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…”