“Shall we try one of the towboats?” Jason asked.
Nick nodded. But, as they motored along the riverfront, Nick looked ahead to see the crows atop a shrunken mound of clothing on the afterdeck of the nearest boat, and he felt the hair on his neck stand on end.
“No,” he said. “No. Get back in the river. As far across as we can go. And don’t steer anywhere where you don’t see birds flying.”
Jason looked at him wildly. “Why? What is it?”
Nick licked his lips. “Gas. A cloud of gas killed all those people when the flood trapped them in their houses.”
Nick saw Jason turn pale beneath his sunburn. ” What kind of gas?” he demanded. Nick searched his mind, shook his head. “There must be a dozen things that could do something like this. Chlorine gas. Arsine. Hydrogen cyanide. One damn barge is all it takes. We’ve got to hope it’s dispersed, that we haven’t been breathing it.”
Jason’s eyes widened. He raised a hand to his throat, and for a moment Nick saw an echo on Jason’s face of the horror that must have come to Helena, the realization that they had been poisoned and were going to die.
As soon as they were clear of the land, Jason opened the throttle and the speedboat roared east across the river. There they followed a series of bird flights south, past the silent city on the bluff. Past the broken houses, the silent boats and barges. Past a double row of gasoline storage tanks that had burned and died, past the flooded casting field, past the shattered, abandoned Arkansas Power & Light plant. Past the circling, calling flocks of carrion crows that feasted on the city’s eyeless dead. Helena died by phosgene gas. Two common chemicals, sulfuric acid and carbon tetrachloride, were mixed in the broken warehouse of a chemical company, and in sufficient quantities to generate a cloud large enough, by nightfall on the day of the quake, to cover the entire town below the bluff. The gas is colorless, and the characteristic scent of musty hay was not thought alarming by those who had already survived a major earthquake, and who were busy rescuing neighbors and taking shelter from a flood. Phosgene is fatal in small quantities, and often takes an hour or two to do its work: by the time its victims felt any symptoms, they had suffered enough exposure to assure their own fate. Phosgene attacks the lungs, specifically the capillaries. The victims choked and gagged as their lungs filled with fluid, and then, as the characteristic euphoria of oxygen starvation took them, died in a strange, contented bliss.
A few survivors staggered or drove up the bluff to alert the town to what was happening. Helena, West Helena, and nearby communities were evacuated and cordoned off, but with communications so disrupted, and the roads so badly torn, the evacuation order in effect commanded the citizens to march into the wilderness and attempt to survive there for an indeterminate period. Thousands of people wandered lost in woods and fields for days, afraid to return home for fear of being poisoned. Ironically, by the time the evacuation got under way, the danger had largely passed. Unlike mustard gas, Lewisite, or some nerve agents, phosgene does not persist in the environment. But Helena’s surviving civil authorities were in shock from M1 and easily panicked; they had no way of identifying the gas or assessing the danger; they gave the orders and hoped for the best.
Days later, half-starved families were still staggering out of the countryside. On the second morning after the quake, Charlie took a bucket of water from his swimming pool and used it to flush his toilet. Then he threw some chlorine in the pool to keep it drinkable—he didn’t know how much to use, he had a company who normally took care of this job, he just guessed. Then he looked in his refrigerator.
All that remained was Friday night’s canard a I’orange in its foam container, and a can of Megan’s diet drink, and the anchovies. He took the diet drink from the shelf and opened it. Vanilla. He hated vanilla.
He drank it anyway, and then ate the anchovies, which made a horrid contrast with the vanilla drink. Possibly, he thought, he should get some more food.
But the nearest supermarket was on the other side of the chasm in the street, and he couldn’t cross the chasm. He just couldn’t. His heart staggered at the thought of it.
And then he remembered the little grocery store. It was maybe a mile away in the other direction. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. There seemed to be something wrong with the way he was putting things together.
Had to get a grip, he thought. He was Lord of the Jungle.
Charlie made sure his wallet was in his pocket, and then he put on his St. Louis Cardinals cap and began his walk.
No chasms blocked Charlie’s way, though broad cracks ran across the road here and there. The neighborhood had been tidied somewhat: some of the fallen trees had been cut up and hauled out of the road, some of the broken glass swept up. Charlie heard the constant sound of chainsaws. There was almost no traffic. Charlie saw only a few trucks moving, carrying supplies apparently, and a flatbed truck with a bulldozer on it. He saw no official vehicles at all, no police, no fire trucks, no National Guard.
As he left his prosperous Germantown neighborhood, he saw clumps of ill-kempt people standing on street corners, people who watched him in silence. Children and babies were everywhere, the children unbathed, the babies crying.
The store shared a little strip mall with a furniture store and a place that sold office supplies. All the windows were gone: the office supply store was boarded up, but the furniture store was wide open. As Charlie walked past the furniture store he saw people inside, apparently living there, sleeping in the bedroom displays. Two unshaven, shirtless men in baseball caps carried a chest of drawers across the parking lot. It didn’t appear to Charlie that they were employees.
The windows of the convenience store were gone, but a rusty old Dodge van had been parked along the side of the store, blocking most of the broken windows. The broken glass had been swept into the gutter. Charlie saw figures moving in the darkened interior, and he heard a radio blaring, so he stepped in. The inside was still a wreck. The quake had knocked practically everything off the shelves, and items hadn’t been replaced, just swept into crude piles.
new polisy, said a sign just inside the door, cash only. The sign was written in black felt marker on the back of another placard.
“If you came for milk,” said the man behind the counter, “we ran out yesterday.”
“No,” Charlie said. “Not milk.”
“Beer’s gone, too,” the man said.
The man was a white man in his fifties who wore a baseball cap and a dirty white T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved since before the quake, and he carried a long pump shotgun propped on one hip. cigarettes, said another sign over his head, $10 pack, marlboros $12.
The man was a profiteer, clear enough. Charlie wasn’t bothered. It wasn’t anything more than what he, Charlie, planned to do. Besides, he could buy and sell the whole store.
Behind him was a battery-powered radio on which quake victims were being interviewed. “It was a true miracle that I lived through it,” a man said. “A true miracle.” All the canned goods had been piled in one area of the store, littel cans $7, the sign said, BIG cans $20. The cans were all sizes, and it was difficult to say which of the medium-sized ones were big, and which were little.
“You want some flour?” the man said. “I got a little left, but not much. And some cornmeal. Sugar’s gone.”
“Flour?” Charlie said. “No.” He wouldn’t know what to do with it, had never baked anything in his life.
“My baby’s buried in there somewhere,” a woman on the radio sobbed. “We’re praying for a miracle.” A door opened in the back of the store and a young man came in. He had long stringy hair to his shoulders and wore a baseball cap and a large revolver prominently strapped to his hip. He looked at Charlie. “C’n I help you?” he asked.