“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.