The next week was the busiest time Jeff remembered. He and his crew ran on sleep snatched in the intervals between trains and on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Every storage facility in the camp overflowed, even if relatively few of the Negroes had brought baggage with them. Where those Negroes went, they didn’t need baggage.
And at the end of it, Jefferson Pinkard looked at Vern Green and said, “By God, we reduced that population.”
“Sure as hell did,” the guard chief agreed. Jeff pulled a pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He took a snort, then passed the pint to Green. The number two man at Camp Determination also drank. After what they’d just been through, they’d damn well earned the booze.
Black clouds boiled up over Andersonville, Georgia. Where the sky wasn’t black, it was an ugly yellow, the color of a fading bruise. The rising wind blew a lock of Jonathan Moss’ hair into his eyes. He tossed his head. The wind got stronger. A raindrop hit him in the nose.
He looked around the prison-camp grounds. POWs were heading into the barracks as fast as they could. That looked like a hell of a good idea. The wind tugged at his clothes as he hurried toward shelter.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” one of the other prisoners said when he walked in. “Moss does have the sense to come in out of the rain.”
POWs laughed. Hell, Moss laughed himself. In Andersonville, fun was where you found it, and you didn’t have a lot of places to look. But Captain Nick Cantarella, who’d come in just ahead of Moss, said, “Noah would find someplace to hide from this. It looks like a bastard and a half out there.”
“Worse than that storm this summer?” somebody said.
“I think maybe,” Cantarella answered, and Moss found himself nodding. That had been a cloudburst to end all cloudbursts, yeah. It had also been a cloudburst to end all escape plans, at least for the time being. But whatever was building out there now looked downright vicious. The light was weird, almost flickering; it might have come from the trick-photography department of a bad horror film.
Somebody sitting close by a window said, “Son of a bitch!” Several people asked him what was going on. He pointed. “The guards are coming down from their towers and running like hell!”
“Jesus!” Moss said, which was one of the milder comments in the barracks. The gray-uniformed guards never left the towers unmanned. Never. They always wanted to be able to rake the camp with machine-gun fire. If they were bailing out now…
“Oh, fuck!” said the man by the window. Then he said something even worse: “Tornado!”
Somebody with a flat Indiana accent said, “Open the doors, quick! It’ll try and suck all the air out of any building it comes close to. If the air can’t get out, the buildings’ll blow up.” Moss, who’d shut the door behind him, quickly opened it again. The Midwesterner sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.
POWs crowded toward windows to watch the twister. Moss didn’t. He didn’t want to be anywhere near glass that was liable to splinter and fly as if a bomb went off close by. “Godalmightydamn, will you look at that motherfucker!” somebody said, more reverently than otherwise.
“Wish to hell we had a storm cellar,” somebody else put in. That made good sense. Moss wished for one, too. What they had were barracks built as flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed, or maybe a little cheaper than that. If the tornado plowed into them, it wouldn’t even notice. Everybody unlucky enough to be inside sure would, though.
He could hear it now, and feel it, too. It sounded like the world’s biggest freight train heading straight for him. That wasn’t really fair to the tornado. If it ran into a train, it would scatter railroad cars like jackstraws. “The Lord is my shepherd-” somebody began.
The Twenty-third Psalm seemed right. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” might have fit even better, because the Lord was doing some serious trampling out there. Wind tugged at Moss, trying to pull him out the open door. The officer who’d suggested opening it knew what was what. That air would have escaped anyway. With the doors open, it could get out without forcing itself out.
Moss stepped away from the door. The flow wasn’t strong enough to keep him from doing that. He looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the onrushing funnel cloud. That made him do a little praying of his own. He’d known one or two tornadoes when he lived near Chicago, but only one or two. They visited downstate Illinois more often.
And they visited the CSA.
“Looks like it’s not gonna hit us,” somebody said-shouted, actually, because that was the only way anyone could make himself heard through the roar and scream of the wind.
Maybe the man who’d yelled was a bombardier. Whoever he was, he seemed able to gauge what that horrid funnel would do. Instead of blowing the barracks to hell and gone, it walked along a couple of hundred yards away. A few windows blew out, but that was all the damage they took. The twister snarled away toward the east.
“Lord!” a POW said, which summed things up pretty damn well.
Nick Cantarella looked outside. He said, “My God,” too, but in an altogether different tone of voice. The captain from New York City pointed. “That fucker just blew half the wire around the camp all the way to the moon.”
Prisoners rushed to the windows, those that still had glass and those that didn’t. Cantarella wasn’t wrong. The tornado cared no more about barbed wire and guard towers than it did about anything else in its path. Three men had the same thought at the same time: “Let’s get out of here!”
That sounded good to Jonathan Moss. He even had some brown Confederate bills-no, they called them banknotes down here-in his pocket. The CSA played by the rules of war, and paid captive officers at the same rate as their own men of equivalent grade. Why not? In camp, the notes were only paper, good for poker games but not much else.
“If they catch you, they can punish you,” Colonel Summers warned. The senior U.S. officer went on, “We’re a long way from the border. Odds of making it back to the USA aren’t good. You might be smarter just sitting this one out.”
Summers had to say something like that. Moss understood as much. Someone needed to be careful and responsible and adult. Captain Cantarella put the other side of things in perspective: “Anybody who’s gonna go better get his ass in gear right now. Those Confederate bastards won’t waste a hell of a lot of time hunkered down wherever they’re at. They’ll come out, and they’ll have guns.”
That made up Moss’ mind for him. He wasn’t the first one out the door, but he was only a couple of steps behind the guy who was. Cantarella was hard on his heels. “How did the escape committee sign up a tornado?” Moss asked him.
Cantarella’s grin was swarthy and stubbly and full of exhilaration. “Hey, Mother Nature owed us one after the way that thunderstorm fucked us over. Every once in a while, I think maybe there’s a God.”
Moss had thought so, too, till that Canuck’s bomb robbed him of Laura and Dorothy. Believing in anything but revenge came hard after that. He said, “You want to stick together? Two heads may be better than one.”
“Long as we can, anyway,” Cantarella answered. “We may have to split up somewhere down the line, but I’m with you till then.” He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it.
Out past the wire they went, out past the wreckage of the guard towers. A machine gun stuck up from a clump of bushes. “Wish it was a rifle,” Moss said. “Piece like that, though, it’s too heavy to lug.”
“Yeah,” Cantarella said. “What we gotta do now is, we gotta make tracks. Somethin’ tells me we don’t have a whole lotta time.” His clotted accent was about as far from a C.S. drawl as it could be.
The something that told him was no doubt common sense. “You think we have a better chance heading north, or east toward the ocean?” Moss asked.
“Depends,” the other U.S. officer said. “If you figure our Navy’s got boats or ships or whatever the hell out in the Atlantic, we haul ass that way. God knows it’s closer. But if we gotta sail up the coast, fuhgeddaboutit, unless you’re a hell of a lot better sailor than I am.”