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.