“Yes, Doctor.”
“I want you to just lie here quietly and let me look at Mrs. Greenwood. Will you do that?”
“Yes.”
I sat holding Mrs. Price’s hand while Proudfoot worked on Mrs. Greenwood.
“Pills,” she said bitterly. “The hollow trash is on meth and OxyContin. Surprised they aren’t robbing drugstores.”
“No doubt they are,” I said. “This little clinic looked too good to pass up, I suspect.”
“Thanks for coming by, Tommy,” she said.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
Twenty minutes passed before the doctor returned. “Mrs. Greenwood is in a deep coma. She needs to be in a hospital, but the one nearest here is closed.”
“What can you do for her?”
“Pray.”
He began examining Mrs. Price. “You have a concussion too, Angelica. I’m going to clean up that cut on your scalp and stitch it up, but that’s about all I can do. You should be in a hospital too, but since there isn’t one around, you need to stay in bed. You’re going to have a terrible headache. We’ll pray for you too.”
“I don’t think much of prayer,” Angelica Price told him. “I’ve been praying every night that Barry Soetoro would wake up dead, but apparently God hasn’t taken him yet.”
I went out to the pickup while Dr. Proudfoot worked. Clouds were building over the mountains to the west.
I changed magazines in the M4 and examined the pistol I had taken off the bleeder. A 9-mm, and the magazine was full. God only knows where the bastard got it, but I would have bet a thousand to one he didn’t buy it. I decided to give it to the doctor. We were getting a nice collection of weapons, but no matter how hard you try, you can only shoot one at a time.
Another guy pulled up in an old truck. His son was in the right seat, shot once above the heart. I helped him carry the boy inside. He was maybe fifteen. People were stealing the cows, the man said, and the boy put up a fight.
“It’s like trying to stop an avalanche,” the old man said. Tears were running down his weathered cheeks.
I emptied my wallet for the doctor, who tried to wave the money away. “Got nothing to spend it on,” he said.
“It won’t always be like this,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. I told him I would be back tomorrow to check on Mrs. Greenwood, and carried Angelica Price out to the truck. I got the deer haunch from the pickup that I had intended to give Mrs. Price and gave it to the doctor instead.
I took her to the CIA safe house and made the introductions.
After Sarah had Mrs. Price in bed, I made sure Yocke and Molina were standing by the machine guns in the pits and drove down to the guard shack where Travis Clay and Willie the Wire were playing gin. “Big-city punks are out, hillbillies are hunting drugs, and scared people are looking for food. All of them are armed. You guys better cowboy up and be ready.”
Willie was appalled. He wanted to argue, but I told him, “It’s us or them, Willie. If you want to keep on living, you’d better be willing to shoot.”
Mrs. Price’s house was down to smoking boards when I got back. The bleeder was dead, and Armanti Hall had dragged him around the house and put him beside Lincoln Greenwood.
There were four corpses in the remains of the house, burned beyond recognition. The boards were still hot and smoking, and we didn’t have body bags, so we left them there.
We buried Greenwood and the bleeder up on the hill in the Price family plot. Before we tossed the bleeder in the hole, I checked his pockets. He had a nice roll of bills on him.
“You can’t take it with you when you go,” Armanti Hall said with a sigh.
Some of the bills were blood-soaked. I peeled them off and tossed them in the hole. “He can take these,” I said, and handed the rest to Armanti. “Grab his feet.”
We tossed him in, then went down the hill to the garden gate for the man lying there. He stunk to high heaven. Each of us grabbed a foot; we dragged him up the hill and dumped him in on top of the bleeder.
I heaved my cookies before we got the holes filled up.
As we walked down the hill for the last time, Armanti said, “I don’t want to live in Barry Soetoro’s new empire. I’m thinking of going to Texas.”
The taste of vomit was strong in my mouth and the smell of death in my nose. “Maybe I’ll go with you,” I said.
He had picked some potatoes and green beans from Mrs. Price’s garden while he waited for me, and had them in five-gallon buckets. We loaded the buckets into the truck and headed up the road to find a place to turn around.
On the way back by Mrs. Price’s, before we got there, a pickup pulled up below the three cars in the parking area and three white males got out. The oldest one had a rifle. He aimed it at one of the cows in the pasture and pulled the trigger. The cow staggered a few feet, then went down. As the younger males, apparently teenage boys, climbed the fence, the guy with the rifle turned to face our stopped pickup. He held the rifle in both hands and looked at us defiantly.
“Protecting his kill,” Armanti muttered. “I could drop the bastard before he gets a shot off.”
“To what purpose?” I asked, and put the truck in motion.
We drove on by. The shooter never took his eyes off us.
“This place is like fucking Syria,” Armanti remarked.
I didn’t argue.
The evening after the Tomahawk strikes, Jack Hays held a press conference at an “undisclosed location,” which was the bottom floor of an underground parking garage in Austin, which fortunately was still on the electrical grid. Three print reporters were there, and two local television reporters, whose cameramen were set up with lights and sound and all the bits and pieces, including a set with a podium for the president of Texas and folding chairs the reporters.
Jack Hays started by reading a statement about the progress of the government in converting a state in the United States to a standalone nation. Much had been accomplished by the legislature, which was in session twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A new currency had been approved and a Texas Border Patrol and Customs Service established. The tax department was expanded and statutes passed adopting federal tax rates for the new nation.
“Everything has to be done at once,” Jack Hays said, “and we are up to our elbows in it. Inevitably there will be glitches, but we will try in good faith to correct any mistakes and injustices, if everyone will help us find them.”
The first question was, “Mr. President, what can you tell us about last night’s missile strikes in the Houston area?”
“The missiles were launched from at least two United States Navy surface ships, both of which were subsequently damaged by an attack from a Texas naval vessel. We know that much because crews on nearby oil-production platforms radioed what they had seen to their companies, who passed it to news media. We are doing our best to get power restored in the Houston area. We understand that at this time of year, loss of electrical power in that area is a humanitarian crisis.”
After a half hour of answering questions about the measures the legislature had passed and was considering, Hays said, “One more question and we’ll call it an evening.” Three hands went up and he pointed to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal.
She asked, “Under what circumstances would Texas consider rejoining the United States?”
“Under the old Constitution?” Jack Hays asked.
“Yes.”
“I can’t think of any,” Hays said curtly. He had learned long ago that the best tactic for a politician was to just answer the question asked or evade it. In the silence that followed that short sentence, he reconsidered his answer. Texans deserved to know his thinking, and if they didn’t like it, they could say so.