At the brewery, the men wrestled the heavy canoe through a freight door. Cussing and kicking at the craft, they wedged it around corners, through tight spaces and managed to get the awkward contraption into the tank room. The trio did not stop to rest. Immediately Abel and Oleg began fitting the pipes strewn on the floor to the machine in the canoe. For an hour they ran pipe, some of it up a steel stairwell to a catwalk at the top of the room. Some pipe they ran out of the building. At the top of one of the tanks they snaked pipe to an access hatch and inserted it.
Outside the building, Max unrolled big coils of flexible neoprene septic line tubing. He stretched the lines behind the brewery to the base of one of the concrete grain elevator towers standing just fifty feet from the north brick walls of the brewery. He disappeared beneath the structure.
Sweating despite the refrigerator-like cold inside the unheated brewery, the men finally set down their tools, their heavy work done. They glanced back and forth at one another.
“We ready?” huffed Abel.
“Line’s to the first silo,” Max gasped. He gave a thumbs up.
“We’re okay here, too,” said Oleg.
“Shall we fire it up?” asked Max, raising an eyebrow.
“Go ahead.” Abel agreed.
“Okay, I think we’ve got everything closed up fairly well,” said Max. “This contraption’s going to make a bit of a racket.”
The men fell silent while Max clamored into the canoe and grasped a loose battery cable in one hand. Bracing himself, he dropped the line onto the terminal of a battery resting in the bottom of the canoe. The machine sputtered a moment then settled down, coughing and whining. Max cursed, urging the engine to fire up. As if obeying the man, the unit’s cylinders suddenly fired in sequence. The rough wheeze of the engine leveled out and the rig soon sang harmoniously. Max whistled out a lungful of air, pushed the engine’s throttle and increased the RPMs.
The slap of pistons was overcome by a mechanical pumping noise and the rush of air moving at ever-increasing velocity. In the confines of the fermentation tank room, the beast Max had fashioned rumbled like an Everglades airboat.
At the base of the fermentation tank they had been working on, Oleg swung a cleanout door closed and latched it to see if it would hold tight. He opened it again, stuck his head into the tank, and waited.
Max ran his hands along the piping that stretched out of the building. “Come on, baby. Come on. Come on.”
Abel retrieved the railroad lantern and brought it over to Oleg so the man could see inside the fermentation chamber. Abel kneeled down beside him.
The roar of the engine was a haunted sound. The room throbbed. The huge stainless steel tanks, empty and hollow, amplified the noise and hummed like mammoth pipe organ pipes.
A rockslide rattle suddenly bounded across the great room.
“Here it comes,” wailed Max. “Here it comes!”
Abel and Oleg crammed their heads through the tank’s cleanout door and peered to the top of the huge vessel. They held the lantern up inside to illuminate the bright stainless steel. From the end of the pipe on high a yellow torrent burst forth. The men fell over each other trying to get out of the cleanout trap. As they piled on the floor and struggled to close the door behind them, little nuggets of gold sprayed out into the room. The cleanout door slammed shut and Oleg set its latch. He spun away from the door with a toothy smile etched on his face, laughing hysterically.
Abel dropped on his knees and scooped yellow bits into a pile. He cupped his hands around the material and stood up. Max and Oleg crowded around him, Oleg holding the lamp high.
“I’ll be damned,” howled Oleg. “I’ll be good goddamned.”
Max bit his lower lip with every one of his top front teeth.
Abel held up the little cone of treasure in his hands, held it up under their dirt-caked noses.
“We’ve got corn, gentlemen,” Abel beamed. “Do we ever have corn!”
Chapter One Hundred-Four
“Tonight our story is about America on the move. A mass migration is underway as this broadcast airs. Millions are fleeing the northern tier of states for the southland, and they are finding they are not welcome there.”
Monitoring National Public Television in the video studio, Bobcat bit his fingernails to the nub. Alone, he chewed in anguish over the fraying constitution of Independency’s shattered citizenry and fretted about the progress of the three who had left for Sweetly towing Max’s pneumatic contraption shoehorned into a canoe.
“Legislatures in the South from Atlanta to Austin, all following Florida’s lead, have voted into law emergency measures designed to thwart the influx of northern newcomers trying to cross their borders.
“As unseasonable winter-like cold sweeps across the country, and as deepening food shortages have become a reality for millions, a trickle of migrants from the Northeast and Great Lakes states has become a stream in flood. Tonight, the southbound lanes of Interstates 95, 81 and 75 are choked to capacity with vehicles crammed with travelers migrating south. The crush of traffic has turned the southbound lanes into parking lots hundreds of miles long.”
“What in hell is the South going to do with all those people?” Bobcat mumbled to the monitors.
“In the Carolinas, hundreds of thousands of snowbirds are camped out along the roads, in fields, by waterways, in business parking lots everywhere. The southern counties of South Carolina resemble refugee camps on the Horn of Africa.”
Footfalls clattered on the stairs to the second floor offices and a face appeared in the doorway to Bobcat’s lair. A fright mask appeared atop a trembling body.
“What is it?” yelled Bobcat, recoiling from the look of the woman who had burst into the room.
“Bobcat, we got a call at the CC on that phone, that special phone.”
“What, the satellite phone?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Well, what’s the matter?”
“Elizabeth Embree called.”
“What?” Bobcat chocked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Liz Embree?” Bobcat couldn’t quite come to terms with what he’d heard.
“Yes. I’m sure of it.”
“My God.” Bobcat placed fingers in his mouth and yanked on his teeth. “Did you talk to her?”
“No, I couldn’t, I, I just couldn’t. But I got a number.”
“You have a number where she can be reached?”
“I do.”
“Well, let me have it.”
“Are you going to try and reach her?’
“Of course. Stupid question!”
The video master grabbed a scrap of paper a telephone number scrawled on it, with a 403 area code. Canada. Alberta Province.
“All right, I’m off to the CC.”
In the town office at Stand-off Creek, Liz waited anxiously for a return call from Minnesota. She paced the floor under Sinopa’s gaze. There was something disturbing in the voice of the individual who answered the phone at the CC in Independency village. The villager had refused to talk to her. How strange. She was told someone would get back to her, provided she left a number where she could be reached. When the phone did ring and she leaped to it, she recognized the voice of the caller.
“Robert? Thank God it’s you. This is Liz Embree.”
“I know. They told me to call you, Liz. I can’t believe it.”
“They wouldn’t talk to me there.”