Deke could see over the top of the truck now. On the other side, twenty yards away, a dozen men were assembling a barrier made of plastic pylons connected to each other by metal pipes. One of the pylons was being filled with water from a hose running out the side of the truck. He’d never seen that before.
One of the soldiers noticed Deke and said something. The other men looked up, and froze. None of them were holding rifles. Then one of them reached for the sidearm on his hip. The rest of the men ran toward the truck. Toward their guns.
“Donna,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not going anywhere except Knoxville, right now.” She stepped toward the nearest soldier. “We’re going down this damn road, or I will know the reason why!”
“Donna-” He stepped in front of her to turn her around and he felt something bite him in the shoulder. He wheeled toward the soldiers, thinking-nonsensically-that one of them had thrown a rock at him. One of the soldiers yelled. Before Deke could say anything he was struck twice more, in the chest and in the arm. Only then did he take in the sound of the gunshots.
Donna roared-an almost subsonic shout that concussed the air like a bomb-then bent and leaped forward. She slammed into one of the soldiers and sent him cartwheeling away.
Automatic gunfire erupted-seemingly from everywhere. Donna planted one hand on the ground and spun toward another soldier. She seized both his rifle and an arm in one huge fist and yanked. The man’s arm popped from his torso. She tossed it away like a doll part and the man collapsed to the pavement.
Deke lost his balance and fell back on his butt. He looked down at his chest. Blood soaked his shirt.
No one understands what it’s like, Deke thought. All the little people thought that being an argo made life easy. Of course you get your way, look how big you are! Of course people respect you, you can break them in half! They didn’t understand how much discipline such a body required, how much restraint. His old human faults were still bubbling in his brain, riding his bloodstream. The Changes hadn’t erased fear and rage-Deke’s daddy had worked too hard pounding those into him for them to go away. Sometimes the urge to strike back, to kill, came on so fast it took everything he had to hold himself in check. Sometimes he didn’t have enough.
But it wasn’t just Deke-it was true for everyone in his clade. It was the secret they kept among themselves. Each of them knew that idiot strength waited like a boulder at the top of a steep hill. Every day, each of them had to decide not to nudge that rock.
Maybe the next generation of argos would be different. More peaceful souls. He hoped so.
He called Donna’s name, but she was beyond thinking now, moving fast. Another soldier collapsed under her fists. Those stupid, sexist bastards-they’d shot him first, even though it was Donna who was the larger of the two, the stronger, the more dangerous. They didn’t understand. She was a full-grown argo woman. And they had hurt her man.
More soldiers appeared around each end of the truck, and some under the truck, aiming their rifles up at them. Donna leaped to the nearest man. He screamed in fear, and the rifles burst into new applause.
God she was fierce, and so beautiful. But there were so many soldiers, and their weapons could shred metal. They would kill her. He pushed himself to all fours, grimacing. He hoped that she was wrong, that there really were such things as souls.
Then he heard her bellow in pain. A great weight inside him trembled, shifted, and suddenly tumbled down.
He ran to her side.
Chapter 19
FOR THE FIRST hour and a half of the service Paxton felt as if he were floating above the congregation: apart from the proceedings, immune, unmoved.
Reverend Hooke, dressed in a billowing dark dress that made her look strangely bulky, had started the service with a long prayer that expanded in a widening circle to take in all nouns. She prayed not only for Deke and Donna, but this church, this town, all the people of Switchcreek; she asked God to embrace the soldiers who surrounded them, the people in the nearby towns who feared them, and their fellow Americans across the country. She prayed for the victims in Ecuador and for people the world over who watched the suffering on their television screens.
She had no other sermon. There was no program, she said, no plan; the spirit would lead. Then she opened the pulpit to anyone who wanted to speak.
The first to come forward was an argo woman. She stood at the podium, between two huge caskets of dark gleaming wood. Like all argo necessities, they were custom creations. They’d been fashioned by Deke’s employees in the same shop where they’d created the argo-sized pews that this morning had been carried in to fill the front of the sanctuary. For once, the argos were not going to sit in the back.
Paxton found it hard to focus on what the argo woman was saying, or on what was said by the others who came after her. Most were argos, but people from other clades also felt called to say something. Sometimes they spoke only about Deke, sometimes only about Donna, but usually it was about the two of them as a couple, a partnership.
Donna’s beta cousin, the one who’d given birth only a few months ago, talked about Deke and Donna’s dream of having children. By now everyone knew where they’d been heading when they met the roadblock. The people in the pews around Pax, even the stone-faced betas, sobbed or wept silently, heads held still as tears ran down cheeks and into their collars. Pax sat impassively, wondering at the intensity of the emotion and at his own detachment. He should have tasted a little vintage before the service. He felt as if he were sitting in the middle of a burning house, breathing smoke like it was fresh air, unable to feel the heat.
His father would have been crying by now, Paxton was sure. Harlan had been stunned by the news of Deke’s and Donna’s deaths; during Paxton’s visits this morning and the day before he’d been incapable of saying more than a few words. Yet he wouldn’t come to the service. Aunt Rhonda said she would have allowed it, that her employees could have transported him, wheeled him inside, and guarded him, but Harlan refused. Pax knew that he was intensely embarrassed by his size and must have been petrified that he’d humiliate himself if the vintage struck during the service. The fact that the funeral would be held in his own church only made it more unbearable. “You go,” his father had told him, and it had been not so much a command as a plea.
The stories and testimonials went on and on. The church was packed as full as he’d ever seen it, and the doors were propped open so that the scores of people standing outside could hear. There were no reporters inside or out, no nonresidents at all-those had been bussed to an alternate quarantine site near Louisville, Kentucky. Already some of those reporters had been examined and declared clear of TDS-causing plasmids-whatever those were. Neither were there soldiers; they’d pulled back to their improvised headquarters at the Cherokee Hotel and to the newly reopened and fortified checkpoints. No one except the National Guardsmen had entered the town in three days.
Pax knew that he should stand up and speak for his friend. Who else here could tell about the boy he’d been before the Changes, before he’d become the Chief? The baseball fanatic who so loved a good game that he’d once broken a finger in the third inning and didn’t tell anyone until the next day. The shy daredevil who’d invented Hillbilly Bobsled. The artist who’d built a dozen birdhouses just because his crazy-ass father mentioned-once-that he liked to watch the blue jays squabble. Nobody who knew only the Chief would believe how scared Deke had been of his old man.
Reverend Hooke stood in silence, waiting for anyone else to step forward.
Pax gripped the pew in front of him and stared at his hand. He could pull himself up, walk to the front. But his hand would not unclench, and seemed to become something alien, a knuckled stump that did not belong to him. A foreign object attached to someone else’s arm. His body felt heavy as river stone.