“Can’t give ’em up, captain,” George replied, staring unseeingly at the paper but not taking it from Ames’s hand. “Until people are starving to death, I figure I can best take care of ’em here.”
“You’re not the one to do the figuring,” Ames countered. “The Army knows what’s needed, and we need chickens.”
“Can’t do it, Captain.”
“I’ve got sixty men here that says you can.”
“If that henhouse catches on fire, and that barn,” George replied, squinting back at his farmyard and watching the circle of soldiers grow tighter, “then nobody’s gonna eat the chickens. Or the hogs or anything else. Why don’t you go back and talk it over with your general or with whatever asshole sent you out here?”
“My orders were clear and irrevocable,” Ames said nervously. “I am to bring back the requisitioned food supplies from this area this afternoon and use whatever force is necessary to do so.”
“You can’t bring ’em back if we burn down the barns.”
Ames flushed.
“Why would you do that?”
“’Cause we don’t like having our property stolen.”
“Your country’s at war,” Ames shot back. “The President has declared martial law. If the Army orders something requisitioned, that’s not stealing.”
“I don’t figure the President had my chickens in mind when he declared martial law.”
“But he did,” Ames countered. “He had everyone’s chickens in mind.”
“Well,” George said after a pause, “I’m not too good at arguin’.” He stared off at a group of soldiers in back of the barn. “Fact is though if your soldiers get within fifty feet of our barns, bullets will hit three feet in front of them, and if they get within forty-five feet of the barns, then they’ll bump into our bullets. And if they get into the barns, then our boys will set the barns on fire. We figure there ain’t no way you can carry out your order.”
Captain Ames, seeing that his men were within seventy or eighty feet of the barns in some places, shouted out an order to halt and the noncoms passed it on. Ames told George to wait where he was, went over to the back of one of the trucks, and got on the radio back to headquarters in Morehead City. When he returned five minutes later, he looked pale and shaken.
“Look, Mr. Cooper,” he said with an anguished, pleading note in his voice. “The colonel says to get what food I can, no matter who gets hurt. He says radioactive fallout is coming this way, and all your animals will be useless as food in less than a week. The Army will be evacuating the area, and we’ve been ordered to take all the food we can find with us. You people should evacuate too. We’ll leave you plenty of food for your families, but most of it we’ll have to take.”
George Cooper squinted at the captain. The fallout bit might be an excuse or it might be true.
“You plan to kill us for a few chickens and pigs?” he said after a pause.
“I will have to kill you if you disobey the orders of the military commander of this region.”
“For a few chickens?”
“You seem to be all ready to destroy your barn for a few chickens.”
“My barns are useless without anything to put in them,” George said slowly. “I figure that you and your colonel can survive without my chickens.”
“Ten minutes, Cooper,” Ames said with a grimace as he glanced at his watch. “If you don’t put down your weapons and let us take what the local military commander has ordered requisitioned, my men will attack.”
George Cooper looked numbly back at Captain Ames.
“Seems like a pretty shitty thing to do,” he said.
“May be,” said Captain Ames, flushing. “But I’ll do it.”
George turned and walked slowly back to his friends behind the tractors, examining as he walked the positions of the soldiers around his farmyard. A few of them back of the henhouse seemed awfully close to fifty feet away from the buildings.
Bart, Fred, and two more of the older men met him by Fred’s harvester, and he began to recount his conversation with Ames. He had just gotten to the Army’s claim that fallout was coming their way when a shot rang out. Then two others. George wheeled to see Captain Ames crouched down next to one of the trucks, and the soldiers near him throwing themselves down onto the grass. Off to the left two soldiers were running away. To the right, a squad of eight or ten soldiers, in a crouch, were running toward the henhouse. A fusillade of shots erupted from the teenagers there, and one of the soldiers fell. Then the real firing began.
As he sat exhausted in his cabin and fiddled with the shortwave radio Neil was feeling baffled. The day and a half since his visit to Greg Bonnville when he had made his separate peace, had been frustrating. He’d found it easy enough to bluff his way out of the two confrontations with the authorities challenging him about his not being in uniform—he put on his captain’s demeanor and Navy lingo and said he was on special assignment from the Morison—but had found it difficult to learn what was really happening in the world.
Official radio announcements indicated that Morehead City was a safe area. Army policy was that refugees should stay put. They were offering no assistance to people who wanted to move farther south. As long as there was no danger in staying where they were, he didn’t feel he had any right to take Jeanne and Frank back out to sea, much less to help Jim desert. Although he himself no longer felt an obligation to serve his country, the transformation of Greg Bonnville was not an example he could use to persuade others. It was too personal. He himself felt the only safety lay in escaping the mainland to sea; to others this seemed to be simply his mania.
Conrad Macklin had disappeared while Neil was on the Morison, and since he had stolen some food from Vagabond, Neil assumed that he’d seen the last of him. But he’d returned thirty hours later— just four hours ago—to inform Neil that though the Army had roadblocks up to prevent civilians from fleeing south, a caravan of Army vehicles with both military and civilian passengers had been streaming south on Route 17. Macklin had hung around and learned that the Army was having problems manning its roadblock units because some of the troops were panicking at the sight of so many others going south after they had been ordered to stay put. Macklin urged Neil to take Vagabond out to sea immediately, whether Jeanne and the others came or not.
Neil knew that if he didn’t take Vagabond out soon, Macklin would find somebody else who would. That meant he not only had to worry about choosing the correct course of action but about Macklin’s trying to hijack Vagabond again. With Olly often aboard alone there wasn’t much to stop him. Neil had tried to delay any precipitous action on Macklin’s part by telling him he planned to decide on his plans tonight. He had visited Jeanne, Frank, and Lisa at the refugee center briefly late that afternoon and had been discouraged to see that they seemed to be settling in; both were working hard, making friends, feeling they were making a contribution. Lisa had spent much of the day trying unsuccessfully to see Jim and had just returned in tears, so Jeanne was in no condition to make decisions. Her response to Neil’s announcement that he wasn’t going back into the Navy was a brief stricken look, as if she were frightened by the implications for her own life. Frank told Neil that he could take Vagabond, as if for Frank the struggle were over and Morehead City High School was now home. Neil had left frightened and depressed at their state.
“There was more fallout today. The total’s more than an eighth of an inch since we first got some four days ago. Some of the farmers are trying to get it off the leaves of the corn and squash and beans, and Pat Nerron reports the wind blows it off the wheat and rye, but it’s killing some of the plants even lying in the soil.”