“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.
Robert Taft sacrificed his handkerchief and his tie. Then he took off his shirt and his undershirt and used a pocket knife to cut them into strips of cloth. “Other people need them worse than I do,” he said, and he wasn’t the only bare-chested man around, either.
“Good for you,” Flora told him. “Let me have some of those, too, please.”
Ambulances roared up, sirens wailing. Philadelphia was good at responding to disasters. And so it should have been-it had had enough practice. “Somebody put a bomb on the bus?” asked a white-coated man from an ambulance.
“Somebody was a bomb on the bus,” a woman answered. The man’s answer was eloquent, heartfelt, and altogether unprintable.
“Well,” Taft said, “looks like we have the answer to my question, and it’s not the one I wish we had.” He was splashed with blood past his elbows. His trousers were bloodstained, too, but Flora didn’t think any of the gore was his.
She glanced down at herself. The cotton print dress she had on would never be the same. Blood also dappled her arms. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked, a question aimed more at the world at large than at Senator Taft. “How do we fight people who’ll kill themselves to hurt us?”
“If we have to, we-” Taft broke off, as if really hearing what he’d been about to say. He shook his head. “Good Lord. I started to sound like Jake Featherston.”
“Yes.” Flora wanted to cry, or to scream. Here, for once, the USA faced a knottier problem than the CSA. Negroes looked like Negroes. Mormons? Mormons looked and talked just like anybody else. Anybody here could be a Mormon, and could have another bomb waiting. How would you know till it went off?
“Good Lord,” Taft said again. “We’re going to have to start searching people before we let them gather. Football games, films, trains, buses, department stores-for all I know, we’ll have to check anybody who goes into the Old Munich.”
“I was thinking how many members of Congress were in there,” Flora said shakily. “If that bomber had walked inside instead of blowing up the bus…” Philadelphia was its usual hot, muggy summer self. That kind of weather wouldn’t last much longer, but it was still here-sweat ran down Flora’s face. She shivered anyhow.
“Auto bombs are bad enough,” Taft said. “People bombs…” Like Flora, he seemed to run out of words. He spread his bloody hands. “What could be worse?”
What were they working on, out in western Washington? Something they thought might win the war. Whatever it was, that all but guaranteed it would be a horror worse than any they’d known up till now. Worse than poison gas? Worse than the camps where the Confederates were systematically doing away with their Negroes? She had trouble imagining such a thing. That didn’t mean the people out in Washington State had any trouble, though.
While horror swelled inside her, rage seemed to fill Taft. “This is no fit way to fight,” the Senator from Ohio ground out. “If they want to meet us like men, that’s one thing. If they want to see how many innocent civilians they can blow up-”