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.