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.