. He was reclined as far as possible in a chair by Jessica’s bed, and he picked repeatedly at a mandolin as he twisted at the tuning pegs.

“Do I want to run for office?” Jessica asked.

“If you think,” Pat said, “that I’m going to play folksy tunes at your rallies and otherwise behave like a buffoon, you can think again.”

Jessica frowned and touched the bandage over her left eye. She’d had an operation that morning, a much more elaborate procedure than she’d undergone with the laser. Instead of cooking the interior of her eye with a laser, this time her eye had played host to a freezing probe that had chilled her eye tissue and, it was hoped, returned it to its normal position.

She was now at home in a semi-darkened room. She had been told to lie with her head on two pillows and avoid straining at bowel movements for at least six months.

She planned to be back at her desk in the morning. Perhaps she would wear a dashing Moshe Dayan eye patch.

Army troops were firmly in control of Spottswood Parish. The place had also been flooded by Justice Department investigators, all now in the process of mortally offending the locals with their earnest Yankee tactlessness.

It was beginning to look as if those responsible for the Spottswood Parish massacres were truly dead. Even David Paxton, the sheriff’s son, who according to some of the chronologies might have set off the whole thing. He had got across the bayou and was walking south, but he’d run into the main body of the A.M.E. evacuees, who had also crossed the bayou at night and were heading in the same direction. David had been shot dead on the spot, and there were about ten people who claimed the honor of killing him.

The person Jessica most wanted to talk to was the swamp hermit known as Cudjo. But that strange man hadn’t been evacuated with the others: as the helicopters came in to carry the others away, Cudjo had faded back into the bayous and swamps that were his home. Perhaps he was just shy, but there was a story that a warrant was out for the man in another part of the state, and that he’d slipped away from the law. In any case, Jessica doubted that Spottswood Parish would ever see him again. Jessica looked at Bill Marcus’s message again, then sighed and held out the piece of paper to Pat.

“Dial it for me, will you, sweetie?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I have but one eye to give for my country,” she said. Jason heard the sound of bells chiming “Claire de Lune,” and he followed the sound to Arlette sitting cross-legged beneath an awning near the infirmary tent. Sorrow brushed her face as she held the watch in both hands and gazed down at it. He crouched down next to her, touched her arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

She closed the watch, gave him a sad little smile. “I miss my grandfather,” she said.

“I know.”

“How’s your dad?”

“He’s planning on becoming some kind of media tycoon,” Jason said. She looked at him in surprise.

“He thinks he can make a lot of money off my story.” Jason shook his head. “I always wondered what it would take to get him to pay attention to me. Now I know.”

Arlette leaned forward, kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“All his plans depend on my cooperation, though,” Jason said. “And if he wants me to cooperate, there are things I will want him to agree to.” He looked at Arlette. “Things involving you, maybe.” He rose from his crouch. “Let’s go find Nick and your mom,” Jason said. “I want to tell them good-bye.” Nick and Manon stood in the shade of some trees across from the Post Exchange, some of the few trees that had survived the quakes and Army Engineers bulldozers. In the helipad beyond, the engine of a Huey began to cough, then spit black smoke while drooping rotors began to turn.

“So,” Nick said, “what do you think? I shouldn’t have any trouble getting a job, not with so much reconstruction going on. Maybe lodging would be a problem, but I don’t see it being any worse than here.”

“I don’t know,” Manon said. “I don’t know where I stand with everything gone.”

“You’re standing in the same place as me,” Nick said. “I don’t know if I have a single possession left. Even these clothes belong to someone else.”

The Huey’s engine roared. Blades flogged the air. Manon looked up at Nick. “Because there’s nothing left?” she said. “Is that a reason to live with someone? Really?”

“It makes the decision easier,” Nick said. “I would think.” She came slowly into his arms. Oh God, he thought as he kissed her, I hope this works. He suspected, however, that it would. A few days ago, he’d been resigned to his own death. Now, having survived all that the river and all that mad, sorrowful humanity could throw at him, he had the feeling his luck was in.

Starting from nothing, sometimes, could be a good thing.

Dust and wind buffeted them as the Huey flogged its way into the sky. They winced away from the blast, then began, hand in hand, to stroll back toward the camp.

Nick smiled as he saw another couple heading toward them. “Hey there,” he said. Arlette looked from one to the other, recognized in their eyes a mirror of the glow that was in her own.

“Hey,” she said softly. “What’s going on?”

Nick let his arm slip around Manon’s waist. “Your mother and I,” he said, “we’re, ah, going to try this family thing again.” What have we got to lose? he thought dizzily. A smile broke across Arlette’s face. She threw herself into her parents’ embrace. Nick hugged her and stroked her, warmth throbbing through his heart; and then looked up at Jason, saw him watching, standing a few feet away, a wistful, lost little smile on his lips.

“Congratulations,” Jason said. He had to tilt his head to the left to say it.

“Thank you.”

“My dad’s come,” Jason said. “We’re flying out later today. I wanted to say good-bye.” Sadness whispered through Nick’s veins. He left Manon and Arlette and walked to the boy, put his arm around Jason’s shoulders.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. It was the truth, strange though that seemed. Jason looked up, and desperate hope blazed across his face. “Can I come see you later?” he asked. “I’d like to come for a visit.”

“I don’t know where we’ll be living,” Nick said. “We may not have room.” His words faltered at the look on Jason’s face, at the blighted dreams and despair… “We’ll try,” Nick said. “If we can arrange it, we’ll try to bring you out.”

Over Jason’s shoulder, Nick saw Manon flash him an exasperated look. Nick gave her an apologetic smile.

We’re a family again, Nick thought at Manon, you and me and Arlette. But Jason can’t have that. We owe it to him to be kind. It could so easily have gone the other way.

Hope flared again in Jason. “Thanks, Nick,” he said. “I’ve given Arlette our phone number in Los Angeles. She can call and let me know where you’re staying.”

“Good,” Nick said. “I hope we can talk soon.”

Jason threw his arms around Nick, squeezed tight. Nick hugged him back, careful of his broken ribs.

“You’ll be okay,” Nick said. “You know that, right? After what you’ve been through, adolescence in Los Angeles is going to be easy.”

“I guess,” Jason said.

And then, as they stood in their embrace, the earth gave a sudden jolt. Thunderous booms crashed through the air. Nick and Jason stepped back, legs and arms both wide for balance, as the earth shivered, a series of sprawling, looping rolls that almost sent them tumbling like circus clowns. And then it ceased. The southeast horizon boomed as the earthquake sped away. Nick stood on the green earth, his heart lurching crazily in his chest.

“Aftershock,” Manon said, in the sudden, expectant silence.

Nick and Jason looked at each other, and Nick saw that they both understood the pitiless message sent in that moment by the violence of the earth. That the world was not done with them; that they were atremble always on the edge of the crevasse; and that in the end the world, this ancient and multifarious remnant of an exploded star would have its remorseless way.