“Yeah?” Stowe didn’t see it for a second. Then he did. “Yeah.” He took a step toward her, and started to take another one-
And the world exploded.
Next thing Armstrong knew, he was on his back. Something that stung ran into his eyes. He put up a hand and discovered it was blood. He was bleeding from the leg, too, and from one arm. He looked around. Yossel Reisen, somehow, was still on his feet and didn’t seem to be scratched. Sergeant Stowe was down and moaning, both hands pressed to a swelling scarlet stain on his belly.
“She blew herself up!” The words seemed to come from a million miles away. Armstrong realized the bomb must have stunned his ears. He hoped they weren’t ruined for good.
He scrambled to his feet. Closer to the woman-who wasn’t there anymore, of course-the landscape was a surreal mess of bodies and body parts. How many had she killed? How many had she hurt? Armstrong watched a soldier pull a nail out of his arm. He realized the woman hadn’t just carried explosives. She’d had shrapnel, too. She’d done what she’d done on purpose, and she’d made sure she did as much damage as she could when she did it.
“You all right?” Yossel’s voice came from far, far away, too.
“If I’m not, I’ll worry about it later,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got to do what we can for these poor mothers.”
He bent beside Rex Stowe and gave him a shot of morphine. He might have wasted it; Stowe was going gray. He put a dressing on the noncom’s wound, but blood soaked through right away. “Corpsman!” Yossel Reisen shouted. But a dozen other soldiers were yelling the same thing, and no medics seemed close by. Who would have thought trouble might strike here?
Nobody would have. Nobody had. And that was probably why it had happened here. The men waiting for transport hadn’t paid any attention to the Mormon woman… till too late.
Yossel Reisen slapped a bandage on Armstrong’s forehead. “Thanks,” he said.
“It’s all right,” Yossel said absently-he had other things on his mind. In disbelieving tones, he went on, “She blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up. She fucking blew herself up on purpose.”
“She sure as shit did.” Armstrong liked that no better than his buddy did. “How do you stop somebody who wants to make like a bomb?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody else does, either,” Yossel said. “Who would have thought anybody could be that crazy?”
“Mormons,” Armstrong said. The Mormons had caused so much trouble for the USA, and had notions so different from those of most Americans, that blaming things on them just because they were Mormons came easy. But even Armstrong, who was anything but reflective, realized more than that went into it. Despite the heat, he shivered. “A woman. She waited till she could hurt the most soldiers, and then-she did.”
“They could pull shit like this anywhere,” Yossel Reisen said, a new horror in his voice. “Anywhere at all. On a bus, in a subway, in a theater, at a football game-anywhere there’s a crowd. If you hate enough and you want to hit back enough… you just do.”
“Fuck.” Armstrong meant the word more as prayer than as curse. He said the worst thing he could think of to follow it: “You’re right.”
Men with Red Cross armbands did rush up then. They got Rex Stowe on a stretcher and carried him away. He was still breathing, but Armstrong didn’t think he’d live. Even if he did, he’d be out of the war for months, probably for good.
Bodies and pieces of bodies remained after all the wounded were taken away. So did the butcher-shop stink of blood. Armstrong walked over to where the woman had been standing. He found a torn and charred shoe that wasn’t Army issue. But for that, there was no sign she’d ever existed-except the carnage all around. “Fuck,” he said again, no less reverently than before.
A dozen U.S. trucks painted Army green-gray rumbled up then. The drivers stared in disbelief at the blood-soaked scene. “What the hell happened here?” one of them said.
Somebody threw a piece of broken brick at his truck. It clanged off the hood. “You son of a bitch!” the soldier shouted. “If you’d got here on time, we wouldn’t have been here when she did that!”
Another rock or brick banged off a different truck. For a moment, Armstrong wondered if the soldiers who’d survived the bomb would lynch the truck drivers. They might have if a burly first sergeant hadn’t said, “She was gonna do it anyways. If it wasn’t us, it woulda been the next poor bunch of bastards. What the fuck you gonna do?”
He was so obviously right-and so large-that he threw cold water on the lynching bee. An officer thought to set up a perimeter in case more Mormons decided to blow themselves to kingdom come for their cause. And then the unwounded and the walking wounded got on the trucks and headed down to Thistle after all. What the fuck are you gonna do? Armstrong thought. Like Yossel, he had no idea. He hoped somebody did.
Flora Blackford had never warmed to the Philadelphia cheese steak. The only way they could have made it more treyf was to add ham and oysters. She stuck with pastrami on rye. Robert Taft probably wouldn’t have minded if they’d added ham and oysters to his cheese steak. Those weren’t forbidden foods for him.
The Old Munich was near the damaged Congressional building. It had pretty good prices and air conditioning. Looking around, Flora didn’t think she could assemble a quorum from the Representatives and Senators in the place, but she didn’t think she would miss by much, either.
Taft raised a schooner of beer. “Here’s to you-most of the time,” he said, and sipped from it.
Flora had a gin and tonic: almost as good a cooler as the refrigerated air. “Same to you,” she said. “We see eye to eye about the war, anyhow.”
“Seems that way.” Taft made a very unhappy face. “Maybe the President knew what he was doing when he tried to come to terms with the Mormons.”
“Maybe.” Flora sounded unhappy, too. Did Taft know that woman had almost blown up her nephew? Instead of asking, she went on, “Would you be comfortable making peace with people who do things like that?”
“It depends,” Taft said judiciously. “If peace meant they weren’t going to do them, I might. If every nut with a grievance is going to strap on some dynamite and start seeing how many honest people he can take with him, we’ve really got a problem.” He drained the schooner. “The way things look now, we’ve really got a problem.”
Flora remembered that she was about to answer. The explosion outside beat her to the punch. Women screamed. So did a couple of men. Flora didn’t, quite. What came out instead-a soft, “Oh, dear God!”-was close to a sob of despair.
Taft jumped to his feet, the cheese steak forgotten. “We’d better see if we can do anything to help,” he said, and hurried out of the Old Munich. Flora paused long enough to pay the check, then ran after him.
A bus halfway down the block sprawled sideways across the road. The crumpled shape was burning fiercely. Window glass glittered in the streets and on the sidewalk like out-of-season snow. Some people were still trapped on the bus. Their shrieks dinned in Flora’s ears. One of them threw himself out a window. He was on fire. Passersby tried to beat on the flames with their hats and with their hands.
“He blew himself up!” shouted a man with blood rilling down his face. “The motherfucker blew himself up! He had a, a thing, and he pushed it, and he blew himself up.” He paused, then spoke again in an amazingly calm voice: “Somebody get me a doctor.” He folded up and passed out.
Plenty of others were wounded. Flora couldn’t tell whether some had been on the bus or were just luckless passersby. Others, the burned, had obviously been passengers along with the man with the thing-some sort of switch, Flora supposed. She tore her handkerchief in half and made two bandages with it. After that, she used the tissues in her handbag on smaller cuts.